What does scale actually mean for a football club?

The moment that looks like success

There is a moment that repeats itself in every growing club, and it is easy to miss because it looks like success.

The organisation has expanded. There are more departments than three years ago. More analysts, more coaches, more data, more meetings to coordinate the data and the coaches. The academy has more teams. The commercial side has more markets. On paper, capability has increased everywhere.

And yet the people who matter most are not less busy. They are more busy. The sporting director still has the same number of hours in a week. The Head of Coaching can still sit down with a limited number of coaches. The number of people able to answer a genuinely difficult question is not growing at the rate the questions are. The club got bigger. The organisation's ability to act did not increase at the same rate, and in places it decreased, because more people means more coordination, and coordination is paid for in exactly the resource that was already scarce.

This is not a failure of management. It is a structural property of how football clubs are built. But it points to a distinction the industry rarely makes explicitly, and which is becoming the most important strategic question a club can ask.

Growth and scale are not the same thing.

The most expensive test of that difference is already running

Multi-club ownership is the clearest example football has produced of the assumption that bigger and better are the same move. The idea itself does not come from football. Companies have long built structures that let them share resources across units and do in-house what previously had to be bought outside. In football that can mean shared scouting and analytics, player development across several clubs, and in some networks the internal movement of talent rather than acquiring it from the external market every time. Then there is portfolio logic: being present in several markets rather than one spreads part of the risk.

Such a structure creates the possibility of synergy, but ownership alone does not guarantee it. Acquiring another club does not in itself make the method and knowledge of one place available in the others. The number of clubs affiliated with MCO groups rose from around ten in the early 2000s to more than seventy by 2022, so a great deal of capital has been placed on the assumption that a network yields more than the sum of its individual clubs.

The promise is attractive. The evidence does not show that MCO affiliation on its own is enough. Quansah, Lang and Frick compared 116 MCO-affiliated clubs with 232 matched independent clubs, 2,060 club-season observations across 46 leagues. In the three seasons following acquisition, MCO affiliation was not associated with systematic improvement in league performance, regardless of how the network was structured or governed.

The question worth asking is what actually travels inside such structures. Red Bull built its network around a single model of play, centralised data-driven recruitment and coordinated youth development pathways. The clubs in the group maintain a high degree of consistency in playing philosophy and tactical principles. That is something other than simply owning more clubs. Another club in the portfolio is growth. A shared method is the element of the structure that can multiply capability rather than only enlarge the balance sheet.

And that is exactly the question worth asking one level down, inside a single club.

Three words the industry uses interchangeably

A club can grow and scale at the same time; these are not sequential stages. But the distinction matters because not every improvement is scaling, and each of the three requires a completely different investment. Confusing them is how an organisation ends up larger with the same effective throughput.

Why football's core has a ceiling

The commercial side of a club can expand almost without limit. The sporting side cannot, and this is where the distinction stops being academic.

The first team remains one team. The number of players, matches and training hours is bounded by the calendar and by physiology. The time of the sporting director, the Head of Coaching, the lead analyst or the most experienced scout is bounded by the same twenty-four hours everyone else has. You can add people around these roles, but you cannot add hours to them, and the judgement that makes them valuable does not transfer by itself simply because someone is hired alongside.

At a certain point the interesting question stops being:

How can the club get bigger?

and becomes:

How can the club multiply its capabilities?

A club does not have to scale in size, it can scale its capabilities

That reframing produces a working definition:

Can a football club increase the reach of its knowledge, expertise and decision-making capacity without proportionally increasing the people required to deliver it?

Four examples of where this question becomes real:

• KnowledgeCan the knowledge of the best people be available and usable across the organisation, instead of remaining in their heads and in the relationships they personally maintain?
• Expertise and people developmentCan an expert's influence extend beyond the number of hours they can personally give? Can one excellent coach developer affect the development of a hundred coaches without ten times the hours?
• ProcessesCan the club absorb more complexity without proportionally adding administration, meetings, reporting layers and headcount?
• Decision-makingCan the organisation process more information and make more good decisions without proportionally increasing the number of analysts and management layers?

Knowledge is the area where football has the best-documented gap, so it is worth staying with it.

The knowledge that stays in people's heads

Knowledge moves through an organisation along two routes, and the distinction between them maps almost perfectly onto the concept of scale.

Personalisation treats knowledge as embedded in people and flowing through relationships: conversations, mentoring, collaboration, working alongside someone. Codification extracts knowledge from people into something the organisation can store, search and reuse: systems, structured data, documented processes.

