The Job Before the Job: Who Can Afford to Work in Football?

Almost everyone trying to build a career in football hears the same advice sooner or later: get experience. It is not bad advice. Clubs do not only want people who have completed a degree or taken a few online courses; they tend to value people who have at least some understanding of how football actually works as a workplace. It is difficult to learn from the outside how quickly plans can change on a matchday, what the week looks like inside an academy, the pressure a media team faces in the hours before kick-off, or how little time an analyst may have to prepare when two matches are only three days apart. Some things in football really are learned by being inside the environment. The problem starts when getting into that environment means working for months unpaid or for very little money.

Some people can afford to do that. They live close to the club, stay with family, have another job or enough financial support to manage for a few months without a proper income. For someone else, the same “opportunity” means paying for train tickets or petrol every week, buying food on matchdays, using their own laptop and equipment, sometimes covering software costs and giving up weekends when they could otherwise be earning money. In scouting, analysis and academy roles in particular, the real cost can be much higher than it looks on paper. Two training sessions and one match a week may not sound like a huge commitment, but once the travel to evening sessions, weekend away games and reports completed after the match are included, a large part of the week can disappear into an unpaid role. A position may be free for the club while being anything but free for the person doing it.

This kind of inequality is difficult to see because it often operates before the recruitment process even begins. Job descriptions do not say “candidates who live with their parents preferred” or “must be able to survive for six months without an income”. They do not need to. Some people look at the hours, the travel and the total cost and decide not to apply. That means the people football loses are not all sitting in rejection folders. Some never enter the candidate pool at all.

That matters even more now because football is no longer a workplace made up only of players, coaches and a handful of administrative roles. Professional clubs, and increasingly semi-professional organisations, employ performance analysts, data specialists, scouts, videographers, designers, developers, physiotherapists, safeguarding staff, commercial teams and content producers. In theory, there are more routes into football than ever before. In practice, many of those routes still include another job before the first real job: the experience you need to put on your CV. Sometimes it is called an internship, sometimes volunteering, and sometimes it begins as “a few hours of help” before quietly turning into a responsibility that lasts for most of a season.

It would be wrong to treat every unpaid role in football as the same thing. Grassroots football depends on volunteers, and smaller clubs simply do not have the budgets of professional organisations. A well-run internship or volunteer placement can genuinely become the start of a career. Spending a few months around an experienced recruitment team, carrying out analysis on real match footage, working with academy staff or taking on genuine responsibilities inside a media department can teach things that are very difficult to learn from the outside. There is another reality too: in football, the first paid opportunity often comes not from a formal recruitment process but because someone you have already worked with is willing to say, “this person can do the job”. Ignoring that would give a false picture of how the industry actually works.

The problem is that the word “experience” can hide two completely different kinds of arrangement. Spending eight weeks shadowing an analyst, helping with selected tasks, sitting in on meetings and receiving regular feedback can be a genuine learning experience. Producing opposition reports every week, clipping match footage, delivering work to deadlines and becoming part of a workflow the coaching staff relies on for most of a season is something else. The same distinction exists in scouting. Going to a few matches with an experienced scout and learning how they assess players is not the same as being responsible for repeatedly covering a territory and filing reports for the club. Media and academy roles have similar boundaries. Once a club regularly depends on someone’s work, availability and output, it becomes harder to describe the arrangement as something being offered mainly for that person’s development.

Football also has an advantage that many other industries do not: people desperately want to work in it. If one person says no, there is often another applicant willing to accept the conditions. The effect becomes stronger when a famous club is involved. A role you would never consider doing unpaid in another industry can suddenly look attractive when there is a Premier League, Bundesliga or Championship badge at the top of the advert. Smaller clubs create a different kind of appeal because they are often seen as one of the most realistic routes into the professional game. Sometimes that works. It is not unusual for an analyst, scout or media worker to start in non-league or semi-professional football and move into the professional game a few years later. But a club badge on a CV does not automatically equal development.

