Building value from the core
Building value from the core
Mission Talent, our long-term partnership with the Bulgarian Football Union, has just reached its first big milestone. Here’s what we’ve learned, and where we go next.
Every country that wants to produce great footballers has to start with an honest question: how good is our system at finding and developing young talent, really? Not the version we tell ourselves, the real one.
Over the past months, that’s exactly the question we’ve been helping the Bulgarian Football Union (BFU) answer. Together we’ve completed the opening phase of Mission Talent, a multi-year project to give Bulgaria a modern, joined-up way of nurturing its most promising players. And for the first time, the country has a clear, independent map of where its football stands today and where it wants to go.
Rather than deliver a verdict, we set out to create a shared starting point: a wide-ranging picture of how talent is developed across Bulgarian football right now. How young players are spotted. How they’re coached. How they make the leap from the academy into the professional game.
The value isn’t in the document itself, it’s in what it unlocks. For the first time, everyone in Bulgarian football, from the federation to the clubs to the academies, can look at the same honest snapshot and rally around it. That alignment is where real change begins.
"This is an important moment for Bulgarian football. For the first time we have a clear, independent view of where we stand and where we need to focus in the years ahead. Together with Double Pass, we are building a stronger future for our players, clubs, academies and national teams."
Georgi Ivanov, President of the Bulgarian Football Union
A picture on its own doesn’t develop players. So Mission Talent now shifts from studying the game to changing it, with two projects running side by side.
The first is about raising the bar for Bulgaria’s youth academies. We want every academy to have a clear sense of what “great” looks like, a way to see how they measure up, and a practical roadmap to keep improving, so that talented youngsters get the best possible environment to grow, wherever they happen to play.
The second follows the journey from the youth national teams to the senior side. We’re looking at whether the age-group teams play with a common identity, how the best young players are identified and coached, and how smoothly they can travel from their clubs all the way to representing Bulgaria at the highest level.
At Double Pass, we’ve had the privilege of working with federations and leagues around the world. From Italy and Germany to the Premier League and Major League Soccer. What we’ve learned again and again is that the countries that succeed aren’t the ones with a single brilliant idea. They’re the ones that get everyone rowing in the same direction, and keep at it.
That’s the ambition here: the federation, the clubs, the academies and the national youth teams all working from the same playbook. Bulgaria now also has something it didn’t have before: a benchmark to measure real progress against, year after year. That means young talent can become a lasting priority rather than a one-off project. For us, this milestone is a beginning rather than an end and it’s the part of the work we find most exciting.
"The study we've just completed isn't the finish line, it's the foundation. Mission Talent now enters its most exciting phase, where insight turns into real programmes on the ground. We're proud to keep supporting the BFU in building a more connected, forward-looking home for young talent."
Stig Meylemans, Global Operations Lead Double Pass