Doloriert and Whitworth studied the back office of two Premier League clubs and found knowledge management in both, but largely informal, ad hoc and implicit. One club ran essentially on personalisation: a shared open-plan management office, staff covering each other's work, learning on the job, and a marketing manager who described the club as knowing everything he knew. The other combined personalisation with codification and had more formalised processes. In neither was anyone responsible for knowledge as such. Both valued knowledge management more for its effect on sporting performance than on the business, and both treated it as secondary to the game.

A decade later the picture is more formalised, but the gap has not closed. Gregson and colleagues surveyed 25 clubs and 10 national federations on the operating practices of their medical and performance units. Most reported strategic alignment between the first team and the academy, standardised and formalised structures, and effective use of internal and external knowledge. Almost all used a data management system. But medical and performance data reached the same system in 68% of clubs. Research and development was usually led by a head of performance or a team doctor, without research training and on top of an already full role. Roughly a third of organisations used an off-the-shelf solution from an external provider, which the authors read as a sign that IT and analytics expertise inside football organisations is still at an early stage.

Their framing is close to the argument here: knowledge transfer is a central component of knowledge management, and it is what connects to better decision-making. They describe formal athlete data management systems as the first step toward turning data into knowledge that streamlines decisions.

We go one step further than the authors. Their sequence is:

The sequence that matters strategically is:

Because if a person must personally gather the data, locate it, connect it, interpret it, pass it to another person and only then decide, the organisation's capability is still capped by human throughput. The system may be excellent. The ceiling stays where it was.

Put plainly: scaling a football club may ultimately mean scaling access to its best knowledge.

The test that separates the three

This is where the distinction stops being theoretical and becomes usable. The same test works elsewhere:

More coaches, more academy teams, more employees are all growth. The same knowledge reaching ten times as many people is scale. One decision or one system influencing an organisation ten times the size is scale. The best expert increasing their impact without ten times the hours is scale.

Only the third column changes the ratio. And only the third column is unaffected by the fact that the first team is still one team.

The tightest case is not a club

A federation faces the same constraint in its most extreme form. A club is responsible for one organisation: complex, decision-heavy, but one. A federation is responsible for an entire national pyramid: for the competence of several thousand coaches, for methodological consistency from grassroots to the senior squad, and for decisions that must mean the same thing in every region.

The expert staff, meanwhile, is a single group. The ratio between the people who know and the people that knowledge has to reach is an order of magnitude worse in a federation than in a club. This is not a different class of problem. It is the same problem at an incomparably worse ratio.

In the same study, the federation numbers are weaker almost everywhere. Medical and performance data reached a single system in 40% of federations against 68% of clubs. Fewer than half of federation respondents agreed that their medical department made effective use of its own staff's knowledge to develop the rest of the team. Federations relied more often on external consultants for research and development, and less often on academic collaboration and industry partnerships than clubs did.

The coach developer example stops being hypothetical here. A club does not have a hundred coaches. A federation has thousands, and the question of whether one good developer can genuinely affect their work without a thousand times the hours is not a thought experiment but a description of the everyday situation.

The difference comes down to consequence.

A club that does not scale its knowledge operates inefficiently. A federation that does not scale its knowledge simply fails to reach.

The dependency that has always been there

For most of football's history, capabilities have been tightly coupled to human hours.

More analysis required more analysts. More feedback required more expert time. More oversight required more managers. More information required more people to process it. The coupling was so consistent that it stopped being visible as a constraint and became simply how clubs are built. That is why the default answer to “we need more capability” was always “we need more people”, and the default answer to “we need scale” was “we need more clubs”.

Technology, automation, and now particularly AI, are beginning to weaken that coupling. Not everywhere, not evenly, and not without serious organisational work. But the direction is clear enough to formulate the question the industry has not yet properly asked:

Can technology break the dependency between a club's capabilities and its people's hours?

This is not about replacing people. It is about multiplying their reach. The judgement of a coach developer, the way a sporting director frames a decision, the way an analyst reads a problem: these remain scarce and valuable. The question is whether they must stay confined to the hours of the person who holds them.

Where this leaves us

Football has spent two decades learning how to grow. It has built bigger academies, bigger commercial operations, bigger data departments, and in the case of MCO bigger ownership structures spanning continents. Much of that growth was considered, and some of it produced genuine development.

What it has not reliably produced is scale in the strict sense: more capability per unit of resource.

The next stage of football's technological transformation may not be about helping clubs grow. It may be about helping them scale what historically could not be scaled: knowledge, expertise, processes and part of the decision-making itself.

That is a different problem from the one the industry has been solving. It deserves to be named as such.