To celebrate joining a seemingly “healthier” social media site in Bluesky recently I asked new followers for some questions they wanted answered about working in football. Here goes:
Always wondered how many players a club can spend months identifying/scouting/negotiating with only for it to fall apart at the last minute and they sign elsewhere? (@stanalaysis.bsky.social)
It’s happened to us over the last couple of weeks! It’s a fairly frequent occurrence in football – extremely frustrating but you have to accept it and move on. We’ve been tracking a player since June and felt we were on the verge of a deal and all of a sudden a bigger club has blown us out of the water financially at the last minute. If you are making bids to a club for their player, and they’re up for selling, it’s in their interest to find other parties to up the stakes. In this case they’ve managed to do it, the player has his head turned by a bigger club and bigger wage. There’s not a lot you can do about it if you have a certain budget and some other club’s is just bigger.
This is why clubs tend to have trusted agents they deal with regularly, ones who are less likely to encourage other clubs to get involved. But at the end of the day, an agent’s job is to look after the best interests of their client.
It’s possibly harder for smaller clubs to avoid because with less budget, the pool of players you can realistically pick from is smaller, but I’m sure a top club would say there’s only a small group of players good enough to play at the elite level also.
What I will say is that in Finland, 9 players out of a matchday squad of 18 have to be “home grown”. Rich Dorman, the Technical Director tells me there are less than 25 full time clubs in Finland. If I do a search on Wyscout, say, for players across the whole world with a Finnish passport that have played 1000 mins of senior football in the last 12 months, we are talking about 300 players total. If I then filter out all the players still in contract (it’s not often Finnish teams pay a fee for players) then the “pool” becomes more of a bath…or a kitchen sink, and there’s plenty of clubs fishing. Whenever a good home grown player becomes a free agent, there’s going to be at least half the league interested in signing him. It’s hard!
How much money is set aside for translation services and other integration stuff for foreign players? How much money is there for background staff and how common is unpaid overtime and two roles in the staff? (@reziprokermiles.bsky.social)
Specifically, zero money is set aside for translation or integration. However, at SJK we are more international in our staff than most clubs in Finland and pretty much all the staff pitch in at some point with foreign players – Rich Dorman, Pekka Lehtinen the Team Manager. However, Assistant Technical Director, Adriel Gabilan does the bulk of this as he speaks Portuguese and Spanish and can also understand Finnish to a good enough degree. He helps players with paperwork, setting up bank accounts, and legal stuff. Stevie can speak French so that’s helped with several players too. Working language at the club is mostly English which everyone understands well enough.
Re: overtime? There’s no such thing in football. Most staff in the professional game put in ridiculous hours to make everything work. Almost everyone ends up doing something not in the job description on a weekly basis, it’s not like a “normal” business. If you consider that the players need coaches, physical/medical staff, they need to eat, they need facilities that need maintaining, the club needs administration staff to run on a daily basis. At this level, there’s never enough money for staff. For me, more staff is nearly always more essential than more players.
How much do players cost a club excluding their wages and what costs do we not think about that are the most expensive for clubs? (@temujackblack.bsky.social)
See above!
How do you strike the balance between being ambitious yet realistic? (@talkintactics.bsky.social)
There’s a quote up above that’s a good starting point to answer this: “There’s not a lot you can do about it if you have a certain budget and some other club’s is just bigger.”
Clubs in Finland publish their player budgets each year. It’s not always 100% accurate but it’s probably not too far off. HJK, the “big” team in Finland operate with a budget roughly three times bigger than ours at SJK.
As Billy Beane says in the movie Moneyball to his scouts in the meeting room: “If we try to play like the Yankees in here, we will lose to the Yankees out there.”
It’s part of the reason why the club has changed strategy over the last few years – creating a better player pathway for youth – having two academy teams in men’s football, bringing a more attacking style to Finnish football etc. We need to be different, we need to be more sustainable, taking away as much of the usual chaos of football from the organisational/business side while creating a bit more chaos in a positive way on the pitch/playing side. All aspects of the club will be a canvass for young people to showcase their talent.
“Ambitious” is an interesting word. For me it’s about everybody doing the right things for the right reasons. It’s not saying “that will do”, its about striving to get incrementally better on a constant basis. You can make mistakes but you learn from them – that’s both on and off the pitch. In the last 15 years, HJK have won the league 11 times. The gap between their budget and the rest gets bigger every year, but KuPs winning the league this season proves it’s not unrealistic to think you can win it. At SJK over the last two years, we’ve used less money for the first team, cut the average age of the squad from around 30 years old to about 23 years old, but been in the title race until late in the season. Before that we hadn’t been in the title race since 2016. If you don’t think you can win, or strive to win, what’s the point? Dreams are for chasing!
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