How I tried to enter the football industry

How I tried to enter the football industry

12 Learnings.

This is really the most personal piece I ever shared on social media.

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It all started with a Germany jersey I received on Easter Sunday back in 1997. It was the green one from the Euro ‘96.

Football has been my passion ever since.

I basically played football for my whole lifetime. Even though I never made it out of Sunday League, I had amazingly good times, met many great people and I still believe the competitiveness does not depend much on the level of play. ??

However, it took until early 2019 until I finally tread into the rabbit hole. It was the book by Christoph Biermann that sparked my interest and curiosity (“Die Fu?ball Matrix”, I think the English version is called “Football Hackers” although I am not sure if it’s actually the translation of the first book or the sequel). It was then, when I first heard about “Expected Goals”, how Sven Mislintat revolutionised scouting at Borussia Dortmund or the origin of the numbers game Brentford F.C. or FC Midtjylland are playing.

I quickly realised there is no return as those fascinating stories combined my lifelong enthusiasm for football and the zeal I developed for data and analytics while I started my professional life in Startupland in the meantime.

Literally, I snatched every book I could find about this side of the football business. The more I read about it and the more content I soaked up, the more I noticed how many concepts and principles from my professional experience could be applied to a football club as well.

It was so obvious to me that clubs that opt-in for innovative management and data usage would have such a clear competitive advantage that I couldn’t believe why apparently only a handful of clubs are applying such insights from the business world to their operations.

Eager to learn more and to get first-hand insights, I asked myself how to move on. What would I do if I had a startup business aiming to explore a new market? Right, just get in touch with the people and collect feedback, refine the vision, sharpen the product.

So, I did some research on LinkedIn and found a bunch of people with very interesting job titles from the football industry. I prepared a catchy connection request and hoped for at least a single response. Back then, I just wanted to know what kind of data and tools are used in the real world and get to know what the skillset is those experts are looking for.?

The result was incredible. I ended up chatting with the (that time) Head of Football Intelligence of the most renowned football consultancy and the Head of Scouting, Match Analysis and Diagnosis of the German Men‘s National Team. Simply amazing and a big learning.

Learning 1/12: If you openly ask the people in a friendly and honest manner, you will be surprised by how good the response rates can be. Just go out and try to talk to the right people. There is no such thing as people out of reach.

Spurred by this initial success, I decided to take it a step further. I took a few days off from work, packed my things and travelled to Barcelona to attend the Barca Sports Analytics Summit in September 2019.

When I arrived in front of the venerable Camp Nou, I felt something in-between complete insanity and pure zest because, on the one hand, I was very proud of myself that I invested all the efforts to come there and be part of such an exciting event but on the other hand, insecurity arose because I am really not that person you tend to remember for his winning manners or great charism. I am embarrassingly bad at small talk. This was a networking event. Did I completely lose my mind now??

To hell with that, let’s just dive into it! I convinced myself. It was a great opportunity.

Suddenly, I found myself snacking Catalan biscuits with Ted Knutson and a Strategy Executive of Manchester United, elaborating about the advantages of a virtual data layer for football clubs. Funny enough, I didn’t even realise that I was trying to educate the co-founder of Statsbomb about my view on data access and management for football clubs. Just noticed that afterwards. ?? The next moment, I was sitting next to the Head of Sports Data Science at Benfica Lissabon, in my view a real mastermind, listening to a presentation about football analytics and whisperingly asking him for his thoughts about it. Between the presentations, I was chilling with some smart dudes from Red Bull’s scouting department and later that day I met the author of a book I was reading before about Big Data in football and match analysis 4.0. It was just unreal.

At the end of the day, I was just delighted and went back to my shabby Airbnb next to La Rambla. I couldn’t have been more content.

Learning 2/12: Your Zone of Genius is larger than you think. As a socially awkward person (at least in unknown contexts), sucking at small talk, I attended an exclusive networking event. I did very well because it was in my personal Zone of Genius, where my interests, passions and skills align. If you are in doubt, go where the fear is and embrace your growth.??

