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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In 1854, London was dying. Cholera ripped through the city's streets, killing hundreds in days. Everyone knew what caused it: bad air. The disease spread through foul-smelling vapor from sewers and rotting waste.
Everyone was wrong.
A physician named John Snow (before he became a major character on Game of Thrones) couldn't prove it wrong just by saying so. The medical establishment had their consensus. Snow needed something more powerful than argument.
So he created a map.
He plotted every cholera death in Soho on a street map of London. One dot for each victim. A pattern emerged that had been invisible before. The deaths clustered around one location: the Broad Street water pump.
Snow removed the pump handle. The outbreak ended almost immediately. A visualization made the invisible obvious.
This is what separates winning football clubs from everyone else.
Most clubs are drowning in information. Expected this, progressive that… yet they keep making expensive mistakes and missing obvious patterns.
The problem isn't lack of information. The problem is they can't see what it's telling them.
A Sporting Director asks their staff about a player, and receives a spreadsheet with 47 metrics. By the time they've figured out what it means, the player has signed elsewhere.
The best clubs understand what John Snow understood: the right format and context makes the invisible obvious.
When Snow presented his map, they couldn't deny what they were seeing. The visualization did the convincing.
That's the power of the right context and efficiency in football recruitment. When your Sporting Director can see player patterns in just a few clicks, decisions become obvious that were previously arguments.
You stop debating whether a player is good enough and losing key context along the way.
Most clubs look at intel the same way everyone else does, while drowning in multiple open tabs and buggy dashboards, and wonder why they keep missing opportunities.
The clubs that will dominate the next decade are learning from John Snow. They're building systems that visualize intel in ways that make the invisible obvious.
Because somewhere right now, there's a Broad Street water pump in the transfer market. A pattern everyone can see but nobody's visualizing.
The question is: will your club be the one to remove the pump handle, or the one still arguing about bad air?
