AI is rapidly changing how organizations research, analyze, make decisions and increasingly hire. Football is no exception. Still, hiring backroom staff at the highest level remains an unusually complex and deeply human process. Clubs are not simply looking for people with the right qualifications but are building around specific strategies, cultures and ways of working. So, where does AI fit in elite football staff recruitment?
Anca van Assendelft is a strategic adviser focused on helping organisations unlock value from AI. Her clients include Fortune 50, start-ups and scale-ups. She’s also a lifelong footballer and athlete with a particular interest in how AI can improve performance, decision-making and fan engagement in sport.
David Clancy spent 15 years working in sports medicine and physiotherapy, including as a head of medical and lead physiotherapist for several top teams. He now works with elite sports organizations on departmental design, recruitment, and staff and team development, with vast experience across the Premier League, WSL, NWSL and other major leagues and sports.
In this interview Anca and David share how elite clubs currently hire their backroom staff, what a well-designed medical and performance department looks like, why football remains cautious about hiring people from outside the sport, and where AI might improve recruitment and organizational design. We also discussed football’s resistance to new technology and the opportunities for smaller clubs.
The interview has been condensed and lightly edited for grammar and clarity.
Who’s speaking
Anca van Assendelft
David Clancy
[ Background ]
AvAAnca van Assendelft
I'm a strategic advisor focused on AI. I help organizations see what value they are leaving on the table, how they can unlock it and what that transformation needs to look like. My background is Princeton and then Wharton. For the last ~2 years, I’ve been working with an organizational change expert from Harvard to accelerate the path to value from AI. There are all kinds of tree roots and potholes around how to actually navigate this opportunity.
I’m also a senior executive somatic coach. Even with all that’s happening, we’re still walking nervous systems and the amount of change and the speed that it’s happening with AI, frankly, it just deeply challenges nervous systems! I’m trying to help people say, you know what, actually this is not horrible, this might just be super cool and giving them a helping hand to get value from it.
I’m an athlete, an ice hockey player, judoka and a long term soccer player - I was on the Georgia State Select team way back when - and soccer has always been my passion, so it’s been a pleasure hooking up with David to apply this and help unlock value with AI for sports teams. Outside the business side of things, I’m really interested in the engagement of fans and helping people get healthy. I ran an outdoor fitness boot camp in my town - my goal has been to get the whole town of 10,000 people fit and bring fitness into their lives. As a somatic executive coach, I have a keen interest in personal performance that is rooted in our physicality and goes beyond sport.
DCDavid Clancy
I played football, but not particularly well! I played under-age basketball for Ireland. Played ice-hockey in Montreal as a kid, did some skiing. My background is in sports medicine and physiotherapy. I worked in that world for 15 years and was head of medical and lead physio for various teams. I worked in a FIFA Medical Center of Excellence in London called Isokinetic, consulted for NBA teams, NFL teams, Premier League teams.
Now, I have two main bodies of work. One is organisational design and recruitment for elite teams. And second to that, I do quite a lot on staff and team development - learning and development with the people who are already at the club.
In football, I’ve done quite a lot in the Premier League, the WSL, the NWSL and a handful of European football teams over the last 3-4 years. We usually work with sports medicine and sports performance staff. And, speaking to my work with Anca, AI is just coming up in so many conversations and the level of anxiety, overwhelmingness, not knowing where to start and reluctance to adopt has piqued my interest and curiosity more and more about how AI strategy will evolve in elite football.
[ What does the ‘hiring status quo’ look like in sports medicine right now? ]
DCDavid Clancy
I suppose it varies a lot on ownership, the performance director, the technical director and their level of experience and exposure in the past. Some clubs have used agencies or firms for years, some teams less so.
I think what's happening is there’s more and more staff at teams than there used to be. There is more work on the table for companies like my company to create opportunities to lead a search. A search can take anything from 3-4 months to a year depending on notice periods and the level of the candidate - if it’s a head of medical at Manchester United, it takes longer.
There are definitely some trends we're seeing. There’s a huge influx in performance psychology, mental skills, mental performance as well as a big influence in R&D and innovation arms at certain teams, especially in the States and the bigger clubs in the UK.
As to our searches, we’re pretty specialized, usually doing head of department searches. Sometimes we’ll do a more junior search to build a relationship but more often than not, it’s head of department level. We start with basics like, how many people are there in the medical arm? In the performance arm? And is there a balance or a misalignment there? We want to know what the reporting lines look like and from there we start to specialize. But again, it really depends on the sporting director, performance director and the manager and what they want or see as the future of their club.
[ On the organizational structure - what do you take into consideration? What does a good structure look, or feel, like? ]
DCDavid Clancy
We will definitely have examples of departments that we think have a good structure. Maybe because we’ve worked with them and we’re biased - or maybe because they’ve done well in terms of winning, or league position, or less staff turnover, etc.
