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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Last month, I watched a Champions League club's sporting director frantically refresh his WhatsApp on match day, waiting for a scout's report on a potential target. The scout was three time zones away, the analysis team was working from a completely different dataset and the financial planning department was building their own Python-based model with player values that hadn't been updated in weeks.
This wasn't incompetence. It was inevitable. When your process is broken, even brilliant people produce mediocre results.
After years of seeing the inner workings of football clubs at every level, I've come to a sobering realization: most organizations are flying blind not because they lack talent, but because their systems actively work against them. They've built technological Frankensteins — cobbled together from archaic Tableau dashboards, long and confusing email chains, copy/pasted links from agents and Excel spreadsheets shared like state secrets.
The problem isn't the people. The problem is, of course, the process. The problem is when systems become obstacles.
Picture this scenario, played out weekly across most clubs: A scout sends a report on a player, the analyst sends their report, the finance team sends theirs, and the agent sends their notes. It’s all happening at once, but in different systems.
The sporting director, trying to keep up with all the tiny tabs on his phone, makes a bid while forgetting there was a key note about the player’s wife’s unwillingness to move to London, buried in a WhatsApp chain from 2 months ago. Meanwhile, he passes on another (ultimately better) option who was ready to make the move.
Our sporting director might be in for a nasty surprise.
How many brilliant analysts have their inputs reduced to screenshotted Tableau charts pasted into PowerPoint presentations? How many scouts filed reports with critical details that never reach the people making million-Euro decisions? How many sporting directors make critical choices based on outdated info because the latest analysis was trapped in someone else's desktop app?
This isn't just an inefficient way to work — it's certifiably insane.
The best-run clubs understand that in football's increasingly competitive landscape, marginal gains compound. And there is no margin more critical than the speed and quality of your decision-making process. Your insights are probably sharper than your outcomes reflect. Your competitive disadvantage likely isn't staff talent. It's friction.
I keep wondering how systems can allow brilliance to shine through rather than bury it under layers of technological mud.
In football, as in everything else, the process is the product.
