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Independent research · 2026–27

How clubs prepare their sporting decisions

A short survey for sporting directors, technical directors, presidents and owners, in their own words: who is involved, what support you use, and when you need it. In return, you see how clubs like yours decide.

  • About 9 minutes
  • In English
  • Every question optional

Run by Sinopis, an independent football advisory based in Italy. Who we are and why we ask ↓

In collaboration with {{partner}}

Where the research stands

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Desk review

What public sources show, and what they cannot

Alongside the survey, we are running a systematic review of public sources: four clubs drawn at random in each of 62 leagues, in 59 countries across Europe, Asia, the Americas and Oceania (248 clubs).

Interim results

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Foreign-player rules differ widely between leagues. Results on the roles that clubs make visible will follow once each club has been coded twice.

Read the abstract: methods, interim results and limitations

Who decides, and with what support? A systematic desk review of sporting decision structures in professional football clubs

Chiara Valentina Blandino, Mattia Stella · Sinopis Football Advisory, Milan, Italy · Correspondence: research@sinopisfc.com · Structured abstract, research in progress, 7 November 2026.

Background. Professional football clubs take recurring, costly sporting decisions: appointing coaches, building squads, signing players. Research on who takes these decisions has focused mainly on the largest European leagues. Little comparative evidence covers clubs in mid-sized leagues elsewhere. Yet head-coach changes are frequent and costly, and the sporting director role is still loosely defined, so knowing who decides, and under which constraints, matters for clubs, leagues and the people who train sporting directors.

Research questions. How are sporting decisions organised in professional football clubs inside and outside the largest European leagues, and under what pressures and constraints are they taken? Specifically: (1) which sporting decision roles clubs make visible in their official communication, and how this varies by region; (2) how often clubs change head coach in a season; (3) what public sources show about the rules that constrain recruitment and about the financial cost of sporting errors; (4) how advisory and data providers present the support they offer to clubs.

Methods. Systematic desk review of publicly available sources, conducted since early October 2026 as the desk strand of a mixed-methods study that also includes a survey of club decision-makers and follow-up interviews (by call or in writing). The review follows PRISMA 2020 and PRISMA-S where they apply, guidance for grey and multivocal literature reviews and the standard criteria for evaluating secondary data. A stratified random sample of four clubs per league was drawn, with fixed seeds, from 62 leagues, mostly first divisions, in 59 countries across Europe, Asia, the Americas and Oceania (n = 248). For each club, the official website (staff, organisation and contact pages, official announcements) is read in the original language and coded for five indicators: a published sporting organisation, a named sporting or technical director, a named head of recruitment or chief scout, named scouts and named analysts. Each club is coded twice, independently, and the source is recorded for every role. Context comes from head-coach changes in 85 leagues, the FIFA Registration Ban List, foreign-player rules, league salary disclosures, the annual reports of listed clubs and the public messages of advisory and data providers. Searches are run in the language of each market and logged session by session. Crowd-edited player databases, professional social networks and pages behind log-ins, paywalls or bot protection are excluded as sources for club roles; head-coach changes are the one exception and are counted from collectively edited season records (see Limitations). Each source is rated for reliability. Proportions will be reported with Wilson 95% confidence intervals and agreement between coders with Cohen’s kappa; disagreements are resolved by a third reading of the source.

Interim results. On average there is about one head-coach change per club per season (85 leagues, last completed season), with large differences between regions. In two listed Danish clubs, exit costs in seasons with two coach changes equalled about 5% and 6% of revenue. In the Korean first division (2025 season), foreign players earned on average 3.5 times as much as domestic players. Limits on registered foreign players ranged from five per club (Chinese Super League, 2025) to nine (Brazil, to fall to five by 2030), while Korea removed its squad limit in 2026 but allows at most five foreign players on the pitch. Results on the roles that clubs make visible, and on how providers present their support, will be reported once double coding is complete.

Limitations. Public sources show what clubs disclose, not how decisions are made inside them: a role not found is coded as “not published”, not as “absent”. Coach-change counts rely on collectively edited season records, and evidence on the cost of error is limited to two listed clubs. The sample gives equal weight to each league, so it does not represent all clubs proportionally, and websites change over time, so every reading is dated.

Next steps. The desk findings will be compared with the results of the survey and the follow-up interviews. The review will be repeated in 2027, and the full protocol is available from the authors on request. The coding manual and the anonymised club-level dataset will be shared openly. We welcome collaboration with universities and research groups (joint analysis and publication, independent coding, student theses) and with leagues, federations and training programmes willing to share data.

