Full transcript: Hugo Scheckter – Player care: reducing the risk of players failing

A little bit about myself as was introduced. This chap with the incredible hairline is actually me. Back in the day been at great clubs like Southampton, West Ham, Brentford, etc, and now, working with clubs around the world to improve their player care.

But what is player care? And I think a lot of people kind of don’t really understand.

Is it a mental health thing, is it a support thing, is it a concierge? Turns out it’s very different at every single club. We look at a three corner, player care model, operational player care, which is kind of the day-to-day operational operation. Obviously, maybe the relocations of families, maybe making sure the team’s running OK off the pitch, personal, developmental, giving people the life skills to be able to look after themselves and then welfare, which is the appropriate signposting to trained mental health professionals.

But in reality, over all my clubs I’ve managed some if not all of these things at every single club. And when I’m talking about loans, I’m not a loan manager. But how are we looking after the young people who are out on loan, often the young development loans – 18 years old, it might be the first time they’ve lived away from home.

How are we making sure that their situation, living situation, is not undermining their football side? And same with injuries, it’s not how do we fix a broken leg, but how do we keep that person integrated into the team? How do we make sure that their house is appropriate for where they’re living and their injury they’ve got.

‘His wife just exploded at me’

So there’s some things here are more important, some things are less important of course, but overall we’ve divided player care down into 24 sections and 170 different standards which are the only standards in player care worldwide. I’m going to talk about two key players that I’ve worked with. I’ll keep them anonymous, just out of respect.

One was player one who I worked with at Southampton. And this was right early on in my career. And I got this one completely wrong. This was a young player who joined from a European club. Him and his wife didn’t really speak much English, and I would just check in with him every day.

He was very, very happy. He was playing OK, but he was kind of in and out the team. And I really didn’t take much notice. I was like, ‘yeah, he’s happy, we’ve got everything he needs’. About six months into my time there, I had to go around his house. I can’t remember what I was doing there. And I walked in and his wife absolutely just, like, exploded at me.

And she’d basically been sat in a house, in a flat for six months, not speaking in English, not being able to drive, not having any school, social network. And she got to a point where she’s like, “I want to leave Southampton”. And there was nothing we could do at that point to really get it back on track. We tried to.

We introduced some of the other Spanish families and she felt better. But ultimately they both decided to leave the club at the end of the season. We sold him for a quarter of what we paid for him a year earlier. And that was on me. That was 100% on me as a player care person, having not made the proactive support.

And so when we’re talking about good player care, it’s going from reactive. And some clubs are not even reacting to problems. Some clubs are hearing problems from players and not having the ability to react to those problems, but to get to a proactive approach. And there was a player, who was actually looking to sign at Brentford, and he said to us, “the most important thing is my wife and my daughters are happy. If they’re happy in the club, I can see myself playing there now”.

His wife and his daughters had flown over to London without us knowing. And as if anyone’s been to Brentford, there’s a lovely sort of motorway that flies over the stadium. They put themselves in a hotel underneath that flyover. And then the wife and the daughters walked around and said, “this isn’t where we want to live”. And they didn’t want to come to Brentford.

Well, actually, that’s not the really nice part of Brentford. You’ve got Richmond right there. You’ve got lots of beautiful places around west London.

So we decided to try and fix that. So we brought them back to the city. I found out that the daughters really liked Frozen. We hired an Elsa, which those of you who have kids might know. Elsa. Turns out there’s a price difference between a singing Elsa and a non-singing Elsa.

So that’s something I learned. So we got the singing Elsa. We went all out. But we took them around London, we showed them the nice areas, we took them to see the schools. The kids were able to play with their potential classmates. We showed them houses. And by the end of that trip, the wife said to me, “this is home, we’re good to go”.

Now, I don’t know, maybe he would have still come here, maybe he wouldn’t have done. But that was something where we stepped out and we proactively tried to go ahead and get ahead of that issue. And there are loads of other proactive things that good player care can do to look after players.

‘Just me by myself’

And this is kind of – and I’ve anonymised this – but I wanted to show, when I started at Brentford, I came in as Interim Head of Player Care, they didn’t have a player care department. It wasn’t a thing that they were doing. And we can see at the top here, Player A and Player B, 93 days before they found their accommodation after arriving at the club and 42 days. It’s a long time to be sat in a hotel. I mean, I’ve been two days here and I’m already looking forward to getting home.

So I can’t imagine 93 days in a hotel. But then by the time we signed player C and D, we had a player care department in place. It was just me by myself.

But we were doing it – eight days, to find a house. And player D, we actually got six days because this club gave him permission to. And so we signed the lease on his house six days before he signed his contract. The club. So overall, on boarding time, 93 days, 42 days, down to eight days and two days.

And I don’t know the salaries of the players. I never have, but try to work out how much the club is paying them during that time. While they can’t possibly be at home, they can’t possibly be playing the best they can because they can’t get around. They don’t have the language, they don’t have the kids in schools.

