In many ways, this move has brought Richard Montague full circle.

The 38-year-old isn't from the area, nor does he have any obvious ties to the club. But Swansea City has nevertheless made a profound impact on his career to this point.

"It's an amazing club, with an amazing history that genuinely does appeal to me," he says when asked about how the move to SA1 came about. "Watching those Swansea teams [over the years] and trying to make Notts a bit like Swansea was a huge draw for me.

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"So yeah, it's an honour to be here." Sign up to our Swansea City newsletter here.

The swashbuckling football of Martinez, Rodgers and Laudrup was, Montague admits, hugely influential in shaping his formative years in the game, and underpinned much of the philosophies implemented during his five largely successful years at Notts County.

The possession-based style of football that brought so much success during that era set Swansea apart from many of their contemporaries and propelled the club all the way to the promised land of the Premier League, and a first-ever major trophy to boot.

But it also inevitably became a style of football many others started to adopt, and finding the next incarnation of the fabled 'Swansea Way' perhaps hasn't been the easiest task. Even pinning it down to single definition has become increasingly difficult.

"I have had people from the city and from the club sit me down and talk to me about the Swansea Way," Montague explains when quizzed on his own thoughts on the Swansea Way.

"I think you know it when you see it, when you feel it. I think it is about respecting those traditions, about respecting what got the club to its highest point and its greatest days.

"It's very clear we want that heritage to live on and our job is to find the next version of that."

Montague believes data could well prove integral in finding the next version of Swansea's identity.

It was a message pushed by his predecessor too, and the disastrous reign that followed means many will greet any mention of data with a certain degree of caution, perhaps even outright alarm.

Unlike his predecessor, however, this is a field he's operated within for some time already, and largely to great effect.

After completing his master's in social policy at the University of Oxford in 2011, Montague joined Football Radar, a small company specialising in analysing player data for use in the gambling industry that were, he claims, pioneers of the now infamous xG metric that has now permeated every corner of the footballing landscape.

"Football obviously, like so many people was my passion," he says. "It was everything I did in my free time and was everything aspired to be I guess.

"Around that time I read Moneyball, which is the most cliched origin story of all time, but I read it and wondered whether there could be paths into that kind of work for me, because I had this sort of data background through my master's, so I wanted to see if there was a pathway where I could actually combine both those things and make a career out of it.

"I joined the company at quite an early stage, so I was able to get exposure to loads and loads of the interesting stuff that they were doing; building models, coming up with better ways to assess players and better ways to assess teams to more accurately predict what's going to happen in future games."

The models at Football Radar became so sophisticated, it wasn't long before ambitions around actual decision-making at clubs started to grow.

When Notts County lost their EFL status for the first time in their 157-year history, they saw their chance.

"They asked me to help them find a club to buy, so I was heavily involved in that process," he added. "So we built a little matrix and started looking at different clubs we could could buy and we settled on Notts.

"It was a fantastic experience and we went in with a lot of help at first I would say. There were some great people at the club. Jason Turner, Neal Ardley supported us an awful lot. Then over the period of five years I was there we developed more and more of the processes and systems that, in our mind, go into trying to over-achieve and over-perform. I'll keep banging on about that phrase.

"But I think you can be successful in football if you over-perform your playing budget, and that's what we're all aiming to do. All the best teams in history have done that. Leeds are probably doing that now. They'll be spending a lot, but they're also over-performing relative to that budget so what can we do to over-perform was really what we were all about."

It was at Meadow Lane where Montague worked with the now former Swansea boss Luke Williams, who oversaw a return back to the EFL in 2023. Replacing Williams is understandably item number one on his swelling to-do list. You can read more on his thoughts about the manager search here.

But when it comes to the 'over-performance' Montague mentions, there's one area that stands out more than any other in terms of importance.

"Obviously the biggest way you can probably impact that is player recruitment," he says. "To try and have an analytical approach to player recruitment. Trying to do that a bit differently to everybody else, but also in terms of head coach recruitment, what we can on the pitch and all kinds of decision-making within the club really.

"So the idea really is to try and bring a lot of the learnings I've had from my experience at Notts into Swansea and see if we can try and achieve some of that over-performance here, and try to get better at measuring how good we are against everybody else.

