The Method Behind the Madness
If you have read my work for any length of time, you may have noticed that I rarely begin with the player. I usually begin with the organization, because the value of any player depends on what that organization is trying to accomplish, the environment in which it operates, and the capabilities it needs to succeed. Before I can offer a meaningful opinion about recruitment, development, coaching, or performance, I need to understand the problem those activities are supposed to solve.
That approach has shaped nearly everything I have written about women’s football, although for years I understood it more instinctively than I could explain it. My career has crossed military service, government contracting, finance, organizational consulting, and football. Those fields may look unrelated from the outside, but I have always recognized a common process running through them: understand the objective, establish what is required to achieve it, examine what is already available, and determine how to close whatever gap remains. The environment changed as I moved between those fields, but the underlying methodology stayed with me.
Early in my civilian career, I worked for a government contractor supporting acquisitions across the U.S. Department of Defense. We often described our work in three words: Make, Manage, Measure. We helped the government make investments, manage those investments, and measure whether they delivered the capabilities they were intended to provide. The investments involved defense programs, technologies, systems, training, and operational requirements, but the central issue was always whether the expenditure improved the organization’s ability to accomplish its mission.
That idea followed me into finance, where an investment had to serve an objective, operate within defined constraints, and be evaluated against the result it was intended to produce. Eventually, it followed me into women’s football. Signing a player, appointing a coach, hiring an analyst, expanding medical support, building an academy, or purchasing a recruitment platform are all investments in capability. They differ in cost, purpose, and timescale, but each represents a decision about what the organization needs to become capable of doing. Whether a club describes those decisions in that language does not change their nature.
The difficulty is that organizations often begin discussing the investment before they have agreed on the mission. A club may say that it wants to win, but that statement does very little to guide a decision. Competing for promotion, establishing a sustainable position in a higher division, developing young players, generating transfer value, and preparing for European competition place different demands on the same organization. Several of those ambitions may coexist, but their relationship has to be understood, particularly when money, staffing, time, and squad capacity are limited. The club needs to know what it is trying to achieve, by when, and within which constraints before it can decide what deserves investment.
Without that clarity, departments can pursue different objectives while believing they are serving the same club. Recruitment may prioritize resale potential while the head coach needs immediate reliability. An academy may be expected to produce first-team players without a credible route into the team. Commercial expectations may grow faster than the organization’s ability to support them. Decisions then become reactive, and resources are allocated according to preference, pressure, or opportunity rather than a shared requirement. Evaluating a player in isolation cannot resolve that confusion, because the organization has not yet established what it needs her contribution to accomplish.
Even a clearly defined mission has to be considered within a changing environment. Promotion can expose weaknesses that were manageable in the division below, while relegation can alter both the financial model and the demands placed on the squad. Opponents improve, players leave, injuries accumulate, regulations change, and ownership expectations move. A capability that was sufficient in one season may be inadequate in the next, even when the people providing it have not become any worse. The requirement has changed around them.
This is also why I have been cautious about importing models from men’s football without examining the conditions that made those models work. The sport may be the same, but the operating environment can differ substantially in resources, labor markets, medical support, development pathways, and financial and social conditions. A structure that succeeds in one setting does not become suitable for another simply because it carries the language of professionalism. Its value depends on whether it addresses the requirements of the organization adopting it.
Once the mission and environment are understood, the next task is to define what the club must actually be able to do. This is where organizations often move too quickly. Saying that a team needs a striker, a new head coach, more data, or a recruitment department identifies a proposed solution before establishing the capability requirement. The more useful question is what the team cannot do consistently enough to achieve its objective. It may struggle to progress the ball through pressure, defend larger spaces, retain possession late in matches, create useful decisions in the final third, or maintain player availability across a season. Each of those problems requires investigation before the answer can reasonably be reduced to a job title, a position, or a purchase.
Consider a team that struggles to create attacking threat. Recruiting a forward may help, but only if the missing capability is one that the forward can provide. If the team cannot move the ball into useful areas, support the receiver, or coordinate movement around her, another player may inherit the same limitations as the one she replaces. The club needs to understand how threat is supposed to be created and which part of that process is failing. Only then can it judge whether the appropriate investment is a player, a coaching intervention, a change in roles, a development plan, or some combination of those things.
Defining the requirement also means distinguishing it from the gap. The requirement describes what the organization needs to be able to do; the gap describes the difference between that requirement and its present ability. That difference may be technical, tactical, physical, psychological, medical, organizational, or cultural. It may involve several of those dimensions at once. A club can possess talented people and still lack a reliable collective capability, just as it can possess a capability that disappears as soon as one particular person becomes unavailable.
That is why DOTMLPF became central to my analysis of women’s football. The framework examines doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership, personnel, and facilities, providing a way to investigate the whole system rather than treating every problem as a personnel problem. It asks how the organization intends to operate, how it is structured, how its people are prepared, what resources support them, and whether its leadership and environment make the required performance possible. It also gives the analysis somewhere to go when replacing an individual fails to explain or resolve the underlying problem.
