Christopher Vivell latest Red Bull director being ‘probed’ by Chelsea — reports

Chelsea continue to work down the Red Bull football organizational chart in our attempts to find a sporting director (and a technical director), and the latest executive in our sights, at least according to reports from SportItalia and the Evening Standard, is RB Leipzig technical director Christopher Vivell.

The report is a bit confusing as to which job we might be targeting for Vivell. Vivell retired from playing in his early 20s to go into scouting and analysis at TSG Hoffenheim before joining RB Salzburg as Head of Scouting in 2015 and then jumping over to RB Leipzig as technical director in 2020. Over the past year, he had also taken on some of the responsibilities of a sporting director on an interim basis.

Leipzig recently announced the hiring of Max Eberl, the long-time sporting director at Borussia Mönchengladbach. He’s set to start on December 15, with Vivell admitting that the exact definitions of their roles — also including CEO Oliver Minztlaff and commercial director Florian Scholz — is still not exactly set. We could certainly read that as a possibility that Vivell might be leaving, though that may be connecting a few too many dots through few too many squiggly lines.

Meanwhile, the Mirror claim that we have four (other) names “in frame” for the sporting director role, including Leeds United’s Victor Orta (which we’ve heard before), plus Atalanta’s Lee Congerton, Sevilla’s Monchi, and Benfica’s Rui Pedro Braz.

The Mirror’s report adds that we’re prioritizing being through over being quick in appointing someone, which is definitely not a bad thing — as long as we don’t drag things out for too long.