Hey Reader, The best piece of work you produce this year is worthless if it sits in your drafts. I say that because I watched it almost happen to one of our members. A month of polishing Early on in the Recruitment Room, Freddie built a recruitment project - a task on right-backs at Dundee United. He shared it inside the community and the feedback was good. People told him, plainly, that it was strong. So what did he do next? He sat on it for a month. Tweaking the weightings. Adjusting,...
14 days ago • 2 min read
Hey Reader, You open LinkedIn and someone’s posted a clean player rating model. Someone else has just landed a role at a club. A third person is at the StatsBomb conference, lanyard round their neck, looking like they belong. And quietly, you think: everyone’s miles ahead of me. I get messages like this most weeks. People who feel like the game started without them. The comparison nobody notices they’re making Here is what’s actually going on. You’re comparing your day one to their year one,...
21 days ago • 2 min read
FOOTBALL PROGRESSION PATH Helping you create opportunities in football Hey Reader, I've been helping people with their CVs and cover letters for years. It's something I've been doing even more since starting the Recruitment Room. So I wanted to test something. How far can AI actually take an application? Not lazy, copy-paste AI. I’m talking about a properly built version of my own voice. I’ve fed it hours of my call transcripts, so it genuinely writes the way I talk. Same phrases, same...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
FOOTBALL PROGRESSION PATH Helping you create opportunities in football Hey Reader, Last week I hosted Lee Mooney inside the Recruitment Room. Lee went from a data job in banking and consulting at Deloitte to leading analytics at Manchester City, and now runs his own football consultancy. It’s one of the best transitions into football you’ll come across. Near the end of the session, he told a story I haven’t stopped thinking about. "The escalator and the stairs" For years, Lee got the train...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
FOOTBALL PROGRESSION PATH Helping you create opportunities in football Hey Reader, Most aspiring scouts write four pages of description and two lines of verdict. It’s the wrong way round. Ross Ireland (Recruitment Analyst at Rangers FC) was strong about this in our Recruitment Room mentor session last week. The verdict is the most important part of the report. Not the four-corner breakdown. Not the data visuals. The verdict. Everything else exists to justify it. What a verdict actually says...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
FOOTBALL PROGRESSION PATH Helping you create opportunities in football Hey Reader, I had a call over the weekend with someone trying to break into recruitment analysis. Three rejections in a week. None of them told him why. He thought he was doing something wrong. He wasn’t. Not really. The Easy No Here’s something I said to him on the call that I think every aspiring recruitment analyst or scout needs to hear. If you walked into my football club and applied for a role today, it would be an...
2 months ago • 2 min read
FOOTBALL PROGRESSION PATH Helping you create opportunities in football Hey Reader, Putting your work online is just the starting point. Not the finish line. A lot of people now understand the value of sharing publicly. Feedback, network, visibility, evidence that you have the skills for the roles you want. All of that is real. But it’s just the beginning. The Post Is the Prompt A post isn’t a result. It’s a conversation starter. After you publish, the next step is to follow up with the people...
3 months ago • 2 min read
FOOTBALL PROGRESSION PATH Helping you create opportunities in football Sponsored This email is kindly sponsored by In-Play Online. As a scout or recruitment analyst, you will need to show video evidence of any potential target. So, if you are looking for an affordable video analysis tool that allows for match tagging, drawing tools and video playlists then In-Play Online is definitely worth a look. Use code HENSHAW20 for 20% discount. → Check out In-Play Online Hey Reader, I'm writing this on...
3 months ago • 3 min read
FOOTBALL PROGRESSION PATH Helping you create opportunities in football Hey Reader, When someone lands a role in football, the word that tends to come up is “lucky.” “He was lucky to get that opportunity.” “She was lucky that she already had a connection” “Lucky timing.” It’s always meant kindly. But it misses what actually happened. Because in almost every case I’ve seen, the luck wasn’t random. It was built. The Andy Reid moment My own break came from Andy Reid, then the Nottingham Forest...
3 months ago • 2 min read