Q&A: Matt Wade

Angel City’s technical staff has gained a new member with the addition of Matt Wade as assistant general manager (AGM). Wade, a native of Manchester, England, has a background in consulting for soccer teams and other sports organizations, most recently at Feyenoord in the Netherlands, where he helped the team win a league title and a KNVB Cup, as well as qualifying for the Champions League, in the last three years.

Read on to get to know Wade and learn about his role with the club.

AngelCity.com: Walk us through the basics of your role as assistant general manager.

Matt Wade: It's a new role that I’m excited to step into. Angela and the rest of the sporting leadership has done an amazing job, and the club is going into a new phase of sporting professionalism and that requires some growth. 

The AGM position is primarily responsible for everything on the football side that isn’t medical, performance, or technical. So that includes soccer operations, travel, logistics, player care, administration—but then also adding a layer on, which is around elevating professionalism across all departments. That’s about how we create processes and standards, how we reshape the way that we do things as a football department to operate at the highest level .

Probably my single most important responsibility is the salary cap—compliance with the salary cap, as well as future planning when it comes to roster construction. How do we build winning teams for multiple years instead of just making sure we're compliant this year? Then also understanding the impact of decision-making around certain players. So if we're looking at contract extensions, free agents, signing new players, it'll be my responsibility to help us understand how that player fits within our planning over multiple years.

ACFC: It sounds like you’ll be working closely with Technical Director Mark Wilson, who joined the club in May. How will your two roles relate to each other?

MW: I've been lucky to spend time with Mark the last couple of weeks, and we, first and foremost, view football the exact same way. 

For example, we both view data in scouting and recruitment as being a primary flagging system. It helps add context to preconceptions or feelings you have about players, but it's not like we're trying to “Moneyball” football. Data isn’t the only thing. We talk about eyes, ears, and numbers. So “eyes” is live scouting, “ears” is your intelligence gathering and understanding who the player is—their background, their personality—and “numbers” is the data piece.

In the world I came from, it was mostly about live scouting. It was people who had watched thousands and thousands of games and had spent decades looking at players, and they can spot a great player when they see one. And then other clubs are like, “we will only sign players if their numbers are where we want them to be.” Whereas I think Mark and I are both very balanced in how we view the inputs. We both agree that the contextualization of those inputs is the most important thing—building the right game model, style of play, player profiles, understanding what we're looking for in each position.

But we also have contrasting strengths. He was an ex-player. His football intellect is far better than mine is—I never played at that level—but I came from a consultancy background within sport and worked within a Champions League club in Europe where my primary role was to pull that intellect out and then codify it and implement it in a really strategic way. So I can already feel that we're going to work really well together. We've already started looking at some big-ticket items like the scouting and recruitment processes and how we can lift that.

ACFC: How did you get into this kind of football consulting work?

MW: Not in a traditional way. I went to university in Leeds and graduated with a criminology degree. I wanted to be in the police. I did join for two years on a voluntary basis, then decided that's not the career that I wanted to have—I just loved sport on the weekends too much. 

So after I decided I didn't want to be in the police, I joined an IT business as a salesperson. Then eventually got a job as an account manager for a company called Catapult Sports, which makes the GPS monitors players wear. I spent the first seven months doing account management for the semi-pro teams in England—the teams that train twice a week on Tuesday and Thursday night—and then moved from that role to doing it for the whole of the UK, so Premier League down to League Two. So that was working with practitioners and leaders of these clubs to understand and utilize wearable technology, video technology, and athlete management systems.

What I found really interesting was not really the tech, but it was understanding how technology can play a part in sporting strategies—and then I quickly realized not many clubs have sporting strategies. The CEO from Catapult, Barry McNeill, now the CEO of Bloom Sports Partners, left and took me into the world of sports consultancy. From there, I got a job with Feyenoord through a project that I did with them.

ACFC: What was your experience at Feyenoord like?

MW: Incredibly rewarding. I got to work with some amazing people. When I first joined, we were under-performing. We weren't competing in European competition. We’d won the league once in 20 years—and that was maybe six years before I joined—but I got to work with some really high-performing operators. So Arne Slot, who’s now the Liverpool manager, I had three seasons with him. When I came in, there wasn’t a scouting department or clear growth plans between departments.

The first thing I did was work with the board on creating and implementing a new three-year vision—a strategy for the football club, which went out to all 480+ staff. And then adapting that full-club vision into annual sporting strategy plans that covered vision, mission, values, and competitive advantages. We had three-year sporting goals and then annual objectives and worked with each department on what their role was in helping us achieve those goals.

So I had a lot of freedom. I got a lot wrong, learned a lot, and we had amazing success with the league title. We won two Dutch Cups, and we played Champions League. We had a lot of success on the field, but also off the field with what we built and an ecosystem that we named “One Football Department,” where collaboration and teamwork was huge. All the initiatives and projects that we had were aligned to something that we said was important, whereas before that, every department worked alone.

ACFC: What do you find most challenging, or most interesting, about working in soccer?

MW: Football is the most chaotic sport with the least amount of rules. You have 22 players on a pitch with a ball, and as long as you don't pick it up, you’re kind of all right, in terms of the rules. 

I think the beauty of it is that it's very difficult. You can't necessarily buy success, but you also can't just “Moneyball” football. I think the best clubs can take gut feelings, tacit knowledge and understanding, but then also bring in that piece of evidence and knowledge and processes, and when you can combine them both, that's how you win.

So I would never sit in a room and suggest to Becki, “start this player because she's got these numbers in these stats,” but then I also wouldn't want us to sign a player just because someone worked with them in the past and likes them. So it’s about making decisions based on robust qualitative and quantitative information in a way that minimizes risk, because there’s always a risk of something going wrong—but that’s also part of the fun.

ACFC: Tell us about your upbringing and family.

MW: I grew up in a part of south Manchester called Stockport. We are a Man United family, season ticket holders. I was spoiled growing up watching those Alex Ferguson teams—David Beckham, Ryan Giggs, Andy Cole—everyone great you can think of that played for those teams. In England, especially in Manchester, from the age of four, you play football every day. On the street, kicking balls against cars and fences and people's doors and just annoying all the neighbors. So I was obsessed with football.

My parents are extremely hard-working, kind and generous people, which formed a lot of my values growing up. I'm very people-first and I think that comes from my upbringing. I've got one older brother, four and a half years older than me, and he’s better looking and has all the athletic talent, so I had to work very hard to become a better player than he ever was! 

My amazing wife, Rachael, is a Scouser [from Liverpool]—huge Liverpool fan, we don’t speak on Derby days—and we have a wire-haired vizsla called Winston. He's joining us [in LA] in just over a week, we are excited to get settled as a family in this vibrant city.

I’m incredibly proud to join Angel City FC as assistant general manager—a club that reaches millions through a purpose-driven way of working, a world-leading women’s sports project with inspiring ownership, investors, and leaders who are people-first and championship-focused.