The email that changed my transfer window.

In my early years as a sports agent, I'd been building a relationship with a very successful Spanish agent for several years. Whenever he flew to England I'd pick him up from the airport, drive him to games, and as a Spanish speaker myself I could translate documents or conversations for him. I did it because I knew I could learn more sitting next to him for a few hours than I could in a month on my own. He had elite players and decades of deal experience. I had a car and three languages.

One evening I picked him up and we were driving to a game. Then he asked me to translate an email from a club.

I started reading and my stomach dropped slightly.

Because it was the email was from the legal counsel at a club I'd been trying to get a response from for months. I'd sent players, follow-ups, everything. Complete silence from their end, and yet i knew they were after the exact profile of the player i had a mandate for.

Now here's the detail that changed the whole situation for me. Lawyers at football clubs are business people, highly organised. They respond to professional correspondence because that's how they operate. They're not scouts or managers who's skillset i in football coaching or talent ID. So I knew immediately that this was a much better route into the club than the one I'd been hammering away at.

I memorised the email address.

Kept it in my head for nearly two hours while we drove to the stadium. I didn't want to write it down in front of the agent because I'd positioned myself as someone with strong connections across the UK market. Pulling out my phone to copy an email address from a club I couldn't get a reply from would have undermined that narrative entirely. So I held it in my head for the whole journey, repeating it back and forth. We parked up, I found a quiet moment and typed it into my phone.

That evening I emailed the lawyer directly.I explained that I'd been trying to get a response from the club for several months and laid out the players I had available.

He replied almost immediately. Said one player in particular was of significant interest to the club and they'd been trying to find out who the agent was.

🤔 Now think about that for a second:

I'd sent this player to their head of recruitment multiple times. Never got a reply. And yet the club's own lawyer is telling me they'd been actively looking for this player's representative.

I'll never know what was going on behind the scenes. It may have been innocuous disorganisation, or it well have been that the head of recruitment had an arrangement with a particular agent and was blocking approaches from anyone else. Unfortunately it happens more than people realise in this industry.

But regardless of the reasons, the front door had been locked for months and I'd just found a side entrance.

We negotiated the deal and got it over the line in the final days of the window. It became the biggest transfer I closed that year.

You could say I got lucky. Had I not been in the car at the exact moment the agent received an email from the legal counsel at the exact club that wanted my player, it would never have happened.

But I'd spent years building that relationship with the Spanish agent. Driving him everywhere. Translating everything he needed. Being useful without asking for anything in return. That groundwork is the reason I was in the car in the first place. I couldn't have foreseen this exact situation would materialise but I did know that, in being around these circles, something would drop my way.

Seneca, the Roman Stoic philosopher, put it simply around 2,000 years ago: "

Luck is where preparation meets opportunity".

The advice from this week is two-fold:

1️⃣ When the obvious route into an organisation is blocked, do everything you can to find another one. Every club, every company, every rights holder has multiple entry points. Your job is to find your route to the decision maker, whatever shape that takes.

2️⃣ Consistency of putting yourself in situations where you can learn from experienced people and be of genuine use to them will set you up for opportunities you can't yet predict. Don't always look for immediate payback on the value you provide, because if you are consistently valuable to the right people, goodwill and opportunities will build up. Not in some abstract karma sense, but in a straightforward mathematical sense: the more you put out there. the higher probability that something significant will land back in front of you.