Talent Isn’t Hired, It’s Built: What Scaleups Can Learn from Football
- Darren Emery
- 4 hours ago
- 6 min read
Why your talent problem is really a systems problem.
Every survey of mid-sized UK firms throws up the same result: “skills and talent shortages” are a top barrier to scaling. The ScaleUp Institute has flagged this consistently in its reports. Sector studies echo it. Executives repeat it.
The default reaction? Push it to HR. Hire harder. Pay more. Throw in a benefits package and a LinkedIn advert. Then complain that the pipeline is dry.
But talent shortages are not an HR problem. They are a strategy problem.
Because what really determines whether you have the skills you need is not your recruitment team’s ability to trawl the market. It’s how you design the work, how you develop people on the job, and how you build a system where talent emerges and stays.
Or, to borrow a sporting analogy: you don’t win the Premier League by buying one flashy striker. You win by building a system that produces players season after season.
Winning Teams Don’t Just Buy Players
Consider football. Every struggling club knows it can’t buy its way out of trouble with one or two marquee signings. Even if you land a superstar, it doesn’t fix a broken system. If there’s no academy pipeline, no tactical cohesion, no bench strength, the club collapses as soon as pressure mounts.
Winning clubs think longer term. They invest in youth academies. They nurture talent in-house. They design training programmes that sharpen skills and create adaptability. Players rotate, experiment with positions, and learn how to work within the system.
That’s why the best teams can withstand injuries, transitions, and tactical shifts - the system produces talent faster than it loses it.
Take Brighton & Hove Albion. Since 2019, they’ve made over £450 million in profit from player sales while still finishing top-half in the Premier League, thanks to a pipeline that develops and integrates talent relentlessly. Bournemouth followed a similar playbook: their academy graduates and smart recruitment have underpinned their resilience in the top flight despite a fraction of the budget of rivals.
Or look at Scott McTominay. At Manchester United, he was often written off as “not good enough.” Move him to a different system, and he thrives - so much so that he went on to win Serie A Midfielder of the Season at Atalanta, driving their unexpected title push. The lesson? Dead systems make bad talent calls. Healthy systems reveal and amplify talent.
Business is no different. Companies that treat talent as a system problem, not an individual problem, scale sustainably. Companies that don’t stay stuck - overpaying for scarce skills while watching good people walk out the door.
The Strategic Lens on Talent
If you step back, three strategic choices determine whether your organisation suffers from “talent shortages” or whether it builds capacity faster than it burns it:
Job design - Are your roles designed around learning, collaboration, and adaptability, or are they rigid boxes that stifle growth?
On-the-job development - Do people actually get better while doing the work, or is learning outsourced to occasional training courses that tick a box?
Hiring for adaptability - Are you optimising for today’s skill set, or for the ability to stretch into tomorrow’s challenges?
These are not HR policies. They are core strategic decisions about how your organisation creates value.
1. Fix Job Design
Too many firms design jobs like static assembly-line posts. Responsibilities are narrow. Processes are fixed. Success is defined as “doing what the job description says.”
The problem? Work has moved on. Software development, digital operations, product management - these are adaptive, learning-driven domains. Locking people into rigid job specs is like asking a midfielder to “only ever pass sideways.”
Winning organisations design jobs as platforms for development. They create room for stretch assignments, rotations, and exposure to different parts of the system. That’s how you keep people engaged, growing, and valuable.
As Spotify Leader, Cliff Hazell put it: “If your org has dead wood, either you hired dead wood or you hired live wood and killed it.”
That’s not an HR critique - that’s a system failure.
2. Make Development a Daily Habit
Training budgets are not development strategies. Sending staff on the occasional external course may look good on paper, but it rarely changes capability at scale.
The equivalent in sport would be sending your striker to a two-day finishing school in Spain, then throwing him back into the Premier League without practice in your system.
On-the-job development is where the compounding happens. Pairing. Coaching. Retrospectives. Shadowing. Cross-functional squads. The daily, structured habits that make people sharper as a byproduct of delivery.
This is why academies work in football: 14-year-olds train and play within the same tactical patterns as the senior team. By the time they debut, they’re not learning the basics. They’re fluent in the system.
Businesses can do the same. Bake development into the flow of work. Don’t outsource it to HR courses.
According to LinkedIn’s 2024 Workplace Learning Report, 93% of organisations worry about retention, but companies with strong internal mobility see 2x higher retention rates. Development isn’t just a nice-to-have - it’s the single biggest lever to keep your best people.
3. Hire for Adaptability, Not Just Skills
Most recruitment briefs read like shopping lists: “Must have 5 years of X framework, experience with Y system, proven track record in Z domain.”
That’s the equivalent of only signing players who can execute one specific tactic. It works until the game changes.
Winning firms hire for adaptability: problem-solving ability, learning speed, collaborative mindset. The skill you need tomorrow is not on your job description today. If you’re only hiring for the latter, you’ll always be behind.
Think again of Brighton. They scout not just for current ability but for underlying attributes - decision-making under pressure, adaptability across systems, resilience. That’s why they can slot players in and watch them excel where others can’t.
Why This Matters for Scale
The ScaleUp Institute has been blunt: access to talent is the number one barrier holding back UK scaleups. Not capital. Not demand. Talent.
And yet, most firms approach it tactically: fill vacancies. Compete on salary. Run another recruitment drive.
The strategic reality is this:
If your job design blocks growth, you’ll burn people out.
If your development is externalised, your bench will always be thin.
If your hiring optimises for today, you’ll forever be chasing tomorrow.
No wonder strategic initiatives stall. You’re trying to build a long-term play with a squad designed for short-term firefighting.
And the cost is not just cultural. Replacing a mid-level professional costs 1.5-2x their salary. Retention isn’t just about being a nice place to work - it’s about protecting the bottom line.
The Executive Playbook
So what does this mean for leaders - COOs, CIOs, CTOs, CPOs, CEOs - who feel the pinch of talent shortages?
Redesign roles for adaptability - Ensure every role has scope for stretch, learning, and exposure to adjacent skills. If your job descriptions are written like checklists, start again.
Turn delivery into development - Build rituals (pairing, coaching, feedback loops) that make people better every week. Don’t rely on classroom fixes.
Audit your pipeline - What’s your equivalent of the academy? How are you developing internal talent for tomorrow’s needs?
Shift recruitment mindset - Hire fewer “perfect CVs” and more adaptable learners. Build a squad, not a shopping list.
Measure throughput, not headcount - The point is not how many people you have, but how much value your system produces.
The Strategic Payoff
Here’s the upside: when you treat talent as a strategy problem, not an HR problem, you don’t just fix shortages. You unlock throughput.
Faster scaling - Internal pipelines fill gaps before recruitment cycles can.
Lower churn - People stay where they grow.
Greater resilience - Teams adapt to change, rather than stalling.
Higher ROI - You invest once in system design, and it compounds every quarter.
Benjamin Franklin had it right: “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”
The best leaders today don’t just invest in knowledge; they design organisations where knowledge multiplies.
That’s what makes the difference between firms who constantly complain about skills gaps and firms who build systems that scale.
Closing Thought
Brighton don’t outperform richer clubs by accident. Bournemouth don’t survive in the Premier League by luck. They’ve built academies, systems, and recruitment philosophies that turn scarcity into strength.
Your business can do the same. The talent you need is not “out there” waiting to be hired. It’s inside your system, waiting to be developed.
Treat it as a strategy problem - and watch the shortages disappear.
