Here's everything you have to think about running a football club

You’re getting a short one today because a) it’s international break and b) our football job has interfered.

Some of you may or may not know that I am an investor in Crux Football, a women’s multi-club organisation that currently recently acquired the Montpellier women’s team, and is in the process of acquiring additional clubs. [Another of which should be announced before the end of the year! 🤞]

I am also the Strategic Director of Football for Crux, while Kim is our Director of Recruitment. We oversee things across all of our teams.

It’s exciting to be back at the coal face of football. However, overseeing one club is a lot - overseeing multiple clubs with different transfer windows and entirely different sets of needs is fairly crazy.

Here’s a sketch of what the workload looks like:

• Budget review. This guides EVERYTHING.

• Build positional guidelines for player scouting/analysis

• Build data-forward funnel for player scouting/analysis

• Obtain and integrate data sources for the above

• Coordinate with academy on their pipeline for the next two years

• Evaluate squad and begin renewals for expiring contracts

• Evaluate the entire world of football to find players that can improve the team

• Reach out to agents and clubs for players of interest to ascertain cost, availability, and willingness to move. (Note: It helps to have a club in the South of France! We did player interviews and almost literally every player said the weather was one of their favourite aspects of daily life.)

• Detail style of play for first team (which can be substantially different than what you might do at the academy level, because the academy is about developing great future players while the first team is about winning matches).

• Teach style of play to coaches, including all component parts, like Set Pieces and anything they don’t already do naturally

• Build SOPs for weekly analysis cycles

• Teach coaches and analysts analysis cycles

• Implement standards of work across group, including session reviews

• Design and build reporting for self scouting and next opponents

• Teach report use and interpretation. It doesn’t make any sense to build things that no one gets info from or understands how to use
  

• Investigate gym situation(s)

• Review performance plans and diet needs. How do we build better players from what we already have?

• Review weekly injury list, and incorporate in squad planning

• How are the training and match day pitches fairing?

That is literally a small sample that leaves out a ton of detail, and does not include the regular fires on the ground that happen at basically every business with a lot of people. Nor does it include hiring for all the necessary positions and the constant turnover that happen at the staff level in sport.

AND that’s before you get into the due diligence that’s being done by the experts on the Crux business side for teams we might potentially be interested in.

Football clubs are deeply complicated businesses. You have product (the team(s)), marketing, branding, sales (tickets and sponsorships), tons of logistical coordination, and endless amounts of people to communicate with at every level.

It’s basically the exact opposite of someone who builds a five-person startup with huge revenue off the back of tech and AI — humans are integral to everything.

On the business side, women’s football is 10-15 years behind the good men’s teams, because up until now there has been no money in it. But when you look at the fans that show up to the big events — whether that’s Euros and the World Cup, England/US National team matches, or the big FAWSL clashes in the men’s stadium — it’s clear there is enormously interesting and fertile ground there, provided you make the investment to plant and harvest the seeds.

The crowds at those events look more like US sports — there are kids and families everywhere. Men’s football, especially in Europe, is dominated by men in a way that almost doesn’t exist elsewhere, not just in sport, but in life. The different fan composition unlocks new match-day dynamics, sponsorship opportunities, and eventually revenue as long as you are patient and do the work.

So that’s what we’re doing.

Football teams operate on a game by game basis on the pitch, and that clock is relentless. But as a business, we’re looking at it in 2, 5, and 10-year timelines. What do we need to do right now that help grow our teams and the sport, so that in ten years time women’s football across Europe looks more like the WNBA crossed with the Premier League.

We won’t talk about what we’re doing on the football side here because the work is fairly secretive and everything could be an edge for us, but if you ever wondered why one of the biggest public experts in men’s football and data analysis took on an enormous, crazy role to help build women’s football teams… here’s why:

I started writing about “Moneyball” in soccer in 2013 and people tried to laugh me off the internet. Look where it is at now. I have as little doubt in my mind that women’s football will be huge as I did when I started working in football stats (and set pieces) and realised those were the waves of the future. The signs that women’s football will be a cultural and business phenomenon are omnipresent if you know where to look, and there was no better time to start than now.

Don’t believe me? Let’s review in a decade and see who was right.

—TK

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