Back in Germany, I started to think about my next steps even though I didn’t have any specific end goal in mind. It was always clear to me that this whole endeavour was nothing more than a leisure project. My mission at Data Virtuality was and is not over and this was always the number one priority. Nevertheless, the whole football data universe just fascinated me and keeps doing so.

Since I had a hard time finding new literature on the topic, I began to look for something more tangible - courses, degrees, certificates. At first, I completed a degree in Scouting & Match Analysis at a remote learning institute in Germany. After that, I got certified in Professional Scouting Methods and Tools, Digital Marketing & Analytics for Sports Professionals, I passed through the Football Tactical Analyst program at the Barca Innovation Hub and finally completed a Football Management Diploma.

Luckily, in the heat of the moment, I did not forget a powerful piece of advice I got from one of the people I mentioned above:

“Qualifications and courses are secondary to us - if you've been able to demonstrate your skills in a public sphere that will always take precedence!”

So, I racked my brain about what I could do to follow this advice and finally came up with my very first article on LinkedIn - an analysis of the performance of Fortuna Düsseldorf after they sacked Friedhelm Funkel. With hindsight, this was quite a poor piece of content but I was very proud of every single one of the 55 views it got to date. It was the first step to a series of more profound articles, and retrospectively, maybe the most important one. You know, good things only happen if you do the most important thing. Start. Go from zero to one.

Learning 3/12: If you want to achieve something - just start. Just start and embrace all the failures you’re facing along the way. Getting started is really the most important step. Relating it to the business world, you don’t need a sophisticated stack from the beginning, just start and validate your ideas in the leanest and most agile possible way. To me, agility means to test hypotheses in the most time- and money-effective way.?

Although today I don’t find it to be high-quality content, I kept this very first article online. It reminds me of a text passage from the Goldmine Effect, where Rasmus Ankersen delineates a story from the famous Jamaican running athletes’ coach Stephen Francis. When scouting young sprinters, Francis is not looking at the runner’s current performance but he’s looking at where the athlete is coming from. The ability to develop fast is more important than a certain performance level on a particular day.?

Learning 4/12: Potential over Performance. It pays off in the long run, often sooner than later. Applied in a business context, this means, the ability to adapt to novel circumstances and acquire new knowledge quickly is, in the long run, often more powerful than a certain level of knowledge about a specific just today.

I continued to write articles throughout the year and my productions got more and more profound, views increased gradually.?

In April 2020, I finally made a (tiny) “breakthrough”. I published “Startup FC - The opposite of what we have always done” where I wrote about how football clubs could embrace core principles from fast-growing businesses and organise themselves in a more innovative way.

The article has 763 views to date. For me, it was (and is) a great success. But even more important than the number of views was the overwhelming feedback I received. Many like-minded people sent me messages, appreciating the article, and with some of them, like the much appreciated Olivier Wicki (a great football strategist, highly recommend to follow him on LinkedIn), I am still in good contact and regularly philosophising about the football business. I don’t want to miss these valuable contacts anymore and I wouldn’t have them if I haven’t been leaving my comfort zone, starting to publish stuff on the internet.????

Learning 5/12: Building in public actually works. You don’t need to be perfect in everything from day one. Sharing your progress and challenges openly with like-minded people can lead to powerful encounters.?

Even though none of the subsequent articles generated a comparable amount of buzz, it was good fun to write and think about a few special topics in depth. For example, "How to make smarter decisions in football clubs", is some other output I still find highly relevant. In general, I strongly believe that writing is a key to clarity. While writing you will discover the logical flaws of your reasoning much faster. In that sense, it was always a great exercise to write those articles and explore different topics in more detail.

Learning 6/12: I strongly believe that writing is a key to clarity. During writing, you will discover the logical flaws of your reasoning much faster compared to just thinking about or discussing. Writing is pure and honest. It uncovers blind spots and reveals how much you really know about a topic. Usually, the more jargon, the less understanding.

