Premier League Talent Viewpoint careers advice blog

Premier League Talent The right people in the right positions. It’s the mantra for every recruiter and manager. It’s also a mantra for every sports team. In the often grey world of business, it’s easy to make the casual analogy between an ambitious business unit and a squad of athletes â€" the need for leaders, for a game plan and for a winning mentality. But in professional sport, the principles of great HR are more deeply embedded than you may expect. As football clubs have continued their steady move from relatively small local businesses to large, professional organisations with a global reach, they have pioneered modern strategies and structures. At Manchester City Football Club, two of the people responsible for the organisation’s success in the short, long and very long term are Director of Football Txiki Begiristain, and Managing Director of City Football Services Brian Marwood. They work together to ensure that the club has a well-stocked talent pipeline and a consistent culture across the generations of current and future playing stars. It is a classic example of succession planning that will be familiar to any HR director. While Begiristain has the primary responsibility of supporting the manager, Manuel Pellegrini, in first-team recruitment and operations, Marwood oversees the recruitment, development, training and management of up to 400 players in Manchester and at other global training centres, in addition to overseeing the football support services across the organisation. City’s CEO Ferran Soriano says: “City’s long-term future is dependent upon our ability to recruit and develop young players all the way through to the first-team squad. Given the scale and importance of this challenge, we want to commit our very best people to it.” Some players join academies before they have entered their teens. It’s the task of heads of such academies to ensure the maximum amount of the skills from the first team and its coaching staff filter down to educate junior members of the Club’s community. “The philosophy and strategy of the Club is to be sustainable, and the only way to do it is to bring our own players through,” says Mark Allen, Manager of the City Academy. Anyone good enough to be selected to join the City Academy is guaranteed private academic education up to the end of their GCSE year (usually 16 years of age), regardless of whether they make it into the professional ranks. Marwood says: “We’re here to develop football players but, if we develop the right sort of people, there’s no reason why we can’t be developing the next groundsman, or commercial director, or marketing director, or chief football operations officer. What we’re trying to do here is create a better footballer, but also a better person.” Building and retaining a pipeline of youth players in the footballing ranks or behind the scenes at the club is key when young players know that the odds of breaking into the first team are stacked against them. It helps perpetuate a culture of continuity that is so important at a football club, with its powerful emotional resonance for fans, staff and community alike. View the full article from issue 7 of our bi-annual publication the Hays Journal, providing global insights into the world of work. You can view the article in the Hays Journal online, via the Hays Journal iPad app or request a printed copy from haysjournal@hays.com