Newcastle United have already agreed 'elite' addition as Paul Mitchell's first recruit
Paul Mitchell has explained one of his first recruits as Newcastle United sporting director.
Less than two weeks after joining Newcastle, Mitchell appointed former AS Monaco performance specialist James Bunce as the club’s new performance director ahead of the 2024-25 season. Mitchell and Bunce worked together at Moncao and have reunited at Newcastle with the view to enhancing the club’s on-field performance and injury rehabilitation.
Mitchell described Bunce as an ‘elite specialist’ in the field when explaining the club’s newest recruit.
“Something that has been well documented is around injury prevention, that rehabilitation, the amount of injuries, the amount of minutes participated by the first team and it's something Eddie wanted to address, I think the organisation and ownership wanted to address,” Mitchell told the club website.
“My job is to go and find the best in class and I was fortunate to have worked with James previously but we came across eachother through an unfortunate situation that looked like this one. I had a big injury list at Monaco where I had 20 players injured every weekend, a lack of availability to the coach and we need to put that right.
“If we're going to move consistently to the next level and perform at that level consistently as well, we need to give our best players accessibility to the coach and vice-versa and how we do that is keeping them fit, healthy, robust and resilient so that our coach has a better chance of winning on a matchday.
“That's why we hired James, who is an elite specialist in the world of performance.”