Bruce Djite: ‘There’s much more to life than just kicking a ball around’

“Whether I was destined to be a football director, I don’t know, but my life experience helps me, certainly.” That’s Bruce Djite, director of football at Adelaide United, a man whose career trajectory suggests predestination should not be ruled out.

Djite was a fine footballer. He won the A-League double with Adelaide, scored goals in Turkey, Korea and China, and earned nine international caps. During this time he also joined the PFA Executive Committee (aged just 25), nurtured an investment portfolio, and spent eight years fitting in a Bachelor of Business degree at Griffith University. He also moonlighted for Fox Sports, started a family, and engaged in politics and the charity sector. “When I was about 24 I realised that I had a lot of other interests and that there’s much more to life than just kicking a ball around,” he explained matter-of-factly to The Guardian.

Djite, now 32, is bringing his unique skill-set to the club with which he is inextricably linked, Adelaide United, and the early signs are positive. Since taking up his post in the offseason, United have lifted the FFA Cup, begun their A-League campaign promisingly, and brought through Al Hassan Toure and Louis D’Arrigo, two of the brightest prospects in Australian football. That pair also make excellent proxies for understanding Djite’s project.

“One of the key reasons the chairman asked me to take on this role was because he wasn’t satisfied with the culture of the club,” Djite said. “The problem with a lot of A-League clubs is they’re coach-driven. What we’re saying is: we want continuity. This is our culture, these are our values, this is the philosophy, and we’re going to plug people in that fit around that framework.” It’s no coincidence Carl Veart and Eugene Galekovic, former custodians of United’s culture, have also recently been brought back into the fold.

Djite’s framework includes prioritising the best South Australians, like Toure and D’Arrigo, because their promotion expresses how the club fits in its community. “It’s very parochial, South Australia,” Djite said. “South Australians love their team, their state, their city. They want local talent getting an opportunity. They love nothing more than seeing their own excelling.” In the short-term that has involved Djite building closer relationships with his state’s NPL clubs, ensuring a flow of talent in both directions, while the longer-term ambition is to develop an academy.

Once identified, those local talents can expect minutes at United, irrespective of who the head coach happens to be at a given time. On this, Djite was unequivocal. “There might be coaches who say, ‘I’m not interested in the youth team and how we’re producing players, I just want to coach the first team and concentrate on my 23 senior players’. Well then, you’re not coming to coach here.”

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Moreover, once established, they can expect to be valued, like Toure and D’Arrigo, who recently had their scholarship contracts upgraded. “There are few things that give me more satisfaction than signing an Al Hassan Toure or a Louis D’Arrigo to a long-term deal and just seeing their delight,” Djite said. “Other clubs might say, ‘oh, he’s on a scholarship contract so he’s not in our salary cap, so he can earn $25,000 for another two years - why should we upgrade them today?’. I’m not taking that approach. If he’s on 20 grand and starting every game, is that ethically correct? No! It’s about giving credit where credit’s due.”

The pastoral side of Djite’s directorship comes from personal experience when, at the start of his career, his path to senior football via the AIS and NSL was not seamless, and it is complemented by his understanding of commerce, a passion shared with his brother, a New York investment banker. The outcome is simple, but profound. “Investing in players - that’s your greatest asset.”

But simple doesn’t mean straightforward. “Investing in companies is easy - you can read cash flow projections and price-to-equity ratios and all these sort of things that are pretty black and white, but investing in human beings is a completely different phenomenon. How are they mentally? Do they have what it takes? How are they going to develop? And like all investments, some will be successful, others will be less successful, but you need to invest in the players.”

In practice, that means backing a teenager like Toure over an older, perhaps more reliable player, and accepting a more erratic short-term output because the long-term ceiling is much higher. It means measuring the success of the youth team not on wins and losses but how many players progress to the senior side. “Better for us to be third-last - so we don’t get relegated from the NPL - and have five players playing regularly and moving up into the A-League team, than winning the NPL championship with a bunch of 20-year-olds that means we have a soft underbelly because we haven’t provided the pathway for the 15-, 16-, 17-year-olds to develop,” maintained Djite.

The most visible marker in this virtuous cycle is the transfer of these homegrown footballers to bigger overseas markets. “Yes, we want to make financial gain, but also we want you to progress your career. That would give me the greatest satisfaction, seeing these young boys going to Europe and doing well. The payoff, beyond the transfer revenue, is it becomes easier to attract the best young Australian talent, because they’ll see and understand we’re not just saying we’ll give them a chance, but they will legitimately get a chance, and from there they’ll have the world at their feet.”

Our linear, sequential approach to history makes it easy to believe that everything Bruce Djite has achieved until now has led him to becoming a perfectly suited candidate for the role of director of football at Adelaide United. But the plans he has in place and the encouraging early gains they are delivering suggest that sequence has not reached its final destination.