Alongside money, the second major barrier is access to people. “Build your network” is almost as common as “get experience” when football careers are discussed. Again, there is truth in it. Trust still matters enormously in scouting, coaching and recruitment, and clubs continue to place serious weight on personal recommendations. But networking is not a completely free or equal process either. Going to matches costs money. Coaching and scouting courses cost money. Conferences cost money. Travelling to meet people costs money. Even being able to spend a weekday evening at an industry event instead of taking a paid shift elsewhere is a form of access. Someone whose family already knows a person working at a professional club and someone sending their first cold message to a club through LinkedIn or a general email address may both be “networking”, but they are not starting from the same place.

Football career stories are also usually told through the people who managed to remain in the system. The scout who spent years driving around lower-league grounds before receiving an offer from a professional club. The analyst who started as a volunteer and later earned a full-time contract. The videographer who spent weekends filming non-league football and eventually joined a professional media team. These are real and worthwhile stories. But we rarely hear from the people with similar ability who could not afford to stay on the same path. A graduate who takes a warehouse job because rent needs paying is not less committed to football. A young scout who stops travelling to three matches a week because fuel costs have become too high has not suddenly lost their ability to evaluate players. A candidate who turns down a six-month internship in London because moving there without a salary is unrealistic is not automatically less suitable for the role. Sometimes people are not giving up on football. They simply cannot afford the route they are being asked to take into it.

There is an interesting contradiction here with football’s own approach to recruitment. Clubs spend huge amounts of time and money looking for overlooked players. Scouts are sent into smaller leagues, youth competitions and markets that others do not watch closely enough. Data departments search through thousands of profiles to find players who have not yet reached the radar of bigger clubs. Football understands perfectly well that talent is not always sitting in the most convenient place waiting to be discovered. The same curiosity is not always applied to the people being hired behind the scenes. If getting into a department first requires months of unpaid work, regular travel, the right introductions and some other way of covering living costs, then part of the candidate pool has already been filtered out before anyone starts comparing ability.

The solution is not to pretend every club can suddenly build a large graduate programme. For smaller organisations, that would be unrealistic. But unpaid and low-paid roles can still have clearer boundaries. How many hours are expected each week? Are expenses covered? Who is responsible for supervising the person? What will they actually learn? When does the placement end? A structured eight-week placement with expenses and proper mentoring is very different from asking someone to attend every Saturday, join midweek sessions and produce regular work for an indefinite period in return for “CV experience”. Clubs that can afford to pay for genuine entry-level work should do so. Those that genuinely cannot should at least make sure the person receives something concrete in return: training, feedback, a proper reference and real development.

Candidates should also be willing to resist the power of the badge a little more. Not every football opportunity is a good opportunity. Before accepting a role, it is reasonable to ask who you will be working with, what you are actually going to learn, where previous interns or volunteers went afterwards, how much time the role will really take and what it will cost you to do it. Building your own scouting reports, creating an analysis portfolio, taking on limited but meaningful responsibility at a local club or producing your own media work can sometimes be more useful than spending months doing vague tasks at a famous organisation. There is no single legitimate route into football.

Football is not going to become an easy industry. Competition is high and hundreds of people may want the same role. People at the start of their careers will still need to improve their skills, produce their own work, contact organisations and accept that their first job may be far from the position they eventually want. There is nothing wrong with that. But a competitive industry and an industry in which success depends partly on who can afford to remain unpaid for the longest are not the same thing.

Football believes in finding overlooked talent perhaps more than almost any other industry. It may be worth applying that same instinct not only to players on the pitch, but also to the analysts, scouts, coaches, designers, recruitment staff and executives clubs will need in the future.

Some of them may already have tried to get in.

The problem may not have been a lack of talent. Experience simply became too expensive.

At Kickwise, we do not see this only as a question of equal opportunity. We do not believe a career in football should be shaped by the family someone comes from, the city they happen to live in, who they already know, or whether they can afford to work unpaid for months. Talent, effort and potential should not be pushed aside by financial circumstances. We want to help build a fairer, more accessible and more equal football career environment; one where opportunities are not reserved mainly for those who are already close to the system, but are also within reach of people who are more likely to be excluded from it. We know this is a structural issue and far too large for any single platform to solve. But making opportunities easier to find, improving access to job information, never charging candidates and reducing unnecessary financial and social barriers are all part of why Kickwise exists.