Lincoln City: Taking on ‘nuclear submarines in a canoe’ in League One
Written by
Jake Mahon
January 14, 2025
Just seven years ago, Lincoln City were plying their trade in non-league football. Now they are a well-established League One team vying against financial ‘nuclear submarines’.
In order to try and bridge the gap with powerhouses like Birmingham City, who paid more than £10m for a single player, Jay Stansfield, this summer, they need to do things differently. This is why the Imps are innovating by deploying AI for set pieces, scouting further afield than ever before and employing a Director of Innovation.
Liam Scully has been Lincoln’s Chief Executive since 2017, following three years as COO of Club Doncaster, which owns Doncaster Rovers. He tells TGG: “You look around League One now and there are clubs that are selling out with 20,000 to 30,000-plus fans every week.
“There’s a good amount of ex-Premier League clubs in the division and we look up and see lots of nuclear submarines and it feels like we’ve got a canoe and a paddle and we’ve got to be able to compete. This is about what can we do in our context to try and shift the dial. What can we do that really supports Lincoln City to be sustainable?
“But it’s equally important to look at things that we can do more innovatively. We’re looking at everything from our carbon footprint to football boot technology to the lighting in and around the changing room and in the training ground. It’s a spectrum of objectives.
“We want to be a Championship football club, unequivocally, but we’ve got to get there in an affordable manner and then when we get there, we’re going to have to be sustainable.
Liam Scully: Lincoln's Chief Executive since 2017
“The book ‘Will it make the boat go faster?’ (by Harriet Beveridge and Ben Hunt-Davis) – we talk about that all the time. Other clubs might have £3 and we might only have £1 – our job is to invest that resource into what is going to make the biggest difference.
“Fundamentally, what is going to improve performance the most with the resources that we have?”
The club prides itself on alignment in its approach, from Boardroom to Director of Football to dugout. Jez George (pictured at the top with Michael Skubala) joined the club in 2018 and has been their Director of Football since 2020.
“When you have a year like this, where there’s crazy spending in League One, we can only run our race and we’ll just keep trying to develop our club the best we can,” he tells TGG. “What we can’t affect is what the rest of the competition does.”
In keeping with the overall ethos of the club, Head Coach Michael Skubala has a track record of doing things differently. The 42-year-old started his career as a PE teacher in Leicestershire before becoming Loughborough University’s Director of Football. Since then he’s been England Futsal Head Coach and then Leeds United’s Under-21 Head Coach and Caretaker Manager.
Lincoln is his first senior Head Coach role and he’s been with the club since November 2023. The Imps narrowly missed out on the play-offs last season after finishing seventh in League One and that remains their aim this term, although a difficult run has left them nine points adrift in 12th place.
“There’s pure transparency here, I think that’s the key,” Skubala tells TGG. “I think that we’ve got alignment in what we’re trying to achieve, knowing that we’re going to have good and bad situations and it’s how we manage that as a group of people that’s important for the club.”
Recruitment
The January transfer window has just opened and Lincoln are beginning to cast their net wider when it comes to recruitment, instead of focusing on the domestic market and loans, as had been the case in the past.
There’s a modern approach, with a number of people involved in identifying, pursuing and landing targets, rather than just the Head Coach.
“I think the idea of a Manager making all the decisions is quite negligent, because you’re dealing with other people’s money,” Skubala admits. “If only one person is making a decision on the future of players and the clubs’ assets, what other industry would that be allowed in?
“There have to be people driving the bus. My job, ultimately, is when we get the player in the building to make them better every day. We try and improve the team and improve the individuals through that. It cannot be a single person’s view on a player, it has to be a team effort.”
George adds: “You have to have absolute clarity as to what’s the plan, what’s the strategy. Liam from a financial modelling standpoint, (in terms of) the number of assets in the squad, where are we developing assets, what are we trading, which players might we look to sell?
“Then once we’ve got that big plan, my job is to work with the recruitment department so Michael doesn’t have to worry too much about the first 80% of that and we only contact him when we’re getting close with the best three or four options in every position.
We’re not just looking for good players, we're looking for Lincoln players – players that fit our game model.
Jez George
“I think it’s absolutely crucial to us that we get the coaching staff opinion though, because we’re constantly discussing how our game model is evolving. We’re trying to overachieve as a club in this league. What gives us the best chance of doing that? How do we develop players at the same time? How do we become a trading club and sell players? Those conversations are on a daily basis.
“It would be crazy to bring a player in that hasn’t got the backing of the coaching staff. If the coaching staff don’t want those players, it would be absolutely ridiculous to sign them. That would be negligent because we’d be wasting club money. So there does have to be collaboration and alignment, not just with the coaching staff, but the medical and sports science guys.
