First, again, my sincere apologies for the month-and-a-half hiatus. Inexcusable, but unavoidable. I hope that I can make up for it over the rest of 2020.
The reason for my absence had to do with a very complex, high-pressure work assignment that required me to carefully broker interests between three large, entrenched institutions each with their own set of strengths in a very specialized scientific field.
Without going into too many details, my job was to accurately and compellingly speak to this science in a way that came through to laypeople, ensure all three partners had equal billing, and ensure their work came through as one unified whole, rather than three separate but connected siloes. All of this had to be approved and vetted not only by said scientists but their respective institutional executives (who don’t always speak the same language as the scientists they support).
And I had to do this all in the space of a month.
So sadly, this year hasn’t exactly been a great time for me so far.
But it was instructive, at least, on the critical importance of narrative, a word that most football journalists today rightly despise for its nauseating, buzzwordy overuse by many consultants and soccer execs alike. And yes—while the concept is corny in the extreme, following the nightmarish stress of the past month, I have emerged as a true believer in its institutional efficacy in football if it is developed and applied correctly.
So what do I mean by narrative exactly? Is it just another word for ‘philosophy’?
Sort of.
Stories > Philosophies
Though in the past I’ve strongly favoured the idea that clubs should have a basic understanding of their overall raison d’etre, my problem with talking about football philosophies is that, like corporate mission statements, they are often entirely indistinguishable from one another. Declaring that your club believes in the importance of high-possession, attacking football with a strong emphasis on youth development isn’t exactly the strongly defined stuff of the magna carta, the US constitution or The Communist Manifesto. So it’s important to tell a story that defines a club-specific, reasonable but galvanizing 3-5 year goal and a clear, club-specific path to achieving that goal.
For this reason, I prefer the idea of a story or a narrative to a philosophy. The basic framework might be “to apply principles X, Y, Z to achieve a concrete goal of A, B, C.” Maybe the principle is developing youth to sell on for a profit, and the goal is to achieve break-even status in the next three years while maintaining your position in the league. It depends on the situation your club is facing.
Once you’ve captured this unified vision in one or two sentences, it makes the thorny, interwoven issues of strategy far easier to execute across a club. This isn’t new to my thinking or conventional thinking in most analytics-adjacent consultancy people. But I think it behooves teams to go one further and go down the line for every division, from the commercial side through to recruitment, youth development and the first-team coaching staff to lay out in advance concrete near- and long-term deliverables concerning your club narrative. And do this all upfront early on, and adjust as needed to evolving circumstances every few months.
My thinking has also changed on who exactly sets the terms of this narrative. In the past, I strongly believed it was incumbent on the chief executive/director to set this philosophy in mere consultation with club staff. Now, I believe all club actors, from top to bottom of the de facto hierarchy, must come to an initial, collective agreement on that story. Because if you don’t have a sense of collective ownership in the vision upfront, it’s going to set you up for crucial fractures down the line when things become challenging and the vision must change. And if you can’t come to an initial agreement at all, then the club leadership must decide if they need to change personnel.
In any case, once that story is agreed on, the job of the DoF is to apply their office and resources to ensure club staff are properly coordinating and communicating to meet their initially agreed upon objectives, or change them depending on how circumstances have evolved.
Again, nothing particularly revolutionary here, and yes, I do realize this post reeks with the disgusting patina of corporate storytelling and marketing culture. But, as I painfully discovered this month, if you have an organization that either doesn’t know its own story, or doesn’t agree what their story actually is, or defines the story in such broad terms that it becomes effectively meaningless, you are priming yourself for conflict, power politics, and institutional failure.
Worse than all this, however, is that if you leave the story writing to a bunch of suits in a boardroom without consulting the people who actually create the value in your club (the workers, natch), then you are seeding resentment right from the offing.
Anyway, I’ll have more timely, specific analytics-y stuff to say this week. Thanks for reading/subscribing!