I think a lot of interesting conversations, usually with directors, comes down to, do you want one ‘point leader’ or two? So, what does your leadership structure in your sports or human performance department look like? Do you want it led by someone with more of a medical background, more of a performance background, or do you want someone with both, or someone else? These are the kinds of conversations we’re having with clubs at the moment.
A lot of teams that do it well have a balance, they have most of the boxes covered. For example, I work with a team in the States. They have 5 departments that all report to one person. So, between performance science, nutrition, wellness, physical therapy and strength and conditioning, they’re very delineated but they’re very well interconnected and there are clear comms between them while maintaining that one point of reference.
It’s always interesting to look at a department and who the heads are, who the director is and I think, zooming out, anytime there’s an issue, it’s often when there’s a big imbalance.
We're working with a women's European soccer team at the moment, and they're performance heavy but a bit light in terms of expertise and personnel on the medical side. We’re trying to help them level up their medical side and even out the imbalance. We ask them questions like, what do you do for return to play? Or do you have someone who's specialized in early rehab? Just trying to get insights on their process and areas of expertise before suggesting candidates.
AvAAnca van Assendelft
I’ll go one level higher and look at what the talent picture and the portfolio of talent look like in support of the strategic intent. Then, as David mentions, there are probably 6 dimensions that you could ‘spider chart’. So, what are the dimensions that need to be filled - and then, what is the balance? I’m looking at the higher order goals they want to accomplish. Part of that is the culture and the cultural context they sit in - in short, what kind of team do they want to be? Those are the topics that I would look at from a strategic perspective.
[ Are players or coaches or fans aware of these reputations for their club’s medical department? Do players say, ‘I want to go to X club because I know they’ll be patient with me when I get injured?’ ]
DCDavid Clancy
We worked with a WNBA expansion team this year where we built out the full department and the GM was very clear philosophically from a recruitment perspective. She wanted her team to be known as a place where players can come and they will preserve and extend their career there. So, she was interested in longevity, the grace of the athlete and on not burning out the players.
For us, we can go away going, ‘wow’ - that’s refreshing! She wanted a place where players will be looked after, cared for and then that brings warmth and EQ, which is very different to some other environments.
AvAAnca van Assendelft
They always say that structure follows strategy but culture eats strategy for breakfast! So, the values and the context is what really matters.
Is it known? Well, if I, just for a moment, go to another industry and look at the tech industry. It’s unlikely I’d work for Peter Thiel, it’s just not going to happen. It’s not where I’d want to put my energy. And I do believe that - especially in sport - the values and culture really matter - especially in an AI world - where the opportunity exists to create a human-centric AI strategy that creates not only competitive but also comparative advantage.
I love the word grace that David just used. I think values create the identity of a sports team. I mean, it ought to be more important everywhere but I think you see it especially in sports teams. For me, the human-centric approach is important.
"They always say that structure follows strategy but culture eats strategy for breakfast!"
DCDavid Clancy
Just to add, how a brand or a team is depicted is obviously massively influenced by changes (or not) of the head coach or the manager. When you read the report after a game and you hear terms like, ‘they’re gritty’ or ‘tough’ or ‘resilient’ - I’m sure that’s reinforced through their staff and how they train.
Or, I can think of a couple of clubs in the UK that are more mid-table but they definitely have the perception in the market that they are well run and they ‘live’ this through their staff, the players they tend to bring in and what their academy looks like. So, I think it’s a great question for clubs to think about and reflect on.
[ Where are clubs most often going wrong in their hiring? + Where is the leverage for AI to improve or change this in some way? ]
DCDavid Clancy
I’ll take the first part and leave the second for Anca!
I think a lot of homework has to be done at the start to really get a sense of what a club is all about - where they are in the country, their history, the owner, direction, where are they trying to go, who's currently there, who’s been there in the past, what’s it like when you walk into the room? All that is massively important, and I think when any of those pieces are neglected or not valued as much as they should be, that’s often when the hire doesn’t quite work.
When we're tasked with a search, we spend a lot of time asking questions and having those couple of visits early to really get a sense as to what it's all about. Then, when you're going from your long list to a shortlist, you can really represent the club to those prospective candidates and have those conversations at a much deeper level.
Sometimes, sporting directors and performance directors will have biases or say ‘we want this kind of person’ or ‘someone from this background’ for certain reasons. We pride ourselves on kind of ‘5 why-ing’ it and digging deeper, investigating their preference. We actually have quite a strong reputation, particularly in the Premier League of some ‘unorthodox’ approaches or more diverse hires. We’ve brought a lot of people from rugby to football and people from other countries. But, because we’ve done our homework to really understand the person and the club, by really being curious, it gives you a really good chance of a good hire.