“They get involved in the process. Are there any red flags medically, have we done our history? Do we think we can improve them? What are their physical stats like? Everybody has got a role to play in this when you’re committing hundreds of thousands of the club’s money. We must have that level of rigour.”
Part of this rigour is trying to assess a player’s character, which is always difficult.
“Character’s massive for us,” George says. “I think the biggest strength we have as a football club is the character of our team. We run hard, we work hard, we’re honest, we’ll never lose games through lack of endeavour.
“We do loads of due diligence – watching them repeatedly for loads of references, but also face-to-face meetings. The more you do a job and the more you know your football club and the more experiences you have of previous signings, the more you can get a feel for the type of characters that are going to be really successful with us.
“Michael is a big part in that in terms of presenting from a tactical perspective and you can tell from the line of questioning who’s really engaged, who’s really serious and who really wants to to do the hard yards and and wants to come to us for the right reasons.”
The club hired a new Head of Recruitment in August, the former Coventry City Head of Data Analysis Jack Coles, and a big part of his remit has been to expand the club’s network of potential players.
The rationale is to find more long-term value but also to take advantage of the ESC (Elite Significant Contribution) scheme. The ESC places were introduced ahead of the 2023/24 season and League One clubs are allowed to sign two overseas players who have met certain criteria.
“We have to keep trying to find ponds to fish in that aren’t so prevalent for other clubs,” George explains. “Changes in legislation have allowed us to have two ESC places, which has opened up more of a global market than we had previously.
Erik Ring: Signed from AIK in Sweden in summer of 2024
“We look at outliers in different leagues, which has been enhanced by appointing Jack Coles. He’s very adept with data, he’s a Data Scientist, which has made the scope that we have even wider.
“We have to use data as the filter. In a domestic market, we’d pretty much know from traditional scouting contacts, watching games. We’ve got a guy called Mark Tracy who watches more games than anybody in a week. So we were very aware of the market domestically. However, we can’t be experts in every market in every country around the world with the resources we have.
“So we have to build some good modelling and use data in a in a way that fits us. We’re not just looking for good players, we’re looking for Lincoln players – players that fit our game model and that’s back to evolving a style that we can be really, really clear with. It’s data first, then video scouting.
“Then, by the time the recruitment department are really excited, we get the coaching department involved to look at those players and at the point where everyone thinks this player could be a really interesting prospect for us then it’s probably my part in the process to jump over there, try and engage with agents and players and sell the club .
“You just have to do that a little bit more skilfully when it’s in a different country because they’ll never have heard of Lincoln and they probably won’t have thought about League One as a destination. Then we have to sell the the platform we can be and the reasons why a player might come to us.”
Swedish winger Erik Ring was signed from AIK last summer and Scandinavia remains an attractive market for the club.
“What we find is by filtering all the data from a number of leagues that qualify for ESC places, a lot of the players that flag up are from Scandinavia,” George says.
“Erik came from that process and we have a couple of other live targets that we’ve identified in that market. I think that will just constantly evolve as we get more sophisticated with how we use the data to identify targets.”
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Innovation
Lincoln believe they are the only club in England – and one of only four in Europe – to employ a Director of Innovation. Jason Futers was appointed to this role in November 2023, having previously had a career in risk and technology across a number of start-up businesses.
He’s just launched the ‘Lincoln City Innovation Lab’, which is, “calling on visionaries to take football to the next level in smart stadiums, sustainability, esports, fan engagement and sports science.”
Scully explains: “This is about what can we do in our context to try and shift the dial. It’s not about putting 25p on the price of a cheeseburger, this is about what can we do that really supports Lincoln City to be sustainable and fundamentally drive revenue but also improve performance in all kinds of spheres.
“It’s exciting to be part of, still very early days, but I’m confident that there will be some really good things that come out of this in the years to come, similar to when Jez started here and our player presentation was a glossy brochure and there was no track record. Hopefully we can we can get there in time.”
One innovation that’s already in place is an AI tool that analyses thousands of set pieces from around the world and uses the information to influence the team both in training and on matchday.
“It’s a tool we’re using to try and give us an edge in the league,” Skubala says. “League One is a league that is very direct and very aerially dominant.
“So we try and find an edge wherever we can, but we have to bring it in-house and use it to make sure that it’s just not a piece of paper and the edge becomes the alignment between the resource and how we deliver that on the pitch. That’s the most important thing, how we align the two.
At the time of my interviews for this piece, almost half of Lincoln’s goals had come from set pieces (11 of 26). To conclude our chat, Scully goes back to an analogy he used right at the start to summarise Lincoln’s approach.
“It goes back to what makes the boat go faster in a in a Lincoln City context,” he says. “We don’t have a catchment area that will give us, you know, 25,000 to 30,000 fans unless we’re maybe in the Premier League. We might not have a stadium with a hotel or other facilities around it. So this is about points of difference.”
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