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.

For years, Lee got the train into Canary Wharf for work. If you’ve been, you’ll know the station has these huge escalators.

Every Monday morning the escalator was rammed. People crammed on, bags everywhere, shuffling slowly to the top.

Right next to it, the stairs were empty.

Lee always took the stairs. He got to the top faster, every time, while everyone else queued.

That, he said, is how you break into football. Don’t pile onto the escalator with everyone else, doing the same things everyone else is doing. You’ll move at the speed of the crowd, which usually means barely moving at all.

Take the stairs. Do something different enough that you actually stand out.

Why this matters more now

When Lee got in, barely anyone was sharing analysis online. Posting your work was enough to be different.

That’s not true anymore.

The space is crowded. AI has made it easy for anyone to churn out a report, a graphic or a post that looks the part. Scroll for two minutes and a lot of it blurs into the same thing. Same templates, same tools, same takes.

If your plan is to do what everyone else is doing, just a bit more of it, you’re on the escalator. You’ll get carried along at the same pace as a thousand other people, and the sporting director or head of recruitment will never pick you out.

What taking the stairs looks like

Being different doesn’t mean being louder or chasing attention. It means doing the things most people won’t.

A few examples of what that can look like:

• Own a niche nobody else is covering. Most people analyse the same Premier League names. Pick a league, a market or a position that gets overlooked - a lower division, a region like Scandinavia or South America, set-piece specialists - and become the person who knows it best. Joshua Young is a great example of his and his focus on Georgian football.
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• Solve a real club’s actual problem. Instead of a generic “best XI”, take a specific club, look at who they’re linked with or where they’re weak, and produce the work as if you were already on their recruitment team.
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• Bring something only you can. Combine the skills from your current job with football, or get a real voice from inside the game into your work - a coach’s view, an angle that data alone can’t show.
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• Show your thinking, not just a finished graphic. Build in public. Share the reasoning, what you’d recommend and why. The opinion behind the work is the part nobody can copy.

Lee’s own version is a good example. While the whole industry shouts about everything being AI-powered, he goes the other way. He talks about people and decisions, the unglamorous reality of how clubs actually choose. That’s his stairs.

Mine was similar. I had no obvious route in, so I built a niche around recruitment analysis on Nottingham Forest and put my work out in a way that didn’t look like everyone else’s. Being different is what got me noticed, far more than any application ever did.

The question to sit with

Here’s the shift I’d offer you this week.

Stop asking, “how do I do what the successful people are doing?”

Start asking, “what can I do that the thousand people next to me aren’t?”

It’s a harder question. The escalator is comfortable. The stairs take more effort, and at first it feels like nobody’s watching.

But the stairs are empty for a reason. Most people won’t take them.

That’s exactly why they work.

Liam