Sometimes the player is the problem, but sometimes she is being asked to produce an outcome that the surrounding system does not support. Recruitment can be blamed for a development failure, coaching for a medical failure, or the squad for an organizational failure. Those distinctions matter because an incorrect diagnosis leads to an incorrect investment. A club may spend money, change personnel, and announce progress while leaving the capability gap largely untouched.
The same discipline requires examining what can be developed, redistributed, or combined before deciding what must be acquired. Existing players may be capable of producing a required effect in different roles, while capabilities spread across several departments may become useful only when those departments work together. The organization also needs to understand how resilient those capabilities are. If an injury, departure, or staffing change removes something essential, then apparent strength may conceal a serious dependency. Building capability involves understanding both what the club can do today and how much of that ability it can preserve when circumstances change.
None of this produces perfect information, and waiting for certainty can become its own form of organizational failure. Complex problems rarely offer a complete picture before a decision is required. That is why I prefer pilots when a proposed intervention can be tested within sensible boundaries. A pilot establishes a specific requirement, a timeframe, clear authority, and a limited commitment of resources. Its purpose is to discover whether the intervention improves the organization’s ability to achieve the intended result, with enough room to challenge the assumptions behind it.
A club considering an independent decision-support function, for example, does not necessarily need to redesign its entire recruitment structure to find out whether that function is useful. It can define a narrow problem, establish how the additional support will work with existing staff, and assess what changes as a result. The pilot must be integrated well enough to give the idea a fair test, while remaining bounded enough that the organization can revise or stop it if the evidence does not justify expansion. Experimentation becomes useful when the club can learn from it without first committing itself to a permanent solution.
Measurement has to be part of that design from the beginning. Before the investment is made, the organization should understand the outcome it expects, the evidence that would demonstrate improvement, what failure would look like, and who will assess the result. Otherwise, the project can drift toward whatever evidence is easiest to produce. Reports become proof that an analytical department is working, enthusiasm becomes proof that a new process is valuable, and attention becomes proof that a signing was successful. Each may tell the club something, but none establishes on its own that the required capability has improved.
Player evaluation belongs within that same logic. I want to understand how a player’s actions contribute to the team’s objectives and intended effects: whether she helps create threat, preserve control, protect space, support a teammate, or sustain a capability the team depends on. Goals, assists, and results can contribute to the evidence, but they cannot carry the whole explanation. The assessment must feed back into the original questions, helping the club understand what it possesses, what it lacks, and whether its decisions are producing the effects it intended.
Looking back, this is what Make, Manage, Measure has meant throughout my work. Making an investment begins with defining the mission, understanding the environment, and identifying the requirement and the gap. Managing it means establishing ownership, integrating it into the organization, and controlling the risks that could prevent it from working. Measuring it means examining whether it delivered the capability the organization needed and whether that capability improved its ability to accomplish the mission. Each stage informs the others, because evidence may require the club to revisit both its diagnosis and its chosen solution.
This is the thread connecting my writing about recruitment, scouting, doctrine, leadership, medical support, facilities, and player development. Recruitment concerns investment; scouting concerns the quality of the information informing that investment; doctrine concerns how the organization intends to operate. The other functions determine whether the people within that organization can produce and sustain the required performance. When I evaluate a player, I am therefore asking whether she provides the capability this particular club requires, in its particular environment, at that particular time, within its actual constraints.
For those working in women’s football, the process begins with a question that should govern every subsequent decision: what are we trying to accomplish? From there, we establish what effects are required and what capabilities produce those effects. We then examine what capabilities we actually possess and how resilient they would be if an asset disappeared. That understanding allows us to consider what we can develop, redistribute, or combine, and to identify what remains uncovered. Only after working through those questions do we ask what additional resource, if any, we need.
That is how I approach building a winning club, whether the setting is U16 football, the WSL, or international competition. The objectives, resources, and demands change, but the need to connect decisions to the capabilities required for success remains. There has always been method behind the madness, and its continuity across my career comes from that discipline: understand what the organization needs to accomplish, establish what will enable it to do so, and make, manage, and measure its investments.
Disclaimer
This publication provides independent, apolitical analysis of historical developments, current events, geopolitics, national security, and strategic challenges. We maintain strict political neutrality, aligning with neither the left nor the right. Examining or criticizing political actors, institutions, or policies does not constitute political advocacy, opposition, or endorsement.
Our assessments are grounded in historical facts, available evidence, established analytical methodologies, and evaluations of probability, consequence, and uncertainty. Hypothetical scenarios are illustrative and do not imply actual or planned events, intentions, or operations.
Our purpose is to identify, define, and understand problems—not to prescribe solutions or advocate outcomes. Conclusions reflect the available evidence, not political preferences. Decisions and actions remain the responsibility of others.