Football clubs can learn a lot about recruitment from tech companies. Player and staff recruitment should be people first, role second. As a club/organization, you want to recruit the best people (A players). But A players are A players because they are unique, multi-disciplinary, and hard to define. They are not cogs in a machine. They do not fit into a predetermined cookie-cutter shape. As a consequence, over-specifying a role filters out A players. Over-specifying a role adds (perceived) risk to hiring people who do not exactly fit the job specs. The odds of an A player emerging from the application process are low because the application process prioritizes conformity. Teams/organizations will have gaps that need to be filled, but roles (whether player or staff) should be a rough outline, not a strict shape. Criteria should shift away from specific skillsets to scalable, context-sensitive traits - low ego, adaptable, self-motivated. Criteria and specifications do not solve problems. People solve problems, often in ways that cannot be precisely predicted because they do so in a uniquely authentic manner. Identify the best people/players first, build roles/processes/systems second. This principle applies to player and staff recruitment. You get better returns organizing top people/players into roles and systems that suit them rather than settling for B/C players who fit into a rigid, predefined role or system.

Many clubs fall into the trap of being too specific about the profiles they sign. It starts with being too prescriptive about a gap in the squad. The club decides what it needs, then defines as much criteria as it can around what the ideal profile looks like: age, position, footedness, physical profile, specific actions, experience, budget. Those criteria become filters that extend out into the market, through data and video, eliminating players who don't fit until the best fit is found. The player who remains is not necessarily the best player to solve the problem. He's the player who survived every filter while being available, affordable and interested. Data accelerates the trap. It makes the process feel rigorous and the criteria precise, but every criterion you add makes the search more dependent on the assumptions you started with: that you identified the right problem, that you correctly figured out the solution, and that neither will change over time. The mistake is thinking the solution is a specific set of player characteristics you can plug and play into a complex system. Rarely is there one specific solution to a problem like this, and the more specific your solution, the lower your margin for error. It's a tricky trap because it's usually the product of logical reasoning and objective data. We think we know what the solution looks like ahead of time, and data disguises an educated guess as objective truth. Players are capable of solving problems in unexpected ways, but if you narrow the range of profiles you consider based on specific criteria, those players are often removed from the process before they are ever seriously evaluated. You end up selecting for conformity, not quality. The better process is identifying the best players, the ones who solve many problems in many ways, then building specific roles and systems around their qualities.

🚨 𝗡𝗘𝗪: Luis Campos has revealed one of his unique scouting methods. 🗣️ "Sometimes I send two scouts to the same match without them knowing they're both watching it. "I love comparing their reports. I don't let them share information because I don't want them to influence each other. I want their opinions to be as honest and pure as possible. "I call them my super scouts. I also scout the scouts by choosing them. They are special people."

Some time ago, I saw a YouTube documentary on the Brooklyn Nets scouting department and saved this image of the mantra on the wall during meetings. "DISAGREE AND COMMIT" I'm fascinated by how organizations like this make decisions: who has the final say and whose input carries the most weight. The mantra sparks this question: does debate lead to the best idea or the best argument? Those aren't the same thing. It's easy to mistake clear reasoning for correct reasoning. Imagine a group of individuals with specialized knowledge who are paid for their expert opinion, all with different versions of the truth and strong arguments. What happens when the highest-level decision-maker has a specific opinion and nobody below wants to disagree with the person responsible for their job security? The best thinking lives in the tension between opposing ideas, and the decision hierarchy should respect that and optimize for it. That's why scouts should form opinions in isolation, and why the most senior person in the room shouldn't speak first. The meaning of disagree and commit is that disagreement is healthy, not a red flag. It's important to dig into disagreement to understand why, rather than agreeing to disagree. The commit part is integrating multiple perspectives and selecting one angle from many. That's far easier when one person is responsible for the final decision rather than needing consensus from the group. There's a balance between working with people who think similarly to you and people who challenge your thinking. What is a healthy agreeableness ratio? 80/20? How deep should differences in perspective go?