6 Takeaways from our webinar

On 28 May, 303 people registered and 135 joined us live to ask one deceptively simple question: what does it actually take to build a talent development system that holds up not for one promising generation, but across a full season, and across an entire football ecosystem?

Our Managing Director Koen Put opened with the shifts redrawing the landscape. A panel, Vincent Mannaert (Sporting Director, Royal Belgian FA), Sune Smith Nielsen (former Sporting Director, FC Copenhagen) and Claudius Schäfer (CEO, Swiss Football League), moderated by our own Hans Vander Elst, stress tested them against real life inside a club, a league and a federation. And we closed on a real six year case from Denmark presented by Double Pass’ Global Operations Lead, Stig Meylemans. Below are the six ideas worth keeping.

The first shift was framed as the ‘sportification’ of football: for years, commercial growth, broadcast, commercial, matchday, was the main engine of value. It still matters. But on its own it’s no longer enough to drive a club or a federation forward.

What’s changed is where value now comes from. The sporting engine, the players you develop, promote and eventually trade, has moved to the centre of the business model. Which means talent development is no longer a support function tucked beneath the first team. It has become a genuine strategic asset, and the organisations pulling ahead now resource and govern it like one.

The second shift sits above any single club. Leagues and federations are constantly reshaping the environment, competition formats, registration rules, homegrown quotas, even transfer taxes, and every one of those levers changes the timeline talent develops on.

Claudius Schäfer, CEO of the Swiss Football League, gave a concrete example: a high transfer tax, raised even higher for players signed from abroad, precisely because clubs kept reaching for ready made imports over their own academy players on the argument that the domestic talent ‘wasn’t ready’. Regulation, in other words, is being used deliberately to protect the development pathway. As the deck put it: rules shape behaviour, and development needs minutes. You can’t optimise an academy in isolation from the rules of the competition it feeds into. The two have to move together.

The third shift is about capability. Almost everyone now has access to broadly similar data. So data access itself is no longer the advantage. What separates environments is the intelligence layer built on top of it: the people, processes and decisions that turn numbers into better choices.

Alongside it sits human capital. The best systems treat coach education as a continuous cycle, not a certificate earned once, and they integrate players as whole people, performance, development and wellbeing together. Intelligence on one side, continuously developed coaches on the other. One without the other stalls.

One of the most practical moments of the night was Koen on the economics of timing. The deck framed it as a roughly four year opportunity window: market value rises most sharply from around 17 to 21, keeps climbing to 26 but from a higher base, and declines after about 26. So the window where value is really realised is early and it’s moving earlier.

That reframes a question every academy wrestles with: when do you give a young player real minutes? The panel was candid that there’s no single answer. Plenty of players still break through at 21–23. But development pathways increasingly have to start younger to prepare players to earn first team minutes inside that window, rather than just after it.

If there was a single thread running through the whole session, it was this. A report is a snapshot. It tells you where you stood once, then ages in a drawer. A system is a loop: audit, actions, reviews, and continuous improvement, running right across the season.

And crucially, it can’t stop at the elite level. Koen was explicit that quality assurance belongs across the whole pyramid, professional and grassroots alike. The panel echoed it: when every club at every level is pushing the system upward, the top of the pyramid rises with it. For a federation, that’s the difference between policing standards and actually building them.

The panel was blunt about the real blocker, and it isn’t money or talent. It’s alignment and what gets in its way. The biggest threat, as the discussion put it, is the ego of people, because it blocks the alignment that actually drives outcomes.

The antidote is keeping football at the centre of every decision. When federation, league and clubs share one definition of success, and communicate constantly, especially between club and national team coaches, selection and development stop being a tug of war. The Belgian example was instructive: grassroots and elite aren’t separate projects, they’re one connected pyramid, and each level has to understand it’s part of the same picture.

We closed where talk should always end, on evidence. From 2016 to 2022, the Danish ecosystem worked as one: federation, league and clubs aligned behind a shared national ambition. Danish football believed in youth, but in 2016 the system behind it was still fragmented. Four forces (clubs feeling the urgency, federation and league pushing, a shared national ambition, and Double Pass bringing the method) met at the right time. What followed was a six year programme built on three pillars, repeated over time.

• Audit & analysis: benchmarking, diagnostics and standards (the continuous loop, not a one off report).
• Education & mentoring: masterclasses and development for academy directors and sporting directors.
• Implementation & advisory: the strategic roadmap, plus hands on work on and off the pitch.

The shift, was that the culture became structural and the results followed. Across the programme, academy ways of working rose around 25%, club academy productivity climbed (more players reaching the first team), club transfer income grew as a direct consequence, the league climbed roughly six places in the rankings and grew 91% in total market value, and the youth national teams qualified and went deep in tournaments.