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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I recently had a call with a team that's at the top of their league and should probably be promoted to the upper division next season. Their sporting director told me something that stopped me cold: “Our owner already thinks our scouting department is expensive because we're spending almost as much on technology as another member of staff would cost.” They have a staff of four people.

Let me translate what I'm hearing—the owner isn't really sure how much value the right tools bring in organizing a small staff and keeping everyone on the same page. He sees technology as a luxury, not a necessity.

I don’t mean to be unkind, but that is pretty fucking stupid.

The fact they're a small department means they need help making sure each staff member is maximally productive more than anyone. They need help evaluating more players with limited headcount. They need help being more efficient in how they produce and share insights. A four-person scouting operation competing against clubs with departments four times their size can't afford to operate like it's still 2010.

Here's the math many owners seem to miss: Teams need to stop being scared to spend €100,000 on technology that prevents them from making €5M mistakes. That's not an expense. That's insurance with an insanely spectacular return on investment.

When you're operating with a skeleton crew, you can't afford to have your scouts spending hours writing reports by hand. You can't afford to have your sporting director reading those reports one by one, trying to synthesize patterns across dozens of players manually. You can't afford to have critical info trapped in someone's inbox or buried in a folder nobody can find. Small departments don't have the luxury of inefficiency. They need every advantage they can get just to compete with clubs that have double their resources.

The right tech doesn't replace people—it multiplies them.

It lets four people operate like eight. It allows your scouts focus on scouting instead of admin. It frees up your sporting director to make faster, smarter, more confident, better-informed decisions, because all the intelligence is accessible instantly.

But here's what kills me: this same owner who balks at spending what amounts to one reserve player's wages on technology will happily sign a €5M player based on incomplete information, then act shocked when it doesn't work out. They'll rationalize that transfer as "taking a chance" while viewing the tools that could have prevented that mistake as an extravagance.

The best-run clubs I work with understand this intuitively. They know in a market where one bad signing can set you back years, investing in the infrastructure that helps you make better decisions isn't optional—it's existential. They'd rather spend €100K on tech that improves every decision than save that money and continue making expensive mistakes.

If you're running a small department, you need technology more than clubs with massive staffs, not less. You need every efficiency gain you can find. Systems that give you the power to punch above your weight. The question isn't whether you can afford the right tools—it's whether you can afford to keep operating without them.

The cost of technology is visible.

The cost of bad decisions just looks like bad luck.