And one other thing that people sometimes forget - you can do all the work and go through a really rigorous process for 4 months, and go right the way through from 12 people to 6 people to 3 people to 1. But you have to follow up, with the club and the person. 2 weeks later, 4 weeks later, 3 months later - and that’s not for the money, that’s to make sure it’s working. Like, are your kids happy? How's your partner? How's the house? Because that stuff is what causes friction and tension. So we spend a lot of time on the other side, not just on the front end. And, again, I think that helps with a really good fit and a good chance of a soft landing - getting everyone on the same page before the start date for a good onboarding. All these things that people sometimes forget about but are massively important for the hire to be a success.
AvAAnca van Assendelft
It's really interesting to zoom out a bit. So, what David just said is that it's not just the recruiting itself, but you’ve reframed it in a nice way that distinguishes between two things, there is talent needed and then there is talent being fully productive and supported with the goal of getting the team to the next level. The value of bringing a person in is bigger than ‘just’ recruiting and the mechanics of recruiting.
So where could AI help? First, what is AI good at? It’s really good at the complicated but not the complex. AI can also help us play the ‘what if’ game. In that case, the pool that you’re working with expands a lot.
For example, an international electrical equipment company that I was working with could potentially face a new competitor coming into their market. Using AI, we explored which products and product features were most vulnerable to a potential new market entrant, and analyzed ‘what if’ scenarios to project what products this new entrant was likely to compete with. Within an hour and a half, we had a soup-to-nuts business plan for a new entrant.
That research and thinking partner capability can help validate the best go-forward strategy much more quickly (i.e. where to use AI to augment, where to automate, and where to have it help transform). And that client was a year ago, the AI models are much better today.
AI is also very good at pattern recognition tasks, things like compare and contrast and follow-up and administrative tasks just to name a few. Still, it’s very important to actually use your own expertise in conjunction with AI, especially because AI is not so good at complex tasks - and what David described is super complex with all these different considerations to determine whether someone will be a good fit or not. I call this the ‘human-AI sandwich’ - it’s super important that you don’t take your hands off the wheel. One of the trickiest things to do is to look across the whole hiring process and find the ways that AI can advance, or reimagine, certain tasks or the whole workflow without sacrificing the human side.
"I call this the ‘human-AI sandwich’ - it’s super important that you don’t take your hands off the wheel"
—^interviewer’s note: To illustrate the point, Anca opened an AI tool (Manus) and generated a full eight-slide strategy deck on head of department recruiting live, in about 5-10 minutes. A few of the slides are shown below.
DCDavid Clancy
Just one last thing, for people like me, we've got LinkedIn Recruiter, we use Talent Insights, so we'll know what's going on in the market. But the complex thing, we're humans, right? So we’re using AI to help but intuition is really important too. When I speak to someone for a job, I’ll probably know early, or get a good sense after a couple of questions if they might be a fit. Human nature is subjectivity.
[ On this ‘unorthodox’ approach, do you think the value of experience specifically in football is changing? (e.g. going down) Are more clubs open to taking people from other sports or industries or are they largely still pretty resistant to candidates without experience in football? ]
DCDavid Clancy
Such a bad answer (haha) but I'd say it depends.
I think there are a lot of clubs who say they want ‘football people’ who have worked in football for X seasons at this level and that gets built into an inclusion criteria and into a job description. This happens so often. I don’t think I could give even three examples of hires that we’ve seen who are coming from medtech, pharma or from a startup. Even in the NFL, where we’re doing a bit of work, they tend to ask, ‘do they know the sport?’
There can be a lot of transferability, maybe this person’s been leading and managing and in a pressurized environment and all that stuff but if they haven’t been in the game, it will come up.
So, I think I’m not really giving an answer but I think it’s such a wonderful thing for people to think about. We bring it up all the time and it’s so easy to just consider what’s ‘normal’ and what you’re used to but it’s not the only correct way.
AvAAnca van Assendelft
What you end up doing is thinking about the particular talent, the job, the thing that needs to be filled. But if you kind of up-level a little bit, and ask, what are the meta-skills here? What is the work that needs to happen? And think more from a skill or capability level, where do those people exist, you might find them in surprising places - or at least places you haven’t looked before.
[ There often lots of ridicule/criticism about ‘laptop managers’ and advanced stats, etc. Do you think football will be a slow adopter of AI because of fears of backlash if it ‘goes wrong’? ]
AvAAnca van Assendelft
Yeah, I think different industries go at different speeds. What is interesting for me, is to look at what can assist in the acceleration?
Usually, it is helpful to look higher-up at the owner level, at the GM level - what are their key care-abouts? It’s improving performance, both on the field and financially. Eventually, if they think AI is going to help them do that, that’s what they’ll do.
But in the meantime, it’s human nature to be a little skeptical about change: we tend to like what we know - and less like that which we don’t know. That has to do with feeling a sense of safety - and a certainty around that. And AI messes with all that and disrupts that sense of safety for a number of reasons. Still, you’re always going to have people who are more risk taking or innovative and that’s your traditional ‘early adopters’ and leveraging them is part of the AI Value Unlock strategy.
