For three years, I worked in a strange corner of football.
I was an FA-registered intermediary.
Most days were less glamorous than people imagine.
Motorways. Training grounds. Service-station coffee. Calls from the car. Meetings that went somewhere and meetings that went nowhere.
I spoke to players, agents, managers, coaches, owners, recruitment teams and sporting directors.
The network became international.
I held mandates connected to players across different countries and markets. At one point, based on the valuations I was working from at the time, those players carried more than $100 million in combined estimated value.
I will not name most of the players, clubs or people behind these stories.
That is deliberate.
Football runs on trust. Much of the work was confidential and some was covered by non-disclosure agreements.
Private conversations stay private.
The names are not the point.
The pattern is.
I thought I was learning how to move footballers.
I was actually learning how football misprices people.
The Player Was Only Half the Question
Everyone wanted to know whether a player was good enough.
I wanted to know something else.
Why was he available at that price?
Stats mattered.
Video mattered.
Performance mattered.
But I kept looking behind them.
Academy education.
International recognition.
Who had coached him.
Who had trusted him.
What had happened to his career.
Whether injury, rejection or a bad move had changed how the market saw him.
What pressure did to him.
Whether he still had something to prove.
Personality mattered too.
Some players needed structure.
Others needed freedom.
Some responded to confrontation.
Others retreated from it.
These were not rules.
They were clues.
Then came weakness.
Too slow.
Not physical enough.
Does not attack the ball.
Not enough end product.
Sometimes those judgements were correct.
But I became interested in a different calculation.
Is the weakness harder to fix than the talent is to replace?
If a player possessed three difficult-to-find qualities and one coachable weakness, I did not automatically see a bad player.
Could the weakness be improved?
Could a different role reduce it?
Could the right system expose the strengths instead?
That changed the question.
Not:
Is this player good?
But:
Where could this player become valuable?
I saw that tension with one Championship defender I held a mandate for.
A major British club became seriously interested. Conversations progressed far enough to reach the player’s family.
Then the football objection arrived.
They did not believe he attacked the ball aggressively enough for the type of defender they wanted.
Fair enough.
What bothered me was what happened around it.
The possibility had become real to the player.
His family knew.
Expectations moved.
Then the opportunity disappeared.
That was football in one episode.
The technical judgement might have been legitimate.
The human consequence was still real.
A player can appear as an asset on a recruitment screen.
He remains a person when the screen closes.
What Had the Market Forgotten?
Football has a short memory.
A player can spend years being selected for elite environments, have one difficult period and become yesterday’s news.
That interested me.
Youth international.
Senior international.
Top academy.
Trusted by respected coaches.
Playing above his age.
Early first-team football.
None of it guaranteed future success.
But neither did it disappear because the market had lost interest.
I wanted to know why the value had fallen.
Sometimes the market was right.
Sometimes it had simply stopped looking.
And I was not always right.
There were players I rated who never became what I thought they could become.
There were opportunities I believed contained value that went nowhere.
Human beings are not spreadsheets with a hidden cell marked future value.
The job was not predicting the future.
It was asking better questions about uncertainty.
The Price of Certainty
Timing became almost as important as talent.
I put players in front of clubs who were passed over and later became considerably more valuable.
One centre-half I worked around rose roughly tenfold in market value over a relatively short period.
That did not make every club that declined him stupid.
They had different needs, budgets and risk tolerances.
The interesting part was the moment before everybody agreed.
That was where the discount lived.
Another opportunity involved a teenage South American striker.
Senior football.
Elite youth pedigree.
International recognition.
Major tournament success.
His contract situation meant he could be acquired for roughly €2 million.
I took the opportunity into England.
Major clubs looked.
Nobody moved.
A leading European club eventually did.
The player had not suddenly become more talented when that club acted.
What changed was certainty.
Someone credible had gone first.
That changes a market.
The opportunity was never that success was guaranteed.
It was that the balance between potential upside and price looked unusual.
Wait until everybody agrees and you remove uncertainty.
You also remove much of the value.
Follow the Money
Another deal changed how I looked at football clubs themselves.
I held a mandate involving an established Championship player when interest came from a major American club.
Wealthy ownership.
A valuable franchise.
An ambitious market.
Yet when the deal reached the transfer fee, the football operation could not deploy the money required.
That separated three things in my head.
Wealth. Valuation. Deployable capital.
They are not the same.
A club can be worth hundreds of millions and still be unable or unwilling to spend a relatively modest amount on a particular player.
