Am I too late to work in football?

Hey,

"My only fear is my age."

A man said that to me on a call the other week. He's in his fifties, he's spent over thirty years in finance, and football has always been the thing he actually cares about.

He wasn't worried about the work itself.

He was worried about who he'd be up against, the young people who are "a whiz" with all the tools and make reports full of "fancy diagrams and arrows pointing there, here, and everywhere", while he writes in black and white and sticks to the facts.

He'd done a scouting course, and part of the feedback was that he needed to make his reports "a little bit more jazzy".

And honestly, I doubt he's not the only one. The age worry comes up on a lot of my calls, so if you're thinking the same thing, this is what I told him.

In September, Craig Bradley came into the Recruitment Room to walk us through his route into football.

Five years ago he was a retail supervisor in his forties, with no degree and no football on his CV at all. He's now a first team scout at Derby County.

He said something on that session that I think every career changer should hear:

"I'm competing with people that have more qualifications than me, that have youth on their side. My differential is you won't outwork me."

He didn't get to Derby by being younger or more technical than anyone else.

He kept putting work out, for free at first, and people noticed it. The Derby job was never even advertised. Someone passed his name on, and he's 95% sure it goes back to unpaid work he did years earlier, because scouts sit together at live games and talk.

Nobody in that chain was asking how old he was.

Then there's the jazzy reports.

I think that feedback has it the wrong way round. The first feedback Craig got at Derby wasn't about how his reports looked. It was this:

"Your reports are fine, but I don't need 500 words. I need 50. Tell me what he's good at, what he isn't, what he does, what he doesn't do, and what your recommendation is."

That's the black and white report he'd been told to jazz up.

When you're inside a club you're writing in their systems, so how it looks is mostly taken care of for you. Styling matters a bit more when you're putting work out online and trying to get people to stop and look. But what matters most is whether you can do the job, and that shows up in the work you put out there.

The other thing I told him is that a club isn't the only way in.

Freelance scouting and analysis, consultancy and agency work are all popular routes, especially for people who are further into their careers. I did consultancy and freelance work myself, for clubs, player agents and players directly.

So no, I don't think you've left it too late.

My advice would be to stop comparing yourself with the person half your age and their ability to code.

Write the report in black and white. Make the recommendation clear. Then get it in front of someone who can tell you whether it's right.

Craig started in his forties, with no degree, up against people who were younger and more qualified than him, and he's at Derby now because the right people saw his work.

Liam