"While everyone talks about data, everyone has data. So it's actually how you use that data to make decisions. I think that's what the really smart clubs, the really clever clubs are actually doing is they're making better decisions more consistently.

"So if you have a robust decision-making process, over time, those good decisions compound, and then you get the effects on the pitch. That's the idea, that's the theory anyway.

"So yeah, we're going to use data, but we're also going to use inputs from coaches and scouts and other smart people that we have in the building to make better decisions and try to be consistent with our decision-making, so not just allow transfer decisions or contractual decisions to be made on whims, always making sure that we follow the same process we use the same inputs.

"We check ourselves. We make sure that we are robust in that decision making and improve on that decision making and then see the benefits from that. So that I think is the actual edge that we're looking to pursue here. It's about decision making"

Montague has unsurprisingly echoed calls for lessons to be learned from what was, in the end, a chaotic January transfer window, and admits it could take some time for the club to bring the processes up to scratch.

"There can be a million reasons why a particular transfer falls through or it doesn't happen," he says. "I think that was the case of back end of the window here, but my job has been to come in and try and look at as much of what we have as possible and
figure out what's useful and what's not useful, and how we can improve some elements of that process, and I think that's what I've been brought in to do is to.

"So it will look slightly different this summer. There was nobody in my post during the window as well and I think that probably ended up being more of a disadvantage than was maybe expected, but that is an inevitable consequence of roles changing, so I think it will look different this summer.

"It will have more of my hands on it. It still probably won't fully look like it's going to until maybe the window after unfortunately, because of just where we are. But it's a year-round constant process to get ready for a window. So it won't be changing everything, but it will be trying to figure out which tweaks to make and where I can add the most amount of impact in the short period of time for the summer.

"But yeah, it's obviously a huge focus, recruitment is probably 80% of winning football matches."

The methodology could also be turned inwards, particularly when it comes to the academy, which Montague believes could yield the sort of cost-effective solutions that allow the club to thrive.

"It's still a little bit like recruitment," he says. "Figuring out who can go into a team and make it stronger or where you can make savings by having a player maybe on a lower salary than somebody else you can bring in externally.

"So it's all connected, but I think it can't be overlooked if we have the most suitable players for the way we're playing, then we have a real chance of being successful and we need to be able to sign those good players for less money than those players are probably worth. That's the reality of it.

"We need to find good players, but lots of people can do that, and we need to find good players who will accept slightly lesser wages. And that's the reality of trying to punch up against the parachute payment clubs in this league."

Indeed, there are decisions to make over several players ahead of the summer, with Harry Darling the most high-profile star coming to the end of his current deal.

"I haven't I haven't caught up with Harry's agent on that just yet," he says. "I need to be fully up to speed with where we are with everything.

"It's an attractive proposition to be a free agent at this time. I think you can go into the summer knowing you've had a really good season like Harry has done and have a lot of options and he's going to have a lot of opportunities. So I think all we can do is make our best case to him and I'll make sure that we've done that.

"We also have to recognise that there are points when the other options on offer might be too attractive for our players. So all I can do is make sure that we put our best foot forward and our most competitive offer forward and try to sell ourselves in the best way possible and we will do that.

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"But there is obviously always a chance in these situations that players perform so well that he outgrows us financially, and that might be a reality.

"I think there are cases where it's not the worst thing in the world to have players running down their contracts because there might be a point where there isn't value to be found by selling that player or the offers that come in wouldn't wouldn't replicate losing that player and replace these in our player.

"There might be times when you recognise that you're not going to be able to offer something competitive to a player, so if you can't realise some transfer value, sometimes it might be the best way to let contracts expire, especially if you're fighting for something.

"So that's the kind of decision-making that we're going to try and employ, and we'll do the same with offering new contracts and trying to figure out when a player is value for money and when they're not."

There's clearly plenty of items to address, but Montague doesn't appear too daunted by the scale of the challenge, and insists he fully intends to be in this role for the long haul.

And, there's one clear long-term goal in mind.

"I think it's obvious, really isn't it like I mean everyone, just the Premier League is, of course, the ambition of everyone at the club," he added.

"My job is to break that bit down and to try and look at it and figure out how you actually get there."