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 under-23s coach, reaching out and asking me to do work on their loan players. Brennan Johnson was one of them.
From the outside, that looks like luck. A top coach lands in your DMs.
But it wasn’t random. Andy had been following my work on Twitter for months. The recruitment plans, the loan analysis, the commentary. He’d been quietly watching.
The message came out of nowhere. But the conditions for it had been built in public, one post at a time.
The four types of luck
Chris Gill walked through this at our recent Recruitment Room event in Chesterfield and it’s stuck with me since. The framework originally comes from Marc Andreessen, based on work by the neurologist James Austin. Four types of luck:
- Blind luck. Pure chance. Outside your control.
- Luck from motion. You’re creating things, showing up, putting work out. You bump into opportunities other people miss because they’re standing still.
- Luck from preparation. You notice opportunities others walk past, because you’ve done the work to recognise what’s valuable.
- Luck from your uniqueness. Opportunities come to you because of something specific about how you operate, what you stand for, what you make. You’ve become recognisable for a particular thing, and that thing pulls opportunities towards you.
Only the first is outside your control.
Three of the four are fully down to you.
Josh’s meeting
One of our Recruitment Room members, Josh, recently had a meeting with the director of football and head of recruitment at a club.
No mutual contact. No introduction. They reached out to him after seeing his work online.
That’s lucky some might say.
But Josh had been consistent. Posting analysis, building a clear niche in Georgia and Armenia scouting, making himself findable. What he stood for was specific enough to be memorable.
The meeting was the payoff. The work was the setup.
Take more shots
Austin Kleon makes the point in “Show Your Work!” - you can't make specific moments of luck, but you can increase the surface area for it to find you.
Take more shots. Put more work out. Be specific about what you do. Let people discover you quietly over time.
That’s all Andy Reid saw before he messaged me. Months of work he didn’t comment on, didn’t like, didn’t signal he was watching at all.
That’s all the director of football saw of Josh.
The people on the receiving end of “lucky” messages are rarely lucky. They’ve just been taking shots for long enough that the odds caught up with them.
The reframe
So when you catch yourself thinking someone else got lucky, flip it.
What were they doing before the luck happened? How long had they been doing it? What made their work memorable enough to be noticed?
That’s the blueprint. That’s the real story.
Luck in football isn’t about being in the right place at the right time.
It’s about being in enough places, for long enough, with work specific enough, that the right place eventually finds you.
Liam
The Recruitment Room is built on this exact idea.
Taking more shots, building a specific angle, and putting work out consistently until opportunities come looking for you.
Portfolio development, mentorship from people working inside clubs, and a community of people doing the same work alongside you.
→ Join The Recruitment Room
Any questions, just reply. I read everything.