“Everyone made me believe I was going to be a footballer.”
That’s what someone who spent his childhood inside elite football told me recently. By 14 he was training several times a week, playing matches, missing things with his friends, and had been scouted by professional clubs. Football wasn’t simply something he loved doing. It was what he believed he was going to be.
Then he was released. The training stopped, the matches stopped, and so did the routine that had shaped his life. He told me his love for football simply died.
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the question his story raises. When somebody is surrounded by coaches, staff and support, and still falls through the gaps, whose job is it to notice?
I don’t think the answer is more support. Elite sport already has a lot of it. What I keep coming back to is whether that support is connected.
We organise performance around functions
Think about an elite athlete. Depending on the sport and the level, they might have coaches, analysts, doctors, physios, psychologists, nutritionists, strength and conditioning staff, agents, player care, governing bodies, unions and commercial partners around them. Each of them brings expertise, and many of them are exceptionally good at what they do. Organisationally, that makes complete sense.
The athlete in the middle of it doesn’t experience their life in departments, though. Their injury affects their confidence. Their contract affects how secure they feel. Their relationship with their coach affects their performance, their performance affects their identity, and their home life comes to training with them every day.
We separate those things because organisations need structure. The person experiences all of them at once.
Stephen Erikson, who has spent years around the NBA, describes that network as the Athlete Matrix. We’ve become very good at building expertise around people. I’m not sure we’re as good at building the connections between it.
Adding expertise also adds gaps
As high-performance environments get more sophisticated, we add expertise. We spot a need and bring in someone who understands it better, whether that’s psychology, nutrition, data, welfare or player care. That’s genuine progress, and I’d never argue against it.
Every new specialism also creates a new boundary. Another handover, another place information has to travel, and another chance for everyone to be doing exactly what they’re supposed to be doing while something important happens in the space between them.
A network of brilliant people is not necessarily a brilliant system.
So I’ve been trying to work out where you would actually start, and I’ve come up with four places.
1. Design around the person, not the organisational chart
Organisations naturally ask who owns performance, wellbeing, development, medical and people. Those are necessary questions, and somebody has to answer them.
The more revealing exercise is to start from the other end. Take one person and walk through what this environment feels like from where they stand.
Where are the handovers, and where does information stop? Who picks up the thing that doesn’t fit into anybody’s remit, or never shows up on a dashboard?
You learn far more about a system from what happens between its parts than from what each part says it’s responsible for.
Try this: Pick one person in your team and trace an ordinary week from where they stand. Count the handovers, and mark every point where information about them could stop.
2. Someone needs to see the whole
This doesn’t have to mean creating another job. It means being able to answer “whose job is it to notice?” with a name.
Who is close enough to recognise that somebody whose numbers still look good is behaving differently? Who sees that the athlete coming back from injury has been physically cleared but no longer trusts their body, or that the player approaching the end of a contract is dealing with far more than their next employment decision?
Having support available matters. But availability relies on the person knowing what they need, knowing where to go and being willing to ask.
Good systems need to be capable of noticing first.
Try this: Think of someone whose results look fine at the moment. Ask yourself who, by name, would notice if something changed for them, and whether that person knows it’s their job.
3. Design for the moments when performance changes
High-performance systems are very good at progression. Identify talent, develop it, improve it, move it forward.
Some of the most important moments, though, come when that trajectory breaks: injury, deselection, loss of form, release, retirement, a contract that isn’t renewed.
That’s where the footballer’s story sits. Releasing players is part of academy football. Selection is necessary, deselection is necessary, and high performance can’t exist without judgement.
What that conversation made me see is that performance systems make the decisions, and people live with the consequences.
Making the right performance decision and handling what it does to the person on the receiving end are two different responsibilities, and a good system needs to be capable of both.
So I’d like to see development systems judged not only on how well they identify people and move the best ones upwards, but on what happens to the people the pathway moves on without.
How do they leave, and do they understand why? Who stays in contact, and what have we helped them build beyond their ability to perform?
Those moments are part of the performance system, and they deserve to be designed as carefully as the rest of it.
Try this: Look at the last time someone left, was moved on or missed out. Ask what they were told, who stayed in contact afterwards, and what they took with them.
4. Measure the experience, not just the provision
This is the part I find most interesting.
Organisations can quite reasonably point to what they provide: player care, psychological support, development programmes, wellbeing provision, transition support, an open door policy.
All of that can be true, and the person at the centre can still feel completely unsupported.
The more useful question is whether they experienced it as support.
Did they know where to go, and did the different parts of the system connect? Did somebody notice before they had to ask, and did they understand the decision made about them?
And when they left, did they believe their performance had been rejected at a particular moment, or that they had?
Those are very different experiences. Particularly when the person is 14.
Try this: Ask a few people what support they think is available to them, and compare their answers with what you believe you provide. The difference between the two lists is where to start.
Perhaps I’ve been niching down in the wrong direction
There’s a slightly personal reason all of this has been on my mind.
I’ve spent months trying to become more precise about what I do. High performance, leadership, self belief, sport, business, Lessons from the Touchline. Find the niche, define the offer, make it easy for people to put you in the right box.
It’s sensible advice.
The trouble is that the conversations I’ve found most interesting recently refuse to stay in one box. I’ve found myself talking about athlete welfare, sports technology, women’s sport, talent development, transition, identity, leadership and performance, and for a while I worried that meant I was going in too many directions.
I’m beginning to think I had it backwards.
The subject isn’t my niche. The lens is.
Twenty years inside professional sport has given me a particular way of looking at performance.
I’m interested in where performance, people and systems meet, and increasingly in what happens when they don’t meet quite as neatly as somebody intended: the handovers, the assumptions, the good idea that doesn’t work in the environment it was designed for, the person everyone is supporting but nobody can see in full.
Experience doesn’t only make you an expert in what you’ve already done. Eventually it gives you enough data to recognise patterns in things you haven’t done yet.
So, what does better look like?
I don’t think there’s a neat answer, and I’m wary of anyone who claims there is.
The principle I keep coming back to is simple: don’t just add more support, connect what already exists.
In practice, that means the four things above.
Design from the person outwards, rather than the organisational chart inwards.
Make sure somebody can see the whole, not just their part.
Design for the moments when performance goes off track, not only the ones when it goes to plan.
Judge support by what the person in the middle experiences, not by what the organisation provides.
None of this is unique to sport. Swap the athlete for someone who has just missed out on the promotion they spent ten years working towards, and almost all of it still applies.
We’ve spent years learning how to build environments that produce exceptional performance. The more interesting question now is whether we can make them just as good at seeing the people producing it.
High performance shouldn’t force a choice between the performance and the person.
The best systems should be capable of seeing both.
Which of the four would make the biggest difference where you work? Leave a comment, I’d love to hear.