The role of a technical director in football manager is to evaluate the current level of all your staff excluding the Director of Football, singing new staff members if there are available slots and replacing those who are not good enough in their jobs depending on the level you are playing at or the salary the board has allocated for that role.
Depending on how much you want to get involved in the day-to-day management aspects of FM, the role of a Technical Director might be a huge time saver or a waste of the wage budget.
Aside from renewing staff contracts and bringing in new staff, the Technical Director will also give you regular feedback on how your staff are fairing. He will also recommend which staff members to be sent out on coaching courses.
Since the Technical Director can not fire the Director of Football and vice versa, they are more or less equal in their standings at the club, what differentiates the Director of Football from the Technical Director in football manager is that the Technical Director deals with the staff while the Director of Football is responsible for the players.
Whether you need a Technical Director comes down to your preferred playing style of FM. If you are the type of manager that likes football manager to closely mirror real-life football as much as possible, It then becomes impossible to do without the role.
In recent times we have seen Technical Directors like Man City’s Txiki Begiristain, Liverpool’s Michael Edwards and more recently Darren Fletcher at Man United become increasingly prominent in the modern game, especially now that modern managers do not spend a long time in a single club, as was the case in the past.
Technical Directors in real-life ensure that staff who are brought in will carry on with their jobs when the current manager leaves, as opposed to having an overhaul of the backroom staff every time the manager is fired or decides to leave on his own.
This happens to some extent in football manager as once you spend a considerable time at a single club and get fired or move on to a new job, some of the backroom staff that had a close relationship with you might also quit, leaving the next manager with vacant positions which he will need to fill before getting on with his work.
However, it is important to note that real-life Technical Directors might play somewhat different roles from their counterparts in FM, with some arguably wielding more power than the actual managers.
On the other hand, if you love micromanaging every aspect of FM from signing backroom staff for your U18 team to creating a custom training schedule for both the senior and the youth teams, then the technical director might not make much sense to you.
Personally, I prefer signing all the best staff I can get at the beginning of the save and then carrying out an overhaul after every 4 years or so if I started in the lower leagues and have already had a promotion or two.
Getting promoted avails more money to you, which in turn makes it possible to sign better staff.
In between the years when I do not carry out my staff overhaul. I normally delegate the staff contract renewals to the Technical Director to sort out the one or two contracts that need looking at.
This is done purely for time-saving purposes. However, I do not trust the Technical Director to sign better staff than I currently have.
If you are managing a big club with no worries about your financial situation, having a Technical Director on your team even when you largely do not use him will save you time and your sanity when you are not in the mood for painstakingly renewing around 50 staff contracts that are coming to an end.
You will be better off spending that time looking for potential first-team signings, creating new scouting assignments, going through the scout reports or scouting for wonderkids that you can later sell for huge money
On the hand, if you are managing in the lower leagues and have only 10 staff or so, a Technical Director is an added expense that you can do without.
In conclusion, most players are in agreement that FM being a single-player game should be played as you see fit, whether you go down the micromanaging route or try to mirror real-life by having a Technical Director and let him go about his business.
After all, not having a Technical Director will not break your game but having one will save you hours of your time which is huge for people who do not have enough time to play the game regularly.