And sports are a very much copycat industry to some extent as well. If a few teams have a lot of success, probably many will follow, but…
Why are they so risk-averse, David?
DCDavid Clancy
There was a club in Central Europe that got quite a bit of bad PR over the last couple of weeks. They had adopted a lot of AI in their processes and it didn’t work so well and they got relegated. Of course, that’s not the ‘full’ reason they got relegated but it’s a convenient scapegoat.
But I think I'm a perfect case study. Anca's been trying to bring me along, and, after a lot of nudges, I'm only now starting to go, ‘I think I probably should look into this a bit more’. And I would have thought I'm ahead of the curve, but I think the reason why I've been so slow to even get here is I can’t even name 10 people I’ve interacted with that have really incorporated AI in a meaningful way. When I chat to people at different clubs, I usually get something like ‘oh yeah, I was using ChatGPT for my email’.
"I can’t even name 10 people I’ve interacted with that have really incorporated AI in a meaningful way"
I haven't seen enough or heard enough examples of people who’ve brought it right the way through and done this, this and this with good results. So that's why I think you're absolutely right, hence why Anca and I are talking more and more about AI.
Whoever has a go at this, and does it right, as Anca said, knowing where AI ‘sits in the sandwich’ and finds out what can be unlocked - and for whom. When you do it at the right level, you have a really good chance that then there’ll be other teams looking serious at it.
AvAAnca van Assendelft
Yeah, it's a mindset shift, right? I think it's super important what you just said, David, which is you've got to do it right. And there are - and will be - right and wrong ways to do it. There is a way that will get teams to success and one that won’t and it’s pretty counter to the way people have been thinking about technology in general.
So, there are some real shifts and pivots that folks need to make that will accelerate the adoption of AI in sports but the potential value is on the table. Whether it's winning more or having more revenue, it’s really significant.
There are plenty of examples of industries that were hesitant and then took off.
[ You’re both working frequently with top clubs/elite organizations - are the things we’ve talked about something that only ‘works’ at the top level (e.g. where clubs can hire a lot of staff, etc) or are these ideas and strategies more universal, also for clubs at much lower levels? ]
DCDavid Clancy
I’ve run events and written a book on soft skills, so I’m really interested in clarity, connection, community, communication and collaboration. I’ve done work with a League of Ireland team around the corner that don't have a big budget. We're working with a League One team in the UK who don’t have a big budget but they are interested in getting better. Therefore, I’m interested.
Anca and I had a conversation before this and I think ‘resourcefullness’ is a great word. If you have a limited budget and limited personnel but ambitions to get better and you’re curious as to what that looks like, there’s a lot of stuff that isn’t easy but doesn’t require a lot of money. Things like, what does alignment look like? Are we all going in the right direction? Are we holding ourselves accountable? What do our communication or feedback mechanisms look like? Are we really connected and cohesive as a unit? Where's the dysfunction? How can we mitigate this? And on and on. This requires stepping back and looking at what we are doing and putting systems and processes in place that move you in the right direction.
So, for sure, teams in the Premier League can hire a lot of staff for very specific roles but for a third division team in Croatia, there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit that I think a lot of teams still neglect.
AvAAnca van Assendelft
Yeah, I think you see it often in other industries, if you have less budget - the number one priority is defining a focus, what’s urgent and really matters? Focus on that! This will help you understand which skills you need in the team as well.
Then, I think, having folks who can wear multiple hats, who are flexible, becomes super important.
And thirdly, where it becomes very interesting, is what are the things you can outsource to AI? What things can you automate or augment or improve? Usually you can’t really get here until you have a mindset shift - a ‘wow moment’ where you re-imagine your work. Then you need to take the steps to orient yourself differently, some practice and maybe some hand-holding. It’s not a given that you can just ‘outsource’ everything - you actually have to ‘do’ AI super actively to be successful.
I think if smaller teams and clubs just spend a little bit of their time and effort on learning about this opportunity and where they can accelerate on their path to improving their performance, they could create gains quickly. (We often talk about 90 day sprints or evolutions.)
DCDavid Clancy
I'll add one last thing on the wearing multiple hats side. A couple of years ago, I studied at the London Interdisciplinary School and we talked a lot about interactional expertise and threshold concepts. Basically, understanding your area of expertise and where and how you can interact with other experts and areas of expertise - how can you connect fields?
For example, when you’re trying to learn something new, or a new way of working, the moments of understanding usually come from conversations - or creating the opportunities for education and awareness in the first place. I think for teams that are a bit smaller and less resourced, creating those moments and opportunities for people to learn a little bit more about one another, as well as themselves, can help a lot. And surely AI can help with that too.