The Backroom Staff - Kickoff

Welcome to The Backroom Staff!

The Backroom Staff is a place to share the stories of people working in football.

Football is the most popular sport in the world. There are thousands and thousands of people all over the world working in football in all kinds of roles, from safety steward and groundskeeper to the players and coaches themselves, and yet, we rarely hear their stories, perspectives and experiences.

I always planned to have a career in football. I started a degree in sports management, did some coaching and scouting qualifications, wrote some things - basically dipped my toe in a few times. Turns out it’s not so easy to just ‘work in football’…

In my ‘real life’, I’ve spent (literally) thousands of hours asking people about their jobs and it’s clear that football (and sport more broadly) is a unique industry - ultra-competitive, often insecure, and difficult to navigate. Oh, and while the extremely (financially) lucrative jobs make the news - long, demanding hours for low (or even no) pay is closer to the norm.

The amount of people working in football has exploded in the last 20ish years. Entire categories of jobs have been created, normalized and heavily funded (e.g. data analysis, sport science, new media). There are more jobs, more opportunities than ever before but never more unclear how (or where) to start - or what it’s actually like to do these jobs.

I want The Backroom Staff to be the ultimate resource to hear about jobs in football, from the people who actually do them!

Here’s a little preview of what we have for you - live now!

Wei Xian - A young goalkeeping coach who holds the AFC ‘A’ license. Wei Xian talks about his qualifications, networking, and working in the Premier League.

Kaloyan - One of Bulgaria’s first real analysts, Kaloyan shares great insights from his journey from a successful businessman to an academy cameraman to the Champions League, and his work in England and the Netherlands.

Andreas - A Cypriot chemical engineer who got bored with his day job and became a data analyst. Andreas cut his teeth in Bulgaria before moving to Germany to do analysis for a betting company.

And a huge thank you to Wei Xian, Kaloyan and Andreas for taking a chance on this and sharing their time and stories. If you enjoy someone's interview, or it helps in some other way, I'd be grateful if you reached out to them and told them you liked it! ❤️

Each new interview can be sent directly to your inbox as a newsletter, so subscribe :), all interviews are available at thebackroomstaff.com.

I’m interested to speak with anyone in football - any role, any location, any level - if this is you, or someone you know, please get in touch!

p.s. full disclosure so I don’t feel too phony 😅 I’m American but am going to use ‘football’ instead of ‘soccer’ here, sorry/you’re welcome. (‘soccer’ isn’t too bad though! - and it’s British anyway…)