You're Not Going To Become A Footballer

Given that I didn’t make Tuchel’s preliminary squad for the World Cup this summer

It’s time for me to finally give up on my dream of representing England and Manchester United

(If only I’d had better knees and an ounce of footballing talent, I probably would have made it… hard to say)

Obviously it’s cliche to say ‘It’s every boys dream to play professional football’, it almost was and wasn’t mine - it was in the sense that I lived and breathed football as a kid, but I was acutely aware very early on of my limitations as a player.

And although I’d win many a top goalscorer award for Stonydelph Boys, I probably wouldn’t be setting the world alight outside of the Tamworth U10s league.

The thing with football is that it’s a huge market - there is no shortage of people who’d love to make it. There’s not that much demand for people - teams can only have small squads, there’s only so many teams etc etc.

So in terms of supply and demand, it’s not particularly leveraged, right?

Which is also true of a lot of coaching businesses in the industry at the moment

There’s not much differentiation.

Peter Thiel makes the point that the next Bill Gates won’t build an operating system, the next Larry Page won’t make a search engine, the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t make a social network.

Basically if you’re copying people, you’re not going to make something new

Now whether we should care about this or not, is very much a ‘choose your hard’ moment for coaches

If you’re copying people, you’ll find it way easier to ‘create’ stuff

But also loads harder to sell - because the same thing is elsewhere

If you create new stuff - that’s much more effort up front. But easier to sell, because (providing you’ve created to solve a problem for a market) - there’s no one else.

If it were me? I’d always choose the create something new ‘hard’

It’s more enjoyable, more rewarding process, more satisfying to deliver

You’ll see that in all the things I’ve made - I’m the only person I’m aware of created a productivity programme for coaches, the Idea Factory and also Magnetise Your Market (launching soon) is the only product of its kind.

It’s possible that you might get more from copying others and then selling hard - this will suit some people. Just not many I know, certainly not on my side of the industry.

Which goes to show one thing - creating is everything.