Ethics. The desk review uses public information only and records no personal data beyond published job titles. Interviews and the questionnaire follow informed-consent procedures.

Funding and interests. This research is conducted by Sinopis Football Advisory, which offers advisory services to football clubs. No external funding.

Keywords: football; sporting director; player recruitment; head-coach turnover; club governance; systematic review; grey literature; mixed methods.

How we counted

Systematic review of publicly available sources, run alongside the survey and the follow-up interviews, following PRISMA 2020 and PRISMA-S where they apply. Four clubs drawn at random, with fixed seeds, from each of 62 leagues, mostly first divisions, in 59 countries: 248 clubs.

Each club's official website is read in the original language and coded for five indicators: a published sporting organisation, a named sporting or technical director, a named head of recruitment or chief scout, named scouts and named analysts. Each club is coded twice, independently, and the source of every role is recorded.

Context comes from head-coach changes in 85 leagues (counted from collectively edited season records), the FIFA Registration Ban List, foreign-player rules, league salary disclosures and the annual reports of listed clubs.

Last updated: 7 November 2026.

Public sources show what clubs disclose, not how decisions are made inside them. That is what the survey asks you.

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The survey

What the survey asks

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Who it is for

People who take part in sporting decisions at professional football clubs, in any country and league.

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Titles differ from club to club. If you take part in these decisions, the survey is for you.

Take part

Three steps. The first takes 9 minutes.

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What you need to know

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Ready? Your answers show what public sources cannot: how decisions are prepared inside clubs.

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Someone else at your club takes these decisions? Send them the link. One answer per club is enough.

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Questions

Before you start

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Ready? Take the survey ↑

Who we are · the work before the decision

The biggest decisions often arrive with the least time.

When the window is closing or a coach leaves, those who decide carry a lot on their shoulders. Decisions like these deserve solid groundwork: we prepare it with your club, and the decision stays yours.

Our rules

  • We work only for clubs, for a fixed fee, never for players or agents.
  • Any link between our founders and a club is declared in writing before we start.
  • We do not promise sporting results or transfers.
  • We do not replace your sporting director: the decision stays with you.

Sinopis is run by its two founders, who also lead this research. We prepare full club analyses and present them to the club's president and sporting director. Before asking clubs anything, we read the public sources of 248 clubs in 62 leagues.

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Why a survey

We want to build our work around what clubs actually need, not around what we assume.

We never use your answers to contact you or offer you anything, unless you ask us to. The results are shared with everyone who takes part, and with anyone who visits this page.

A red-earth preparatory drawing of a footballer, half covered by the plaster of the finished fresco

Sinopia [siˈnɔːpja] · noun

The red-earth drawing beneath a fresco. It supports the painter from the first line and holds the work together, yet once the fresco is finished no one sees it.

Where our name comes from, and the role we want: an ally behind your decisions.

Privacy

Privacy notice for the research

Last updated: 10 November 2026. In short: the survey asks for no name or email, data are stored in the EU, and results are published only in aggregate.

Read the full privacy notice

What the research is for

We want to understand how professional football clubs take major sporting decisions and what support they need, so that the service we build follows clubs' priorities. The research is not a sales contact: we do not represent players and we do not pitch anything.

What we collect, and why

1. The survey. It does not ask for your name or email. It asks about your role (in broad categories), the country and level of your club (top division, second, or third and lower), whether your club is part of a multi-club group, and how your club is organised. The club name is optional. If you give it, your answers can be linked to you ("the sporting director of club X"), so we treat them as personal data and keep them confidential. Please do not name other people in the open questions. We also record a short code for the channel through which you reached the survey (for example your league's newsletter or this page), so we know which invitations work. At the end, the survey shows you a code for your answers: on its own it identifies nobody, and it matters only if you choose to give it to us in a contact form (point 2). Tally does not store IP addresses with submissions, we do not switch on any feature that would use them, and we add no tracking or analytics tools to the survey or to this page. Tally uses only the technical cookies the form needs to work.