Fast forward - in spring 2021 - I decided it was time for the next leap. With my undaunted enthusiasm, all those certificates and courses, the many books on my shelf, the valuable relationships, I still had not the faintest idea how a professional football club actually works behind the scenes, especially with respect to the management and business aspects. I was keen to get this inside view.

I knew this was a bold endeavour, so I wanted to tackle this in a structured way. I approached it as if I was aiming to start a small business.?

First of all, I began to think about my offering. Nobody is waiting for me, so I needed something to provide, any value-add for the clubs in exchange for some real-world insights. Luckily, I gained some widespread experiences during the years in the venture capital and startup universe and received quite some positive feedback along my way. I felt humbly confident that I could also add some value to a football club and certainly apply some of my skills in this context as well. So in the end, I decided my offering was just me. My idea was to offer some clubs to work for them for free during my summer vacation. Taking a few days off to gain some first-hand football business insights was definitely a good deal, I thought.?

Now the actual project has begun. The main question was of course, how to convince any sporting director, director of football or someone else in a leading position to take me under his wing and let me demonstrate my skills on whatever project. Or to put it differently - how to sell the product?

Thanks to the advice I received earlier, I already published a couple of articles on LinkedIn at that time. Most of them I still find valuable and insightful. They seemed to be a good asset to start with, so I asked myself what was the best way to distribute and get them to the right audience. My first idea was to merge them into one compendium, print it, and physically send it to some club’s offices together with a brief cover letter. The notion was to stand out in a way since nowadays most things are happening online and I hoped to be considered as something special. I started to compile the hard copy and drafted a cover letter. It turned out, merging all my articles and putting them into a visually nice format resulted in 57 pages (DIN A4!). It looked nice but it was massive. While my confidence about this idea was slightly shrinking I was still sticking to the plan - until I collected feedback on my cover letter. The cover letter was a full page long and it sounded as if I was a bloody greenhorn, a winy student desperately looking for an internship and ready to sell his soul to get into any manager’s slavery. Crap! I am so glad that I received honest feedback, it was eye-opening and I realised once again how important it is to be able to handle feedback factually.

Learning 7/12: Not taking anything personally is a super-power. The ability to receive feedback and process it factually is one of the most important skills needed to grow. If you take everything personally, sooner or later, you won't have a single honest person around you anymore.?

At the same time, I realised that I was selling myself absolutely short. I think especially for introverts this tendency can be a big hurdle.

Learning 8/12: Imposter syndrome is real. Be aware of who you are, what you can and be proud of your achievements without becoming a bragger. It’s possible to stay humble and confident at the same time. Potentially even a precondition to sustainable growth.

Pivot time. The idea to send a huge booklet physically to some office without any possibility to trace it was dead. And thanks to the reminder that I am not a begging student but the Head of Finance & Analytics of a growing software company with a background in venture capital and profound theoretical knowledge of the football industry paired with genuine interest, the stupid and much too long cover letter silently went into the bin.

I went digital again. Many of my working experiences and skills are somehow related to the digital world and I strongly believe in digital businesses and style of work. It was just obvious that I had to approach my targets digitally - just not obvious enough for myself in the first place.

Motivated by this eureka effect, I was back in the game. Clearly, it will be an outbound email campaign! Since I am not a marketer and just have a few hands-on experiences in marketing and sales from the early days of my career, I was researching a bit about cold emailing and found some valuable pieces of advice.

My final outreach consisted of a five-step email sequence. Each of them was as short and crisp as possible and supposed to extract and deliver one core insight about a particular topic I dealt with in my articles. Instead of a hard copy, I assembled my LinkedIn publications in a blog to make it also accessible for people without a LinkedIn account. My call-to-action was always a link to book an online meeting with me. 15 minutes, time-boxed. I wanted to make it as easy as possible to get in touch with me, so I utilised Calendly for the bookings, very easy, straightforward and free for my simple use case. I even installed a trial version of an email tracking tool for my inbox - I really took it seriously. ??

