Edu Gaspar’s next move was hard to predict. The Brazilian has joined the newly formed board of directors at Levski Sofia, a week after his departure from Nottingham Forest was made official.
Levski used a general shareholders’ meeting on Monday to scrap their old two-tier setup of Supervisory and Managing boards and put a single Board of Directors in charge instead. Edu takes one of five seats alongside Daniel Borimirov, Claudio Pracownik, Felipe Berliner and Matthew Cherry. Three of those seats are filled by representatives of the investment group Gemcorp, whose backing sits behind the restructure. A chairman and an executive director will be chosen at the board’s first meeting.
In the club’s announcement, Levski said Edu’s “experience in sports strategy, selection, talent development and organisational building will be an important asset for the club”, and framed the wider overhaul as an attempt to “build on what has already been achieved, strengthen the foundations of the club and create an organisation capable of competing at the highest level of Bulgarian and European football”.
A boardroom job, not a football one
Levski have deliberately left the sporting specifics of Edu’s remit blank for now. The five directors will divide their responsibilities internally, and the club has not tied him to a title such as sporting director or head of football. The message from Sofia is that his value sits in governance and network as much as in day-to-day football operations.
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That is a shift in register from his last two jobs. Edu spent roughly five years at Arsenal from 2019, moving up from technical director to sporting director in November 2022 and running recruitment through the Mikel Arteta rebuild. Deals for Declan Rice, Martin Odegaard and Gabriel Magalhaes passed across his desk before he left in November 2024.
His subsequent role as global head of football at Nottingham Forest, which was meant to stretch across owner Evangelos Marinakis’s wider football group of Olympiacos and Rio Ave, ended after little more than a year. Edu had been kept out of the appointment of head coach Oliver Glasner in July and had effectively been absent from the City Ground since the spring.
First title since 2009
Edu joins a club that has just broken one of European football’s longest domestic monopolies. Levski were crowned Bulgarian champions in May 2026, ending Ludogorets Razgrad’s run of fourteen consecutive First League titles and lifting the trophy for the first time since 2009.
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