The boardroom doesn't care about your xG model. They care about whether the player can do the job.
The first time I presented player recommendations to a football club board, I made every mistake possible. I walked in with slides full of percentile ranks, radar charts, scatter plots, and detailed statistical breakdowns. I thought I was being thorough. I was actually being incomprehensible.
The chairman looked at me about four slides in and said: "Can he play or not?"
That moment rewired how I think about communication in football.
The audience changes everything
When you're presenting to other analysts or data people, the technical detail matters. They want to see your methodology, your data sources, your confidence levels. That's the language they speak.
A boardroom is a completely different environment. You're talking to people who have invested millions in the club. They understand football deeply — often more deeply than you do — but they think about it differently. They want to know: Can this player improve the team? What's the risk? What's it going to cost? How long until they're match-ready?
The best analysis in the world is worthless if it can't survive contact with a decision-maker.
What I changed
After that first experience, I restructured everything. My board presentations now lead with the recommendation, not the data. The first slide answers three questions: who is the player, why do we want them, and what do they cost.
The data sits underneath as supporting evidence, available if anyone wants to dig into it, but never as the headline. Video clips replaced scatter plots. Short, contextual summaries replaced statistical tables.
I also learned to anticipate the questions that matter to non-technical stakeholders. What's the player's injury history? Have they played at this level before? What are the character references like? Who else is interested in them? These are not analytical questions, but they are recruitment questions, and if you can't answer them, you're not ready for the room.
The skill nobody teaches
Football analytics courses will teach you how to build models, how to code, how to interpret data. Very few of them teach you how to present findings to someone who doesn't speak your language.
This is a skill you have to develop deliberately. Practice explaining your work to people outside football. If your non-football friends can understand your recommendation and why you're making it, you're probably ready for the boardroom.
The takeaway
Technical ability gets you in the building. Communication skills keep you there. Every analyst I know who has built a lasting career in football has learned to translate complexity into clarity. The sooner you start practising that, the better.