Jake's Road Report is Gemini Sports founder Jake Schuster’s weekly update from professional football's frontlines. He travels globally, meeting club executives to share candid insights on AI's role in football. These raw, actionable thoughts are delivered weekly, with meeting details kept confidential and specific intel omitted.
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Running Gemini has afforded me a unique vantage point across every type of club— from third-division sides scraping for promotion, to Champions League regulars managing nine-figure transfer budgets. I've sat in boardrooms from Manchester to Milan, from São Paulo to Stockholm, and what I've discovered is that the difference between winning organizations and everyone else has nothing to do with budget size, geographic advantages, league prestige or even personnel quality. Those are just demographics — the surface-level factors that make for good headlines but poor predictors of success.
The real differentiator lies in the psychographics: how these organizations think, what they believe, how they make decisions and what innovation really means to them.
When it comes to player trading, being clever is table stakes, and it’s actually a combination of discipline, bravery and organizational processes that determines the winners.
The Winner Separation Mindset
Winning organizations share a fundamental belief that inefficiency represents opportunity. They understand that in a market where emotions run high and egos run higher, disciplined decisions become a superpower.
I recently saw a club take the opportunity to save money and redirect funds elsewhere while a rival was publicly justifying a player’s inflated price with, “other teams were bidding for them”.
These clubs don't just talk about breaking down silos, having a clear process, or incorporating every key piece of information: they embody it in every decision. When a team wins by building their entire model around selling early rather than late, or finding talent that is economical rather than flashy, they’re not getting lucky. They’re executing a philosophy that views every transfer window as a puzzle to be solved, not a lottery to be played.
They’re not rolling the dice. They’re loading the dice.
The Need for Decision-Making Speed
The best organizations I've encountered share an obsession with what I lovingly refer to as “decision velocity.” They understand in football's increasingly hectic transfer windows, speed kills — and I don’t just mean calling agents back quickly. I mean the ability to evaluate, decide and execute while competitors are still scheduling their second meeting.
At one club, I watched them complete complex scenario planning in seconds that would take other clubs weeks. Not because they cut corners, but because they had systems, processes and most importantly, the organizational conviction to act upon. When opportunity emerges — and in the transfer market, it emerges quickly — these clubs are ready to pounce.
Objective Rigor as Competitive Advantage
Winning clubs do more than simply try to be clever in the market. They embrace systems that transform information into insight and insight into action. They understand in a sport where marginal gains compound into substantial advantages, process rigor is existential, not optional.
At The End of The Day
It's not about the size of your budget. It's about the discipline with which you deploy it. The clubs I admire most aren't the ones with the deepest pockets, but the clearest thinking. They approach the transfer market like master chess players: thinking several moves ahead, understanding today's decisions echo across multiple seasons, and never confusing activity with achievement.
Consistently, I observe that the way to achieve that is through clear processes, zero silos, and accessibility of information. That's what separates sustainable success from temporary glory.
The question isn't whether your club has the resources to compete.
The question is whether it has the right attitude to put the right processes in place to win.