They’re having all these problems. Half a million pounds, potentially down to sort of 10 grand. And this is very estimated. I don’t have knowledge of these figures, but that’s my estimation. So trying to show that proactive player care. Sorry, reactive player care to proactive player care can have a big impact on what the teams are trying to do.

And I hear this a lot. We do player care already. Well, there’s not many player care staff in the Premier League. This is what the clubs have, this season upcoming. Most clubs in the first, there’s no rules for player care. The Premier League has no rules. Clubs can do whatever they want in the first teams. And so you’ve got sometimes one person doing it.

That’s a lot of responsibility for one person. And when we look at it, I think Paul had 25 different staff that on the average training ground, this is for three hours a day. And all you guys, we’ve been here for two days talking about all the little marginal gains, but this is the 21 hours a day they’re not at the training ground.

So are you losing maximal gains here by not getting this right? And I think bad player care can really undermine the work that performance staff are doing. If you’ve got a player who’s moved to the country, he’s in a hotel with potentially his partner and two kids, and they’re not sleeping, they’re not engaging, you can have all the great presentations you want, but if he’s falling asleep and not being able to take that in, that’s a problem.

If they can’t speak the club language, we often see players coming into a team and they don’t get told to do English lessons. Well, we always had a policy that, players had to be able to do an interview in the club language before they could stop doing English lessons. Well, that’s massive because then when everyone’s trying to speak to them, they know exactly what they’re trying to say on the pitch that moment.

They have confidence that they are understanding what the players are saying. And I’m not saying we need 25 player care staff, although that would be good for business, really looking at two or three people to do a proactive good job of getting ahead of this and protecting all the work and expense that’s spent on that side.

Proactive policies

We did some new research. We’re launching it today. We partnered with a stats company called Way to Play. And I wanted to look at more about player care and how it actually helps clubs achieve their goals, because it sounds very nice and very engaging, but actually how do we help clubs solve their goals?

So we looked at failed transfers and we looked at the last three years, and we decided a failed transfer was a player who played less than…. so missed 40% of games, or more or less, so played 60% of games. And it turned out that those players, who’d missed 40% of games or more  a cumulative loss of 1.4 billion euros in the last three years alone in the Premier League, which works out to 23.3 million euros lost per club per year.

So a substantial amount of players failing. Now what percentage do we think, and I’m going to ask the audience here, of all the players you’ve worked with, of all the players you maybe say failed at your organisation, how many of them failed do you think because of the player couldn’t settle, the family’s unhappy, isolated in the squad, can’t speak the language.

Between 0 and 100%. What are we saying? Sorry, 45%, 60, 60 higher or lower.

If it’s more than 1% it’s cheaper to have a three-person player care team working proactively than letting them fail. So no-one here said zero. If you’d said 0.5% I would have been gutted. But you know, if it’s more than 1% it’s better to try and proactively solve it.

Now I can’t say we’re going to solve every single one of those problems, but we’re going to give it a good go. We’re going to have proactive policies. We’re going to make sure they come in and do it well. Liverpool’s director of research, Ian Graham, said he thought that player care related factors are one of seven main reasons transfers failed. Roughly about 15% and we’re saying 1% here.

That’s the same with players. How are we trying to make sure that those players who are coming into a meeting are going to appropriately understand and digest the information? Lack of support, network. You know, I’ve had plenty of players who come in alone. We had a player, at West Ham during Covid – Spanish chap. Was alone in his flat for like seven, eight weeks before we got back to football.

[He was] 19, 20 years old, father was sick at home, couldn’t get home. Really, really hard to say to him, ‘yeah, you’ve got to stay inside’ and how do you support him when I couldn’t leave my flat either. These are the kind of things that were exacerbated by Covid but actually come up every day. Football’s a really isolating space and then the increased pressure and scrutiny.

So many of us have lived abroad and some of us are living abroad now, but we didn’t necessarily have that pressure of everybody knowing who you are. Players, when they meet someone new, it might be a new friend, but actually it might be someone trying to take advantage of them. And so they’re often quite isolated in the way that they live.

So there’s a lot of different things here that we talk about. And proactive player care can try and get ahead of these things to try and stop them happening. Can’t always prevent them but try and stop them happening. And that’s the club’s investment in its assets. A little bit about us, I think there’s a…. so we have a lot of different services. I’m not going to hold on to it too long, but we created a set of standards that good player care looks like. Got 170 data points. We developed that and we really strongly stand by it. We work with teams across the world to improve their player care remotely.

Whether it’s what I did at Brentford which was going interim and then create a department then leave, or whether it’s the remote support we’ve done with clubs in Mexico or clubs around the world. I’m really proud of our market-leading player care course. We’ve got 300 graduates, 100 who work full-time in sport, including one that’s looking after the 25 new signings at Burton, and helping clubs find their player care staff.

So a huge thank you from me. Please come and say hello. Send us a message if there are any questions. Happy to do it if we have time. But thank you.