2. The contact forms (optional). At the end of the survey you can ask for a 25-minute call, or book a free first reading of your club (two or three observations from public data, in a 30-minute video call). Here we collect your email (required), your message with the dates and times that suit you and, if you wish, your name. To book a first reading we also ask for the name of your club, which we use only to prepare it. The form also receives from the survey the country of your club, which we use only to show the right consent boxes. If you tick the box, we also use your email to tell you when the results are published. If you wish, you can paste the survey code: we then link your survey answers, and any written answers (point 3), to your contact details, so the call can start from them. In that case your answers are no longer anonymous to us. We use these data only for what you asked: the call, the first reading or the notice about the results.

3. Written answers (optional, anonymous). You can instead answer a few longer questions in writing. This form asks only for your role (broad categories) and the country and level of your club, never your name, email or club. It receives from the survey only the survey code and your answers to two survey questions, so that the questions can refer to them. It runs in a separate Tally account from the contact forms, so your written answers stay anonymous unless you give us your survey code in a contact form (point 2).

4. How the invitation reached you. We do not buy contact lists and we do not send unsolicited emails. The invitation reaches you through your league or federation, or through someone who knows you and agreed to pass it on. If you write to us, for example by replying to a message, we use your email address only to answer you or arrange the call, and we keep it with the contact details below.

5. The call. Calls take place on Zoom. If you agree to a recording, it is saved on our own computer, not in Zoom's cloud. We record a call only if you agree: we ask at the start, and you can say no or ask us to stop at any time without giving a reason. The recording is used only to write an accurate transcript and is deleted within 30 days of the call. Neither the transcript nor our notes include the names of other people.

6. If we contacted you by phone. Before writing to anyone, we sometimes phone the offices of clubs, leagues and federations, using the numbers they publish on their official websites, to ask whether we may send the invitation and to whom. If you are the person we spoke with, we note your name and role as you gave them, your club or organisation, the date, your answer and the email address you gave us. We use these notes only to send the one email you agreed to, at most one reminder, and to make sure we never contact anyone who said no. We rely on our legitimate interest in keeping a record of who agreed to be contacted (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR), and you can object at any time by writing to us.

Legal basis

We process the survey, the written answers and the contact forms on the basis of your consent (Article 6(1)(a) GDPR), given when you submit the survey or a form, or tick the consent box in a contact form. You can withdraw it at any time by writing to us; this does not affect what we did before. The notes of phone contacts (point 6) rely on our legitimate interest (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR).

Who we are

This research is run by Chiara Valentina Blandino and Mattia Stella, the founders of Sinopis, an independent football advisory based in Milan, Italy. Until Sinopis is incorporated as a company, the two of us are joint controllers of the personal data described here (Article 26 of the EU General Data Protection Regulation, GDPR). We have agreed between us who handles requests and who looks after the data, and you can ask us for the essence of this agreement. You can contact either of us at one address: research@sinopisfc.com. When the company is incorporated, it will become the controller and we will update this notice.

Where the data are kept

The survey and the forms run on Tally (Tally BV, Belgium), with data stored in the European Union. Our email is provided by Aruba S.p.A. (Italy), with data stored in Italy. Calls run on Zoom (Zoom Communications, Inc., United States). Zoom takes part in the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, which the European Commission recognises as giving adequate protection. Only the two of us can access the data. If you answer from outside the EU, your data are transferred to the EU, where the GDPR protects them. If your club is in China, Chinese law requires your separate consent before your contact details leave China: the contact forms ask for it with a separate box.

How long we keep them

  • Contact details (email, name, the survey code if you gave it and, for a first reading, the club): deleted 6 months after the results are published (by September 2027), or earlier if you ask.
  • Notes of phone contacts: deleted at the same time as the contact details. If you asked not to be contacted, we keep only the name of your club or organisation on a "do not contact" list until the research ends, so that we do not call again by mistake.
  • Call notes: kept with the contact details and deleted at the same time.
  • Survey and written answers: kept until 30 April 2027, the time we need to analyse them, and then deleted; after that we keep only aggregated results. Published results are always aggregated: no club or person is named, and countries with fewer than 3 answers are not named.

The results

The overall results will be published on this page by the end of March 2027. You do not need to leave any details to read them.

Your rights

You can ask us to see, correct or delete your data, to restrict or object to its use, or to receive a copy, by writing to research@sinopisfc.com. We will reply within one month. You also have the right to complain to a data protection authority; in Italy this is the Garante per la protezione dei dati personali (garanteprivacy.it).

Changes

If we change this notice, we will update the date at the top and, where the change matters, tell the people who gave us their email.