Learning 9/12: Based on my research a good cold email should take into account five core principles:

-- It must be short and crisp

-- Add a personal touch to it

-- Social Proof makes it more credible

-- You need to create any kind of value for the reader

-- Use a clear CTA

How did I follow these principles in my own outreach?

• Shortness: Each email consisted of 150 to 160 words (today I think it could have been even more condensed).
• Personality: I always used the recipient's name in the salutation and mentioned the specific club in the text. Merge tags for the win, paired with an informal tone.
• Social Proof: This one was tough, I worked around it by opening with an interesting industry example “club X is doing Y in the Z way” to demonstrate some expertise.
• Value: I extracted one core insight of my articles and linked to the full blog post and offered help to achieve it.
• CTA: Time boxed, 15-minute call with Calendly link, about how I could help with achieving the value I introduced above. It took four clicks to book a meeting.

As soon as the content was set up, I started to research some interesting recipients. I utilised LinkedIn and the clubs’ website more or less opportunistically. If the email address was not public, I used Hunter.io to get them. I was working with Hunter a couple of years ago and back then I was not really convinced about the quality but I gave it another shot. In my view, the tool massively improved in terms of quality (deliverability). I hardly had any bounces. My focus was on lower-tier clubs, not the absolute elite level. I thought it might be more realistic to get into a smaller organisation and I imagined the experience to be more hands-on.

Hell, I was super excited and even a bit nervous when everything was ready and I scheduled the first batch of my outreach. I had a list of approximately 50 recipients but I only included a small chunk of eight executives in my first batch because I wanted to get a feeling first, of how people would react to my emails and not burn the whole sample in case the majority would immediately be annoyed.?

To keep track of my activities, I created a small and simple report in Google Sheets to see who is in which stage of the sequence, which email bounced and to analyse opening and response rates.

Somewhere on the internet, I also read that emojis in the subject line improve opening rates by a whopping percentage. Eager to optimise my outreach as much as possible I also adopted this advice. While I did not execute any A-B testing, my opening rates were very good, so I tend to believe it’s actually true. ?? However, beware of the vanity metrics trap. Vanity metrics are often easy to track but a misleading measurement of KPIs. A simple example could be follower count on social media. If your company has a huge following but none of the followers converts into a paying customer you are doing something wrong at another stage in the funnel. Celebrating your huge number of followers won’t bring you anywhere, it’s not a good metric to measure your success if your actual goal is to generate revenue. There are other examples, you might have heard of the cobra effect.

Same for me and my opening rates. Since I knew the notion of vanity metrics from my experiences in BI and analytics projects, I luckily didn’t get too excited about it. If we look at my results, the good opening rates were nice to have but did not constitute any success with respect to my actual goal.

Here’s what I achieved:

• Approx. 90 % of emails have been delivered
• Of those delivered emails approx. 85% have been opened (some of them even many times, most likely they have been forwarded)
• In total I got seven responses, thereof:
• Two just asked me to stop sending emails ??
• Three replied it’s not interesting or not the right time ??
• Two were generally interested to talk and in the end, one call really happened ??

The one call I got out of my campaign was super nice and interesting and I highly appreciate that it happened, even though in the end there was no project I could involve myself in.

Learning 10/12: If an outbound email has been opened extremely often, it indicates that it has been forwarded.

Over the course of the sequence, I slightly adapted the last email of the cadence and included an “Exit Clause”. The goal was to make it easier for the people to provide feedback, so I added a few options at the end of the email to be copy-pasted as a response. It was somewhat like:

"Even if these issues are not a priority for you, feedback on my emails would help me to move forward personally.

To make it easy for you, feel free to copy-paste any of the following responses:?

1. No time
2. Not interesting
3. Didn’t know want you want
4. Thought it was sales blah blah
5. …"

So I was hoping for some more insights about my campaign performance at least. One person reacted with one of the options: No time to really read it. I was happy that this adaptation worked out at least once, most likely the person would not have reacted without those options.??

