LTT Aula: Football’s New Training Ground – Knowledge
LTT Aula is built around a simple idea: football knowledge grows faster when people inside the game learn from each other.
Find out more on: www.lttaula.com – Special offer for fcbusiness readers: Get 10% of the cost of the course using FCB10_LTTAULA before 31st July 2026
The world of education is changing. This world is also a multi-trillion-dollar business that is currently reaching up to $8trn globally, and, according to some projections, is due to reach double figures by as early as 2030 – making it worth much more than any single company on the face of Earth, including Space X, Apple, Alphabet or Nvidia.
And the reason it is changing is to a great extent down to these companies just mentioned – as they need more and more productive brain power, but are also shaping the way education is presented and delivered in classrooms, in offices, at home and on the go to hundreds of millions of young and old people worldwide.
What does it have to do with football, you might ask? That is still the same game played on a field demarcated more than a hundred years ago, by 11 players on each team plus a referee, trying to score goals using a standard-sized ball into standard sized goals. Sure, some of the training and sport science used to develop and maintain players at the elite level might use computers and other digital tools, and recruitment at most top clubs might be based on analytics and algorithms, but generally speaking it is still the same good old analogue football, right? Incorrect!
Despite its surface resemblance to the football of old, the modern football industry is now underpinned by entirely different systems where competitions are structured by mathematicians who are able to use their calculations to identify the optimal play system to generate competitiveness and interest, whilst players are developed from a very early age in a professional-feeling environment to be then signed and paid for using a digitised marketplace and payment processing system, all the while broadcasting and betting are providing significant resources and also making commercial returns from the action on the field.
In the same vein, the football clubs themselves up and down the pyramid have moved from family affairs to professional outfits with corporate structures, many owned by MCO groups or with participation of private equity. And this is not limited to just a few clubs in the top leagues around the world – we are talking about an ever-widening system across the vast majority of the confederations, including such far outposts of the game as Oceania, where this year saw the onset of the first truly professional club competition in the region.
New jobs in the game
A few years ago, we spoke about the growing appetite in the football industry for new brains. At the time, we highlighted several specific growth areas: women’s football, where entirely new structures needed to be constructed on par with existing men’s teams; talent identification and recruitment; sport science and performance management. Off the field, the places to find a job we spoke about were in sales, media and creative, as well as premium hospitality where you need more hands-on deck per VIP spectator than with standard attendance spaces.
Of course, the rapid emergence of LLM-based AI and new AI tools have given a correction to this view from several years ago. Sectors such as marketing and media creation were heavily affected by fears that “AI would take people’s jobs”, fuelled by alarming predictions that entire areas of work – particularly in technology, administration and creative industries – could be made redundant by AI agents.
In recent months, there has been a noticeable shift in how this is presented: the formula now is not about replacement, but more about reshaping and adapting. Even big proponents of AI such as Sam Altman or Jeff Bezos, who have developed critical tools and been instrumental in their early adaptation in day-to-day business practices, are now openly discussing how they have realised that AI will not replace humans after all and may even lead to increased demand for human labour.
So, with this in mind, we still firmly believe that the football industry can continue to grow in terms of its labour footprint, as club professionalisation continues both extensively and intensively. But people coming to work in football will increasingly need to be equipped with the ability to use these AI tools on a native level, whilst retaining human control and understanding of where process automations could be beneficial, and where they would be detrimental to the value of football as an experience and a feelings-based business.
The knowledge game: how education is changing football management
Football has spent the last two decades professionalising almost every visible part of the game. Stadiums have improved, broadcast products have become more refined, commercial teams have grown and sporting departments now use data, scouting platforms and performance staff in a way that would have looked unusual not so long ago. But one area is still catching up: the way football learns.
The industry has more information than ever, but information alone does not create better decisions. Clubs, leagues, federations and agencies need ways to exchange experience, test ideas, compare working methods and turn practical knowledge into habits. This is where football education is changing. It is moving away from occasional conferences and isolated training sessions towards more regular, applied and connected forms of learning.
Where and how to get this knowledge?
Vector 1: from formal education to working knowledge
Football management education used to sit mostly in two categories. On one side, academic programmes explained sport through management, economics, law or marketing. On the other side, industry events gave practitioners a place to meet and exchange views. Over the last decade, the offering of sport-related education has bloomed extensively, from one or two exclusive courses here and there like the Liverpool University-based FIMBA or the FIFA Masters, to a consistent and generally ubiquitous proposition at many educational institutions, including some created specifically with the sports, or even more specifically, football industries in mind.
