About
Some want to manage
the team. I want to
take the club to
the next level.
I’m Emre Akbas. I build the part of a club that decides the season before it starts: the recruitment, the structure, and the unglamorous calls everyone else gets wrong. This is how I think about the game, and the kind of club I want to build with.
The short version
I didn’t fall for football because of the highlights. I fell for the machinery behind them: why one club turns a modest budget into a European run while another spends twice as much and fights relegation.
The difference is almost never the eleven players you watch on a Saturday. It’s the decisions made months earlier, by people whose names never reach the back page. Recruitment. Structure. The discipline to do the boring things well.
Everything I study and work on comes back to one question: how do you build a club that wins more than it should? This site is where I work that question in public.
Track record
Where I’ve done the work.
AC Milan Academy
Kuwait City · Since 2023
Built the game model, methodology and player-assessment framework inside the AC Milan Academy structure, with objective KPI systems and feedback loops to measure what actually drives results.
Juventus Academy London
London · 2024 to 2025
Worked inside the Juventus Academy structure, translating the club's methodology into a principle-led system with measurable KPIs tied to a defined game model.
Qualifications
UEFA Licence
Tools I work in
Wyscout · Hudl Sportscode · Veo · TacticalPad · LongoMatch · STATSports (GPS)
What I believe
Six things I’m fairly sure about football.
- 01
A club is a system, not a collection of players.
You can buy talent. You can't buy a functioning football operation. The system is the only part that compounds.
- 02
Recruitment is the highest-leverage thing a club does.
Every other decision inherits from who you sign. Get it right and the manager looks like a genius. Get it wrong and no tactics will save him.
- 03
Budget sets the ceiling. Process decides where you land under it.
Clubs that overperform aren't lucky. They are disciplined about the decisions everyone else makes on emotion.
- 04
Most problems blamed on the pitch are structural.
Slow decisions, fuzzy roles and short-termism all surface as bad results. Fix the structure first and the football follows.
- 05
Data earns its place by sharpening judgement, not replacing it.
The numbers narrow the search. People still make the call. Forget that and you buy spreadsheets that can't play.
- 06
A good sporting operation is almost boring.
Repeatable, unglamorous and ruthless about priorities. Boring is what survives a bad run and a board that wants blood.
The work
I’d build with the right club. Not any club.
Somewhere that would rather be clever than rich, and durable than quick: a club serious about building a real sporting operation instead of chasing the next quick fix. That’s the work worth doing, and the only work that interests me.