Football Operations, Transformation & Technology

Your club is multiple businesses. Most run on spreadsheets and email.

Matchday, hospitality, academy, transfers, marketing, facilities — each with its own systems and no shared, costed view of where the time and money actually go. We map it, cost it, then automate it, using the same methodology we built inside a Premier League club under a multi-club ownership group.

Book a free 15-minute call → No obligation, no pitch — just an honest look at what a PLAYBOOK audit would find in your operations.
A value-creation methodology built for private equity portfolios — proven inside football
PE value creation Premier League club Multi-club ownership group

Most clubs can't tell you what a fixture, a signing, or an academy intake actually costs

An operations director isn't running a football team. They're running six businesses under one roof — matchday and hospitality, commercial and retail, academy and player development, transfers and recruitment, marketing and content, facilities and non-matchday venue use — each with its own systems, spreadsheets and people, and almost never a shared view of where the operational cost and risk really sit.

PLAYBOOK maps every one of those processes end-to-end: who does it, how long it takes, and what it costs on a fully-loaded basis. Then it shows you exactly where the waste is, and what fixing it is worth.

Methodology built directly from operational work with a Premier League club, engaged by a multi-club ownership group spanning English and European football.

Illustrative: matchday hospitality journey
Process owners involved 5–7 roles
Systems touched, box office to F&B 4–6 systems
Manually reconciled steps Typically 30–40%
Automatable without new headcount Most of it
Real numbers Mapped in your discovery session

The shape of what a PLAYBOOK audit produces, not a claimed result for any specific club — every club's process map and cost model is built from your own operational data.

How it works

Three steps to operational clarity

No six-month consulting engagement, no frameworks borrowed from another industry. We map how your club actually operates, show you the numbers, and build the fixes.

1

We map your operations

Working alongside your operations, commercial, academy and football operations teams, we capture how work actually flows across a fixture cycle, a transfer window, and a season.

What you get: Visual journey maps in PLAYBOOK, with every step costed on fully-loaded rates.
PLAYBOOK journey map showing matchday hospitality stages and costs

A real PLAYBOOK journey map — matchday hospitality operations for a top-flight club, modelled from public information (not a client engagement).

2

We find the waste

Duplicate data entry between finance, CRM and matchday systems. Manual reconciliation after every fixture. Academy and scouting data that lives in five places, none of them talking to each other.

What you get: A prioritised automation opportunity register with estimated ROI and complexity.
PLAYBOOK Automation Opportunities view ranking five opportunities by annual saving

PLAYBOOK's Automation Opportunities view, ranked by annual saving — from a sample club's journey map.

3

We build the systems

From matchday automations to bespoke platforms — including Athlete Management System architecture, the kind we led for a Premier League club under a multi-club ownership group.

What you get: Working automations and, where scoped, bespoke systems deployed in your environment.
PLAYBOOK automation opportunity card showing the problem, the fix, and the result with cost figures

A real shopping-list opportunity: cost today, one-off to fix, cost after — and what it saves every year.

What we typically map

Six departments, six sets of hidden costs

Every club we've worked inside has found the same pattern: real expertise, running on manual processes never designed for the scale the club has grown to.

🏟️

Matchday & hospitality

Ticketing, box office, F&B and guest journey data spread across separate systems, reconciled by hand after every fixture.

🌱

Academy & player development

Scouting, medical, performance and welfare data captured in different tools with no single view of a player's development.

✈️

Transfers & recruitment

Scouting dossiers, contract status, agent communication compiled manually under deadline pressure during every window.

📊

Commercial & finance reporting

Sponsorship delivery tracking, matchday revenue reconciliation and budget reporting pulled by hand each month.

📣

Marketing

Campaign planning, content approvals and sponsorship reporting — usually run on spreadsheets and email threads with no shared view of what's live or what's working.

🏢

Facilities & non-matchday use

Hiring out the stadium and hospitality spaces for conferences, exec offsites and events outside matchday — a real revenue line that's often manually coordinated across multiple teams.

Built in football, for football

We didn't adapt a generic tool. We built this doing the work.

Led by a transformation specialist with close to three decades in financial services and professional-services transformation — now focused entirely on football club operations, not general consulting.

Engaged directly by a multi-club ownership group spanning English and European football, we led the discovery and architecture for an Athlete Management System (AMS) — the platform designed to bring together player development, medical and performance data — across a Premier League club, and it's exactly the kind of project we live for.

PLAYBOOK's football module — matchday, hospitality, academy and transfer cost modelling — grew out of a separate ask: adapting PLAYBOOK itself for matchday operations, which is when we built out an events model capable of handling tens of thousands of fans moving through the same shared experience at once, and all the logistics that entails.

