Interview: "What got me started was seeing how rotten the process of identifying the industry's leaders was"

The football industry is still caught in old-fashioned ways of hiring executives for key positions. But former headhunter Charles Gould, who once hired executives for financial institutions, is changing all that.

Today he is the founder and CEO of Retexo Intelligence, a new breed of data-driven sports experts. What's more, Retexo doesn't just deliver a list of candidates to clubs - the analytics company gets involved in the initial strategy process too.

Foreign ownership groups in particular tend to look for people with industry experience, however, according to Gould, they often forget to check whether their candidates actually managed to outperform competitors. 

Gould primarily works on the technical side of football clubs, because one thing he has learned is that the "playing side" always wins when budgets are being drawn up.