Premier League Squad Planner and Manager
*Work shown with placeholder data. Full walkthrough available on request.
The planning and scouting platform a football group waited nine years for
Top-flight football clubs make multi-million-pound decisions: transfers, contracts, and talent development. Yet much of that planning still lived in spreadsheets and scattered tools.
I was brought in to design a bespoke squad planner for executive decision-making, helping leadership plan squads across a three-year horizon.
The work earned a second engagement: expanding the planner into a complete scouting platform, covering the entire workflow from assigning scouts to matches, through structured player reports, to the profiles and data that feed transfer decisions. A tool the organisation had wanted for nearly a decade, finally in daily use.
Designing for people who already had a way of working
The riskiest thing you can do to a high-performing team is hand them a shiny new tool that makes their day harder. Every design decision started from how scouts, analysts and executives actually work, and made that easier, not different for the sake of it.
The Squad Planner
The planner gives leadership a three-year view of the entire squad — every position, every player, every contract — with the financial picture always in sight.
Three-year horizon
Each year shows squad, budget and signings (existing players + signings = full picture). Years expand for detail and can be edited in a focused one-year view with drag-and-drop squad building, sticky budget summary, and instant search.
Projection and scenario planning
A performance view lets analysts set player utilisation across the whole squad at once and generate team-quality projections — testing "what if" scenarios before committing real money in the transfer market.
Negotiation power
By making contract timelines, valuations and squad gaps visible years ahead, the planner strengthens the club's position in transfer negotiations and helps avoid multi-million-pound missteps.
The Scouting Platform
Following the planner's success, I returned to design the scouting platform: digitising a workflow that had run on documents, emails and memory. Two connected experiences, one system:
For scout managers: A fixture calendar with filters by player, club, competition and scout; creating fixtures, players and teams; and assigning scouts to report on entire games or specific players, with drag-and-drop player selection and briefing notes attached to every assignment.
For scouts: A dashboard of assigned fixtures with clear deadlines and report templates that turn expert observation into consistent, comparable data: game context, in/out of possession analysis, strengths, weaknesses, performance and potential grades, plus a critical question: which clubs in the group could this player be of interest to?
Adopted, used, and genuinely liked
The hardest part of enterprise tools isn't building them, it's getting busy experts to change how they work.
This platform succeeded because it was designed around its users' reality rather than imposed on it. It is now embedded in how the organisation plans squads and scouts talent: a system they had wanted for nearly a decade, in daily use across the group's network of clubs.
Robust data and projections behind high-stakes investments, strengthening transfer negotiations and reducing the risk of multi-million-pound mistakes.
Smarter spending
Received and adopted enthusiastically by scouts, analysts and leadership — the truest measure of UX in an enterprise product.
Trusted by its users
Integral to the organisation's planning and recruitment decision-making, from executive squad strategy to matchday scouting.
Embedded in decisions
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