At the same time, large sums can be committed elsewhere to established names with little resale value.
My instinct was not to complain about it.
It was to ask:
Why is the capital going there rather than here?
Recruitment was starting to look less like scouting and more like capital allocation.
Then I Looked at the Supply Chain
My connections into South American football became strong.
That led me to approach a major Premier League club with another question.
Why wait for South American talent to move through Portugal, establish itself in Europe and become more expensive?
Why not go direct?
I offered to help create that route.
The club’s concern was sensible.
Talent was not the only risk.
Settling was.
Language.
Culture.
Family.
Homesickness.
Life in England.
Portuguese clubs absorbed some of that uncertainty.
They helped players adapt to Europe, then English clubs bought later with more information.
I could see the logic.
But my entrepreneurial brain went somewhere else.
If settling was the risk, could you invest in solving the settling?
Language support.
Family support.
Cultural integration.
People around the player who understood where he had come from.
Build the bridge yourself and you might buy closer to the source.
Portugal was not simply marking up footballers.
Its clubs were being paid for something valuable.
Risk removal.
That was the real premium.
The question became simple.
Can we solve the problem ourselves for less than we keep paying somebody else to solve it?
Now I was no longer looking at a player.
I was looking at a supply chain.
Football Likes Rules. Entrepreneurs Look for Gaps.
This probably explains why some people inside football did not know what to make of me.
I came from business.
Football clubs need systems.
Recruitment departments need processes.
Managers need clear lines of responsibility.
Sporting directors need control.
Those things exist for good reasons.
But entrepreneurs develop another reflex.
Why this route?
Why this price?
Why this rule?
What assumption is everybody making?
Where does the process leak value?
I did not look for holes in rules so I could break them.
I wanted to understand why they existed.
Sometimes an opportunity sat beside them.
That created friction.
At one Championship club, I had been given a mandate, but the manager and his assistant questioned why I was there and whether I was qualified to hold it.
To them, my involvement appeared to be about selling players.
I saw something broader.
Where was the value in the squad?
Which assets were appreciating?
Which were not?
Where did timing matter?
Could player trading improve both the team and the balance sheet?
We were discussing the same football club but speaking different languages.
Owners often understood me faster.
Many had built businesses themselves.
They recognised the questions.
What is undervalued?
What can be improved?
Where is the inefficiency?
What does the market believe?
What happens if the market is wrong?
That was familiar territory.
“He’s the Guy Who Sells Hair Wax”
There was another problem.
I was an outsider.
Someone once reduced me to a line.
He’s the guy who sells hair wax.
They meant Hairbond.
They were right.
I was the guy who sold hair wax.
I had not spent twenty years climbing through recruitment departments.
I had built things outside football.
At first, I saw that as a weakness.
Later, I realised it was part of the advantage.
I had no football process to defend.
I could ask questions that sounded stupid.
Why is he cheap?
Why does that weakness matter here?
Why are we buying through that market?
Why can’t we go direct?
Why did the market stop believing in him?
Why are we waiting for somebody else to move first?
Why are we spending the money there?
An outsider can misunderstand a system.
But an outsider can also notice the assumptions everyone inside it stopped questioning years ago.
Then It Stopped
Brexit changed the practicality of some international moves into Britain.
Work-permit rules changed.
Deals that had taken months to develop became harder or impossible.
Then Covid arrived.
Travel stopped.
Meetings disappeared.
Clubs became cautious.
A business built around movement, relationships and face-to-face intelligence suddenly lost all three.
I stepped away.
I have since had opportunities to return to agency work.
I haven’t.
At 34, I could spend my life driving between football clubs.
At 44, I don’t want to.
Time changed the man.
But the thinking stayed.
For years, I thought the valuable thing I had built was the network.
It wasn’t.
Networks change.
People move.
Mandates expire.
Players retire.
The valuable part was the lens.
The Matchmaker
At 34, I thought I was finding players for clubs.
Looking back, that was only part of it.
The player needed the right coach.
The weakness needed the right system.
The personality needed the right environment.
The price needed the right moment.
The asset needed the right buyer.
And sometimes the problem itself had to be solved before the value could be reached.
Football has more information than it has ever had.
That is a good thing.
But information and value are not the same.
Value still hides in people.
In timing.
In context.
In the problem everyone else has decided is too difficult to solve.
I spent three years looking for it before I understood what I was really doing.
Now I do.
The Matchmaker.
Because value depends on what you match it with.