The Ultimate CRM Buyers Guide for Football Clubs
Reading time:
12 mins
Amit Stern has spent nearly a decade inside the football industry, spanning commercial roles and professional environments. Today, as Head of Sales at EasyCoach, he works closely with clubs and federations to help them move from fragmented day-to-day operations toward a shared, structured way of working.
In this interview, we talk about operational fragmentation, the limits of informal processes, and why structure is less about bureaucracy and more about alignment across a club.
The core problem we’re addressing isn’t a lack of knowledge or talent — it’s fragmentation.
In most football organisations, information is spread across WhatsApp groups, spreadsheets, emails and individual memory. That creates gaps between coaching staff, management and support teams.
EasyCoach is about creating one shared operational reality. When everyone works from the same system, decision-making improves, accountability becomes clearer, and the club can function as an organisation — not just as a collection of good people trying their best.
Communication and documentation.
Early on, informal communication feels efficient — a quick message, a phone call, a coach keeping things in their head. But as a club grows, that informality becomes a bottleneck.
Important information gets lost, responsibilities become unclear, and decisions start depending on individuals rather than processes. At scale, this doesn’t just slow clubs down — it creates real risk.
The biggest gains come from alignment.
When daily operations are structured, coaching staff, management and support teams stop working in parallel worlds. Training plans connect to player data, administrative decisions support sporting goals, and communication shifts from reactive to proactive.
Beyond performance, structure also saves money: fewer staff hours spent on duplication, fewer unnecessary and expensive platforms, and fewer missed data points — data that could become real sporting and financial value in the future.
The result isn’t bureaucracy — it’s clarity. And clarity is what allows clubs to grow in a smart, efficient and sustainable way.
What resonated strongly for me in this conversation with Amit is how clearly it surfaces a problem that almost every club recognises but rarely names.
Fragmentation.
It's rarely lack of effort, not even lack of expertise or lack of tools.
Just fragmentation.
Information scattered across WhatsApp threads, spreadsheets, emails, and people’s heads. Each of those works fine in isolation. Together, they create blind spots. And blind spots are where operational risk quietly grows.
This is something I see constantly in CRM and commercial operations as well. Clubs often believe they have a data or tooling problem. In reality, they have a coordination problem. Data exists. Processes exist. People are committed. But nothing ties it together into a shared operational reality.
Amit’s point about informal communication becoming a bottleneck as clubs grow is especially important. Informality feels fast early on. But as soon as scale increases (more staff, more squads, more stakeholders) speed turns into dependency. Decisions start relying on individuals instead of systems. And once that happens, growth becomes fragile.
What I particularly agree with is his emphasis on alignment as the real payoff of structure.
Structure is not necessarily about adding layers but rather about connecting existing ones.
In CRM terms, this is the difference between:
The same logic applies here. When training plans connect to player data, when administrative decisions support sporting goals, when communication shifts from reactive to proactive, the club stops operating in silos.
There’s also a commercial angle that’s often overlooked.
Fragmented operations don’t just cost time. They cost money. Duplicate tools. Manual work. Missed signals. Data that never turns into insight or action. Over a season, those inefficiencies compound just as aggressively as good systems do.
One actionable takeaway clubs can apply immediately, regardless of size: map where information lives today, not where it should live.
If critical decisions depend on private messages, individual memory, or undocumented processes, that’s not flexibility. That’s calledrisk. The goal isn’t to centralise everything overnight, but to identify which workflows truly need a shared system of record. This is also where operational platforms and CRM systems often overlap in philosophy, even if they solve different problems. Both succeed or fail based on whether they create clarity across teams not on how many features they ship.
