Brazil, 13th Jul 2026 – I spend most of my professional life evaluating early-stage companies and founders, deciding which teams are worth backing before the market has made that decision obvious. I didn’t expect that skill set to transfer so directly to how I think about football talent, but it has, almost point for point. The instincts that keep me from overpaying for a flashy pitch deck are the same instincts that make me skeptical of a highlight reel, and I think football’s talent evaluation world could learn a great deal from how serious technology investors actually make decisions.

Traction Is Not the Same as Trajectory

In early-stage investing, one of the first lessons you learn is that current traction — this month’s growth number, this quarter’s user count — tells you far less than it feels like it should. What actually predicts outcomes is trajectory: the rate of improvement, the team’s ability to learn from failure, and whether the fundamentals underneath the flashy metric are getting stronger or just being temporarily inflated. A company with modest current numbers but a steep, consistent improvement curve is usually a better bet than one with impressive numbers and a flat or declining curve.

Football scouting has the same trap, and most of the sport hasn’t caught up to how to avoid it. A standout performance in a single tournament or a hot run of goals over six weeks generates enormous attention, the same way a viral growth spike generates enormous investor interest. But the more important question, in both cases, is what the trend line looks like over a longer horizon, and whether the improvement is coming from something durable — decision-making, work ethic, coachability — or from a temporary and unrepeatable set of circumstances.

The Team Around the Talent Matters as Much as the Talent

Any experienced investor will tell you they back the team as much as the idea, because even a brilliant product fails in the hands of a team that can’t execute, communicate, or adapt when the plan inevitably goes wrong. I apply the exact same logic to football talent. A gifted young player surrounded by a poor environment — bad coaching relationships, no structured development support, no one holding them accountable off the pitch — is a much riskier proposition than a slightly less gifted player inside an environment built to develop people properly.

This is why, when I look at football from an investment perspective, I care as much about the institutional environment around a talented young player as I do about the player’s raw ability. The environment is often the actual variable that determines the outcome.

Diligence Beyond the Highlight Reel

Serious technology investors don’t make decisions off a polished pitch. They talk to former colleagues, check how a founder behaved during a previous company’s hard moments, and probe for how someone handles disagreement and failure, because that’s where the real signal lives. The equivalent in football would be looking well beyond a highlights compilation: how a player responds to being substituted, how they train on a day when they’re not the center of attention, how they interact with staff who have no bearing on their next contract. That kind of diligence is harder and slower than watching a reel, which is exactly why it’s more valuable.

Optionality and the Danger of Overcommitting Early

Good early-stage investors also understand the value of optionality — not betting everything on a single unproven signal before there’s enough evidence to justify the size of the bet. Football, by contrast, often does the opposite with young talent: enormous transfer fees, long contracts, and outsized public expectation placed on a player who is still, developmentally, an unfinished product. I think the sport would benefit from importing some of the discipline technology investors apply here: sizing commitment to the actual level of proven evidence, not to hype.

The Discipline of Being Comfortable Saying No

Perhaps the most transferable lesson is the hardest one: disciplined investors say no far more often than they say yes, even to opportunities that look exciting, because the cost of a bad bet compounds over years. Football organizations that build the same discipline into how they evaluate talent — willing to pass on an exciting name because the underlying fundamentals don’t hold up to scrutiny — tend to build more sustainable pipelines than those chasing every headline-grabbing prospect.

Two Different Fields, One Underlying Discipline

I don’t think football talent evaluation needs to become identical to venture investing — the sport has its own texture, its own timelines, its own irreducibly human elements. But the underlying discipline, of looking past the loudest signal toward the trajectory, the environment, and the character underneath it, is exactly the same skill in both worlds. It’s the discipline I try to apply everywhere I invest, on a cap table or on a scouting list.

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