Learning 11/12: tl;dr is a tough opponent. To write clearly and bring as much meaning into short sentences is another super-power.

Nevertheless, I consider my little project a huge success. It was fun to do and I learned a lot. I had a very nice talk and the few responses were quite friendly, wishing me good look for my endeavours.

Reflecting on it, I think the main reason why I still failed to get my “summer job” was that my emails were still toned way too much in a sales fashion. It appears that people thought I wanted to sell something. The reason for that is probably that I managed the whole thing in exactly that sense - I tried to sell something. However, even though the emails might have been professionally crafted according to the latest sales and marketing standards, they lost their authenticity.

Learning 12/12: Authenticity is to win people, professionalism is to keep people.

If there was an actual product behind my efforts this could have been the right approach, however, the product still was a human being eager to learn stuff, get challenged and follow his intrinsic passion. Therefore, I conclude that you can hardly build up a trustful relationship with an email drip campaign. And trustful relationships is what you need if you want to dive into a new field and establish contact with professionals, especially if it’s a rather gated universe like the football industry. Even though I tried to add the personal touch, I think in the end it was too impersonal. Not honest enough, if you want to put it that way. If I would restart this, I would potentially try to get in touch with people through events, social media or other networks. You can (and should) still provide value for people but it should originate in a more organic way.

Today, I kind of closed this chapter for now. Absolutely not entirely, but I am not trying to push this anymore in this rigorous way. Still, I always enjoy a profound chat about football and I will not miss a single game of my club. Football is a substantial part of my spare time, probably my biggest hobby, and that is perfectly right so. I realised I don’t need this fast-paced growth in this particular part of my life at all costs. While my interest and enthusiasm are unbroken, it’s okay the way it turned out, and I am just fortunate about all the learnings this little side project provided. I am curious to see what is still to come and what opportunities may arise in the future. No need for pressure. I am still surprised about how deep this rabbit hole can be and how much you can learn in a short time if you are just genuinely interested and follow your fascination. In fact, I am astonished by all the knowledge I was able to absorb in such a brief period of time. With hindsight, this is super exciting to reflect how much you can learn about a certain topic and how many industry players you get to know. This is definitely another key takeaway and something I deem very valuable for my future path - the ability to explore new things quickly and acquire new knowledge swiftly. I also strongly believe that you don’t need football-specific skills by all means to enter the business. Especially if you are not a former professional player, I am sure you can build up skills in a different context and still provide value for a football club at some point. Meta skills like the ability to abstract, relate and translate things might be more important than specialised knowledge to some degree. Basically, I would even go so far as to say that clubs looking outside of their usual environments can build up competitive advantages when applying proven concepts from other areas.

That being said, if you are a professional club executive, I still wouldn't refuse a contact request! ??

In any case, if you are still with me up to here, thank you very much.

If we talk about tl;dr, once again I have not taken my own learnings into account for this text. That's okay with me, I enjoyed writing it. At the same time, it means even more to me that you have read it up to this point.

If you can take away one or two of my learnings for yourself, I would be very happy.?

If you even had fun reading it, then of course I'm even happier.?

Should you now have the urgent need to show me your appreciation for this, then feel free to write me a message - I am looking forward to hearing from you!

You would also be doing me a huge favour if you filled out this questionnaire for one of my new leisure projects or forwarded it to someone for whom the questions might be interesting if they are irrelevant to yourself.

That’s it.

Thank you and stay healthy and ambitious!

Matthias

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Some of my publishing for reference:

• Startup FC - The opposite of what we have always done
• How to make smarter decisions in football clubs
• Gladbach - the real role model in German Football?
• The most complete midfielder - Would you have expected him to be number one?
• How to tweak your squad through smart budget allocation
• Leveraging the Academy - The Road to success?
• Free Data Scouting Tool
• How to Organise a Football Club

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