A sporting director I spoke to earlier this year said something I haven't been able to shake: "We're information rich, decision poor. We've got access to everything."
He wasn't complaining about the data. He was complaining about what happens after you have it.
That conversation was one of more than 30 I've had with clubs since leaving Arsenal. Sporting directors, heads of recruitment, data engineers, analysts, performance staff. Across the Premier League, the Championship, League One, MLS, and a handful of clubs in Europe and the Middle East. The conversations have been honest, sometimes uncomfortably so, and one pattern has come up in almost every single one.
The pattern
Every club I've spoken to is paying for good data. StatsBomb, Opta, Skill Corner, Wyscout, GPS providers, medical tracking, contract databases. The investment is real and the quality is genuinely high. That's not the problem.
The problem is that all of it lives in different places. A head of recruitment at one Premier League club described his morning like this:
"I've got to log into this platform to see how quick he runs. Another to see his contract. Another to see what the scouts think. By that point it's lunchtime."
He was half joking. But only half.
At another club, a recruitment lead told me he'd spent four hours that afternoon switching between three open tabs: one for scouting reports, one for data analytics, one for video.
"When you're in the zone and you're trying to really go through what a player is and you have to keep switching, even I'm finding it really annoying. Let alone the manager."
A sporting director at a Championship club put it more bluntly:
"Too often, planning and recruitment sit on opposite sides of a river."
These aren't clubs that are behind. These are some of the sharpest operations in the game. The talent isn't the gap. The data isn't the gap either. The gap is in the connective tissue between the two.
What connective tissue actually means
I spent six and a half years at Arsenal seeing this problem up close from the inside. The specifics of what any club builds internally belong to the club. But the shape of the problem is industry-wide, and what closing the gap looks like in practice is something I've thought about every day for the better part of a decade.
The pattern I kept seeing, at Arsenal and now in conversation with clubs across the leagues, is that decisions get better when the friction of getting answers drops.
When a sporting director can sit with a single view of a player rather than five tabs and three phone calls, the questions they ask change. They get more curious, not less. They go deeper, not shallower.
The data team stops fielding basic requests and gets time back for the modelling work that actually compounds the club's edge. Scouts stop formatting reports and go back to watching football.
None of that is a single dramatic shift. It's incremental. But the compounding effect over a season is real, and you can feel it in the room.
One moment from those years stuck with me. A senior decision maker mentioned, almost in passing, that he'd started going to one place first thing every morning to think, and that he'd prefer the rest of the inputs he relied on lived there too, so he didn't have to call someone or log into another system. That wasn't a feature request. It was the quiet sound of a workflow finally fitting the way the work actually happens.
That's what connective tissue does. It doesn't replace the data a club already has. It doesn't replicate anyone else's product. It makes the data a club already owns more valuable by putting it where decisions actually happen, in a shape the people making those decisions can actually use.
Why most clubs can't build this themselves
Two of the clubs I spoke to had actually tried. In both cases, smart people with real resources took a run at centralising their data infrastructure internally. Both eventually stopped.
The reasons were consistent. Building the initial version is possible. Maintaining it alongside actually running a football club is the part that breaks. Data providers update their APIs. New sources get added. Staff turn over and institutional knowledge walks out the door. What looked like a one-time build quietly turns into a permanent product function, except the people running it still have day jobs.
The underlying issue is structural. A club's engineering capacity is usually small, split across intranets, ticketing, partnerships, and whatever new initiative the business has green-lit that quarter. The people talented enough to build this layer are also the people most in demand everywhere else in the club, so they get pulled in ten directions. The platform never gets the focus a real product needs.
And the work ages. The techniques that were sharp when the project shipped feel dated two seasons later. A new GPS provider signs, or a new event data vendor, and the pipelines need rebuilding. The team that knows how it all fits together is often one departure away from being the team that doesn't.
The build-it-yourself path isn't wrong. It's what smart teams try first. The wall they hit is always the same: the infrastructure work never ends, and it pulls the best people away from the analysis work that actually drives decisions.
The layer that matters most
Four months of these conversations have made me more convinced, not less, of where the gap actually sits. It's in the intelligence layer between what a club already owns and the people trying to use it to make faster, smarter decisions. That's the layer clubs haven't had. That's the layer that makes every other investment compound.
That's what I've started Sentrum to build. We're opening a small number of design partner spots this spring, working closely with clubs to shape the product around real workflows and real decision-making patterns.
If you're inside a club and any of this resonates, send me a message. Happy to walk you through what we're building, or just compare notes.