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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"Our ownership wants to keep things in-house."

Needless to say, I've heard this sentiment quite a few times. And every time, I think of the poor engineers on staff at these clubs.

Last month, I spoke with a data scientist at a Ligue 1 club who spent six weeks debugging frontend display issues instead of analyzing their January transfer targets. During the most critical planning period of the season, their brightest analytical mind was wrestling with CSS instead of player performance metrics. This is madness disguised as strategy.

I am unsure if people know what they mean when they say "we want to do it in-house." What exactly are you trying to accomplish? Win football games? Prove you can build software? 

Because you can't optimize for both. If you're leaving the future of your club to a defensive analytics hire who wants to prove their technical chops by building everything from scratch, you're wasting headcount, salary, and most critically, time.

Here's what no engineer wants to admit: they can't do every part of the work equally well. I've never met a data engineer who actually wants to build user interfaces or take care of frontend bugs. They want to solve interesting problems, not maintain boring infrastructure. We feel genuinely bad for engineering staff tasked with building software instead of doing analysis.

Football analytics people should be helping scouts identify overlooked talent and supporting sporting directors with sophisticated analysis of specific transfer targets. They shouldn't be building data pipelines and front end UI.

Keep your metrics and analysis in-house—absolutely. Your competitive advantage comes from how you interpret information, not how you store and manage it. But let others handle the infrastructure and user experience to enable that work. Focus your talent on football problems, not software problems.

Your analysts didn't join your club to become full-stack developers. They joined to help find, assess and recruit the best football players. Engineers are people, too. People with strengths and preferences who want to do incredible work. 

Let’s let them shine.