The Recruitment Ladder: A Practical Guide for Football Leaders

From the most advanced recruitment departments in Europe to clubs lower down the Norwegian professional pyramid, one thing is clear: the level of professionalism in recruitment varies dramatically across borders and league levels.

Traditional scouting will always remain essential, but data is no longer optional. It is becoming a fundamental layer for structure, consistency, and decision-making in transfers - and the clubs that embrace this shift are the ones shaping the future of football.

Synthesizing qualitative input from 100+ meetings with sporting directors and other key stakeholders across leagues and levels, we have developed a framework that divides modern football clubs into five buckets.

The recruitment ladder, explained

Why the ladder matters

Money talks. In modern football, a profitable transfer business is a key indicator of success - yet many clubs still lack a holistic recruitment plan. Most realise data is essential but struggle to extract its full value because of limited expertise and fragmented systems. As a result, more and more clubs are looking to integrate their entire squad-management workflow into one platform, rather than relying on isolated parts of the process and being “lucky”.

How clubs climb the ladder

Lower-tier Norwegian clubs and top Bundesliga clubs sit at very different points on the ladder, but every club has the opportunity to steer its long-term recruitment operation toward a more professional level. For a top Bundesliga club, levelling up might mean buying additional, expensive datasets to add marginal context to each decision. For the majority of professional clubs, levelling up is not about spending more money on data - it is about connecting the dots and getting more out of existing resources.

A typical “from-to” state for a club climbing from Tactical to Structured.

Access to contextual event data is, of course, a prerequisite for climbing the ladder. But once that first step is taken, most of the value comes from fitting the data into a useful structure and foundation aligned to each club's ambition and strategy. This is where a clear gap in understanding still exists for many clubs.

As an example: imagine a club spending too much of its already-scarce resources interpreting and aligning multiple dashboards, trying to extract value from overly complex datasets. Clubs with this mentality are often stuck on the Tactical level. Now imagine using data to remove friction from the recruitment process - replacing fragmented workflows with structured, aligned, documented decision-making. The result: less time managing information, more time watching and evaluating the right players. That is a club clearly moving toward the Structured level.

Key takeaway

To succeed as a modern football club over the long run, relying on luck in the transfer window is not a strategy. The clubs that succeed are not necessarily those with the most data - they are the ones that know how to turn data into aligned decisions. That is the gap we at Fokus are working to close.