On the practical side, one of the important steps in the evolution of professional sports management education came in 2015 with the creation of the first structured executive programme for club management at the then European Club Association (now European Football Clubs), in which we took a very active part.
The reason it was unique was twofold: firstly, the focus was on people of different backgrounds and professional experiences: with a core of C-level presence but enhanced potentially with less senior but more specialised positions, which would enable people to learn more from exchanges between each other than from listening to lecturers.
The second critical feature was the presence of people from different geographies and football tiers: this allowed to mix and match bigger and smaller club executives, who would be able to find a common ground due to the fact that structurally most clubs are very similar, but the scale of available resources leads to different solutions. And smaller clubs often need to be more creative to remain afloat than their larger peers. Both formats still have value.
But football now needs something in between: structured learning that stays close to real club work. That means studying how a sporting department prepares a transfer window, how a club builds its governance structure, how commercial decisions affect sporting planning, how academy reporting reaches the first team and how ownership expectations are translated into operations. The point is not to turn football into a textbook exercise. The point is to give people inside and around the game a better language for their daily decisions.
Vector 2: football education is becoming more horizontal
For many years, football knowledge travelled vertically. Bigger clubs, larger leagues and former elite players were seen as the main reference points. Smaller clubs often had to learn by observation, by hiring people from larger organisations or by trial and error. That model is changing.
A club from a smaller market may have better academy reporting than a club with a larger budget. A federation may have better stakeholder management than a league. A women’s football project may offer lessons in resource allocation that men’s football has ignored. A club outside Europe may have a stronger understanding of community access, digital fan behaviour or international recruitment.
Learning in football is becoming more horizontal because useful knowledge can now come from many directions. This matters for medium-sized and smaller organisations. They may not be able to copy the financial models of the largest clubs, but they can improve how they think, organise, recruit, communicate and plan.
Vector 3: the classroom is no longer a room
Football people are rarely available for long periods in one place. Their calendars are shaped by matchdays, transfer windows, travel, governance meetings, board deadlines and commercial cycles. This is why new learning formats are emerging. Live online sessions, smaller expert groups, digital casework, recorded briefings, peer exchanges and project-based assessments allow education to fit the rhythm of the industry.
The best formats do not try to replace personal contact. They use online delivery to make regular contact possible, then build learning around cases, discussion and applied tasks. This is the logic behind LTT Aula, which is a distillation of all the experience we have gathered over the last 20 years of working in football management and education fields: a learning space for football people that treats education as a continuous exchange rather than a one-off event. The idea is simple. Bring people closer to the working reality of the game, connect different areas of expertise and create a setting where participants can learn from cases, practitioners and each other.
Vector 4: knowledge now needs translation
Football has many specialists. Lawyers, analysts, coaches, commercial directors, sustainability managers, finance advisers, media people and academy staff may all work inside the same organisation. They often use different language, different data and different time horizons.
One of the challenges for football education is translation. A board member does not need to become a scout but should understand how recruitment decisions are built. A Sporting Director does not need to become a Lawyer but should understand governance risk. A Commercial Director does not need to become a Coach but should understand how sporting identity affects brand positioning and supporter trust. Good football education helps departments understand each other. It creates a shared map of the club.
Vector 5: the next generation needs access earlier
Many people want to work in football, but entry points are unclear. The industry is attractive, competitive and often relationship driven. Young professionals, former players, agents, graduates and club staff looking to move departments need a way to build credibility before they get a senior role. Education can help, but only if it is practical.
Learning should include club structures, budgeting logic, sporting decision-making, fan relations, governance, women’s football, media pressure, internationalisation and project delivery. It should also include mistakes, because football is full of them. A clean case study where every decision works is less useful than a real case where trade-offs are visible. This is why applied football education should not be limited to theory or guest speeches. It should give participants a way to build their own football project, test their assumptions and receive feedback.
The next step Football has always exchanged knowledge informally. Coaches speak to coaches. Executives call executives. Agents compare markets. Former players explain dressing rooms. Supporters understand things that spreadsheets miss. The difference now is that this exchange can and will be structured. LTT Aula sits within this change. It is not about replacing experience with education. It is about making experience easier to share, discuss and apply. In a sport where the margins between good and bad decisions are becoming smaller, the ability to learn may become one of the few advantages that clubs and football professionals can still build without needing the largest budget.
Find out more on: www.lttaula.com – Special offer for fcbusiness readers: Get 10% of the cost of the course using FCB10_LTTAULA before 31st July 2026
