I came up with the title of this article on kind of a whim, but I will explain my reasoning behind why I wanted to call this piece “Unicorn Football” down the road.
The majority of my readership has some connection to the game of Football, ranging from casual fans to people working full time for professional clubs. In sporting organizations across all sports and leagues, how teams choose to recruit who plays for them matters. A LOT.
Let’s face it. When a club chooses to sign a new player, it is a business decision just as much as a sporting decision. (Case in point, Inter Miami.) When these clubs are looking for new players (employees), they must do their due diligence in the recruitment (hiring) process, to make sure that the player (employee) produces the highest output for the club (company).
Let’s all imagine for just a second that you are running a well known, respected company, and you post a job for a senior management level position. Now, let’s say that you have 50 people who have applied for the role. You, as the hiring manager need to make sure that the role goes to the candidate who sets themself above everybody else, and who will align with the values of your business the best. With so many candidates who have applied for the position, how might you offer the job to the best person? You could go through the search process yourself, contract with a recruiting agency, or you could pursue other options. How might you find the best possible candidate, in the soonest amount of time, and cost the company the least possible amount of money? You may say you need to hire a unicorn.
This previous question is something that is considered by those who work in recruitment on a daily basis. According to a quick Google search, there are an estimated 4,400 professional Football clubs across the world, and approximately 130,000 professional footballers. Each of these 4,400 or so clubs have substantially different needs from the other 4,399 professional clubs around the world, and they have approximately 130,000 players to help meet their needs.
I want you to go back now to the hiring manager metaphor that I posed above. You end up interviewing a candidate, but you realize that his skills and talents would do better in other places. You wouldn’t offer him the job! You go through the rest of the interview process until you find a candidate who matches the mission of your company, has skills to push overall success forward, and meets the needs of the team, or are forced to seek alternative ways of finding your unicorn candidate.
With there being approximately 4,400 professional football clubs across the world, and each of these clubs in search of their own figurative unicorns, it is important that clubs cast a wide enough net to find the unicorn meant for them. The unicorn that Yokohama F. Marinos are in search for is vastly different then the unicorn of Hammarby IF, which is even more different than the unicorn of Bohemian FC. So how do we make sure that Yokohama’s unicorn doesn’t end up at Bohemian, while Hammarby’s unicorn doesn’t end up in Japan? You need to hunt properly. There’s more than 1 way to hunt a unicorn after all.
As clubs are in pursuit of their own unicorns, they need to make sure that they are choosing the unicorn right for them. This is done by creating an individualized recruitment strategy that will meet the needs unique to them as a club. These needs vary from club to club. Some of these needs are forced upon these clubs by the region of the world in which they are located, league in which said club participates in, or the constant revolving door of needs dictated by finding players that fit any given clubs game model.
How each individual club might find the player that meets their needs is up to them. In the world of recruitment, the way that clubs search for players varies from clubs that might have 1-2 scouts, all the way up to the largest clubs who have scouts across the world, who scout a wide range of positions, players, and leagues. There once was a time where all player recruitment was done purely through live scouting and occasionally over video. The usage of data involved in scouting did not come around until substantially more recently.
The usage of data in scouting and recruitment was thrust into the limelight when Tony Bloom and Matthew Benham and Brighton and Brentford came along. All of a sudden these clubs were signing the likes of Kaoru Mitoma from Kawasaki Frontale, who has now made almost 100 appearances for the club and has scored 21 times. There is also something to say about making an emphasis on player development, for long term investment purposes. Brighton as a club are more likely to purchase players between the ages of 18 and 21, but utilize sending players on loan to develop until they are at a stage in their career where they can play for the club. Brentford used to be unconventional in their recruitment, but have lost their proverbial edge, now purely signing players from other Premier League sides for a hefty fee. There have been other examples of players from these unconditional markets going to developmental superpower teams like Brentford and Brighton and leaving to super clubs for fees far far greater than they were paid for.
Another case can be made for recruitment based on club culture. Premier League side Nottingham Forest are managed by Nuno Espírito Santo, who is Portuguese. During his time in charge, the club has seen the likes of Danilo, who signed from Brazilian giants Palmeiras, Murillo, Igor Jesus and Jair Cunha sign for the club and experience immense amounts of success, as seen in the club’s most recent campaign. It is clear that with a Portuguese speaking manager and continuously recruiting Portuguese speaking players, Nottingham Forest have been able to attract top level talent who have subsequently performed well for the club. Culture plays a massive part in helping bring top level talent to a football club.
Once other clubs saw that Brentford and Brighton were able to find success from recruiting in these off the beaten path markets, they decided that they would subsequently follow suit. More and more we saw clubs pursue recruitment in places like Asia, Scandinavia and North Africa.
Although there are positives to recruitment in these “off the beaten path” areas, there comes a time when these markets start to become oversaturated and lose their appeal with the clubs that have made this their dedicated niche of recruitment.
What is the solution to this problem of copying the recruitment trends of others?
Identify your own needs as a club, and identify your own methods to meet those needs. The solution isn’t always going to be a player in the Japanese 2nd tier, or Scandinavia or Africa. There are thousands of players out there in search of time and opportunity and a chance to show people that they are unicorns in someone’s eyes. There are clubs out there who are searching for their own unique unicorn player, which is why they must seek unconventional ways of finding them. After all, the best way to be trendy is to start a trend yourself. Club A might find their unicorn by scouting Scandinavia, Asia and North Africa, meanwhile club B could scout North America, Central America, or Oceania, and find their own Unicorn. What’s important is that club A’s unicorn is their own, and that club B’s unicorn is their own as well. Club B shouldn’t necessarily go looking for unicorns in club A’s territory just because club A had success there Club B needs to go find their own unique unicorn in areas of the world that might not necessarily be on club A’s radar. Think outside the box, it could make all the difference.
Additionally, invest in the tools at your disposal. In the year 2025 we have more tools to aid in the recruitment process than ever before. Long gone are the days of recruiting based off of the eye test and gut instinct alone. We now have a myriad of knowledge and information at our disposal. Every stat ever recorded in a player’s career is accessible at our fingertips, and some clubs are choosing to embrace tools like artificial intelligence to sift through mounds and mounds of data. Using a combination of video, data, live scouting, report making, computer science, artificial intelligence will greatly aid in the recruitment process. As a club though, it is extremely important to utilize the resources that work for you, or that help push the boundaries of what your recruitment strategy might define as possible. Again, be individual. Not everyone is going to be Matthew Benham and Tony Bloom, and that’s ok. If I were in the situation of a head of recruitment, I would want to recruit players in the way I know works for me and my club, not necessarily do what another club is doing just because it might be trendy.
If I had to sum up everything I wrote in this article in two words, it would be to be original. Hunting for a unicorn isn’t meant to be an easy task, and there is going to be more than one way to find the proverbial unicorn player that a club might be seeking. What brought Benham and Bloom and their respective clubs success in the recruitment market is that they were constantly working outside the box. My admonition to clubs today is that they do the same, but also recognize that the box they are trying to break out of is different then the box every other club in the world is also trying to break out of. Identify the needs, consider all solutions, use the tools at their disposal to narrow down their possible solutions, then go after the solution they seek. Don’t copy others, find what works for you, stick to it, and do it really well.