Premier League club Multi-club ownership group
What that engagement covered
✓
Athlete Management System Discovery, architecture and prototyping spanning player development, medical and performance data across a multi-club ownership group's network — exactly the kind of project we live for.
✓
Cross-club data model A single structure designed to work across every club in the group, each with different systems and ways of working.
What you actually keep

Your club has years of operational knowledge. None of it is usable by AI yet.

Every PLAYBOOK audit leaves you with more than a report — it leaves you with a private knowledge base of exactly how your club operates, one you can ask questions of and get an instant, accurate answer. Think of it as a private Google for your own operations: point any AI tool at it, or use a simple search box — no AI needed — and ask "what's our guest cancellation policy," or "who signs off an academy trial," and get the real answer. Built from what we actually found inside your club, not a generic model guessing at football operations.

Matchday hospitality procedures. Academy safeguarding protocols. Transfer window scouting workflows. Instead of living in someone's head, a shared drive, or a system you don't own, everything we capture during a PLAYBOOK engagement gets kept — once, properly — as your own searchable knowledge base. Use it with whatever AI tool you choose, or skip AI altogether and just search it. It's yours, not locked into our platform or anyone else's.

matchday-hospitality-guest-journey.md academy-safeguarding-protocol.md transfer-window-scouting-dossier.md commercial-sponsorship-delivery.md
Core — OrgOS

Your club's knowledge, ready to ask

Every process, role, responsibility and decision rule PLAYBOOK maps — captured once and kept as your own searchable knowledge base. Ask it a question, get a real answer. Plain text, yours forever, not tied to our platform.

Middle ring — automations

The workflows built from it

Automated workflows and integrations built directly from your knowledge base — matchday reconciliation, chase sequences, reporting — so the answers don't just sit there, they get acted on.

Outer ring — tools

Whatever you run this season

Ticketing platform, CRM, athlete management system — replaceable any time, without losing the knowledge underneath them.

Investment

Clear scope, clear deliverables

Every engagement starts with a free 20-minute discovery call to scope exactly what's involved — how many people we need to speak to, how complex the process is — before you book anything or see a final price. No obligation, no hard sell.

Discovery Audit

Your single biggest operational pain point, contained within one team — matchday car-parking allocation, an academy trials process, or a transfer paperwork step. Fits inside a single half-day of interviews.

From £2,500
One-off engagement
  • Discovery session with the relevant department
  • 1 core process fully mapped and costed in PLAYBOOK
  • 1 OrgOS file for the mapped process
  • Automation opportunity register with ROI
  • Branded report with visual journey map
  • Delivered within 1–2 weeks
Book a call
Departmental Audit

A full function mapped end-to-end — 3–5 core processes, or one process big enough to span several teams on its own, like a full matchday operation. Most matchday-scale scopes land £6,000–£9,000.

From £5,000
One-off engagement
  • 3–5 core processes mapped and costed
  • OrgOS file library across every process mapped
  • Interviews across the department, not just leadership
  • Full cost model with fully-loaded rates
  • Prioritised automation roadmap with ROI
  • Presentation to leadership
Book a call
Full Operations Review

Matchday, commercial, academy and football operations, reviewed together with an executive business case.

From £12,000
One-off engagement
  • Everything in the Departmental Audit, across every function
  • OrgOS file library across every process mapped
  • Staff input for ground-truth time and cost data
  • Cross-department dependency mapping
  • Executive business case document
  • Scoped implementation roadmap, including bespoke builds
Book a call

Automation and bespoke system builds — including AMS-style platforms — are quoted separately once the audit findings define the scope.

About Workthru / Sport

Operations expertise, proven inside football

Not a technology vendor looking for a football use case. An operations and transformation specialist who has done this work inside a Premier League club's ownership group.

Steve Young
Founder, Workthru — Glasgow, Scotland

I specialise in connecting strategy, design, and technology to accelerate business transformation and unlock value.

I work alongside the C-suite leadership and private equity value creation teams to identify and deliver the most commercially impactful areas for change — improving profitability, lead generation, and operational efficiency.

I bring together design-led problem solving, AI and workflow automation, and deep business understanding to reshape how people work and how value flows through the organisation.

My goal: measurable transformation that delivers lasting commercial advantage and a better experience for everyone involved.

28 years in operations, transformation & financial services consulting Creator of PLAYBOOK, the operational intelligence platform behind every audit n8n certified workflow automation

Find out what your club's operations really cost

One free 15-minute call. No obligation, no pitch — just an honest look at what a PLAYBOOK audit would find in your operations.

Book a free 15-minute call →

Prefer email? hello@workthru.co.uk