Most people who want to work in football have the knowledge. What they lack is the bridge to opportunity.
This is something I think about constantly. The football analytics community is full of incredibly talented people — developers who can build sophisticated models, scouts who can break down a player's profile in forensic detail, analysts who can spot patterns in data that most professionals would miss.
And yet, the vast majority of them are on the outside looking in.
The gap is real
The problem isn't a lack of ability. It's a lack of access. Football is an industry built on relationships, trust, and referrals. The majority of roles in recruitment and analysis are never publicly advertised. They're filled through networks — someone knows someone, a recommendation is made, a conversation happens at a conference or over a coffee.
If you're not inside that network, you simply never hear about the opportunity. It doesn't matter how good your Python scripts are or how many scouting reports you've written. If the right person hasn't seen your work, you're invisible.
The gap between what people know and what they get the opportunity to do is the single biggest problem in football careers today.
Why this matters beyond individual careers
This isn't just a career problem. It's an industry problem. When clubs recruit from the same narrow pool of people — former players, people with existing connections, graduates of the same three universities — they miss out on enormous talent.
Some of the best analytical minds I've encountered in football came from completely unrelated backgrounds. Betting, finance, software engineering, academia. They brought fresh perspectives and different ways of thinking that made the departments they joined measurably better.
But getting them through the door was the hard part. Not because they weren't qualified, but because the pathways simply didn't exist.
What can be done
I believe the bridge between knowledge and opportunity has to be built deliberately. It won't happen on its own. That means creating communities where aspiring analysts can connect with working professionals. It means clubs being more transparent about how they hire. It means established people in the industry actively reaching out and opening doors.
On an individual level, the most effective thing I've seen is public work. People who consistently share their analysis, engage with the community, and make themselves visible tend to close the gap faster than those who work in isolation and wait for a job listing to appear.
The community's role
This is partly why I do what I do. Mentoring, sharing frameworks, writing about how the industry works from the inside — it's all an attempt to make the bridge a little shorter for the people coming after me.
Football will be better when the best minds can actually get in the room. Right now, too many of them are stuck outside it. The industry should take that seriously, and so should anyone with the power to change it.