Exclusive:Chris Maxwell outlines Hartlepool United recruitment strategy after transfer dealings done with more to come
Hartlepool United’s recruitment strategy has been outlined and explained ahead of a busy summer.
The scale of the rebuild at Hartlepool United this summer cannot be underestimated given 13 first team players were released ahead of a new dawn under new head coach Lee Clark and owner Landon Smith.
The challenge of reshaping the Pools squad ahead of a promotion push is a challenging one but backed by a significant budget, the Pools’ hierarchy have set about their business impressively, with four additions through the door and much more to come. This is Smith’s first summer as owner of the club and fans are eagerly anticipating the next batch of transfers.
Chris Maxwell, head of football operations at club advisors’ Bromby & Partners, spoke to the Mail about the recruitment side of the club and some of the key factors they take into consideration when looking to strengthen the playing squad. Clark is the new Pools head coach, with Chris Beech the club’s head of recruitment, both supported by Maxwell in his key role at the club. Bromby & Partners have overseen a full review of football operations at the club since they arrived in March - they have been providing ‘strategic oversight and operational support’ in recent months.
It has been a very busy summer off the pitch at The Vic - with much more business to be done in the coming weeks, the players return to Maiden Castle for testing on Friday before the pre-season starts in earnest on Monday in Durham. Ahead of that, we spoke to Maxwell to get an insight into how recruitment works at National League Pools ahead of the 2026-27 campaign.
Pools have enjoyed a strong start to their recruitment with Jordan Hugill, Jack Nolan, Brooklyn Ilunga and Corey McKeown all arriving at The Vic.
Maxwell explained to the Mail how recruitment works at Pools, he said: “Our first job as Bromby & Partners - so myself, Stuart Webber and Leigh Bromby - when we come in is to help develop the strategy for football clubs, which we've now done quite a few. First and foremost is understanding that the sustainability of the football club had to be in place, and through that, one of the things is the playing philosophy and the football identity. The club want to achieve something at some point in the next couple of years where you watch a player and go, ‘he's a Hartlepool type of player’.
“So there's a lot of work that goes into that; that comes from owner expectations, what he wants to see. It comes from fan expectations, what they want to see. It needs to replicate the local area as well but then also you've got to put in bits and pieces of what it takes to be successful in this league, but then also you can put data in all this, so it's quite a big project.
“Once that was sorted, it's then establishing a head coach that can facilitate that. So when you talk about alignment, Lee Clark's philosophy of how passionate he is comes from what's already been built. So he immediately steps into what the football club is and how the football club wants to play and the identity and such like. Skip forward a little bit, when it comes to recruiting players, obviously from the first minute I came into the football club, I was targeting players, highlighting players, market mapping, all those bits and pieces and then you put Lee Clark on top of that and then you put Chris Beech on top of that, explaining the ambition, understanding what that looks like and how we want to progress as a football club. Recruiting becomes easy. I don't think there's one player that's been put to Lee that he doesn't like because ultimately his philosophy is what the football club's philosophy is, otherwise he wouldn't have been recruited through a lengthy process of numerous amounts of people from different backgrounds.
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“That's the easy bit and then in terms of the actual process, it probably takes around 30 hours per player to get to that point. So that comes from football club fit, head coach fit, financial fit, culture fit, all these bits that go in. They've got to tick all the boxes otherwise they don't come through the door and it's quite complex.
“We could go out now and sign 22 players, instantly, we get players put to us all the time, but ultimately we take ourselves back from that and we already know what we're looking at, we know what we want because we've got the player profiles based on the player philosophy and then we go from there. So it's really starting at the granular level of what Landon and the football club want to achieve and then work backwards from there.”
Hartlepool United fans will now be hoping that the hard work ongoing off the pitch reaps rewards with further key signings ahead of what is poised to be another challenging National League campaign.