When a Club Builds from Scratch.

At Pelly, we spend most of our time listening. To Sporting Directors. To performance staff. To analysts, operations leads, and the people who keep football clubs running. Every conversation shapes what we build next.

Recently, we had the chance to speak with a leading European club in the process of developing their own internal data hub. They weren't looking to purchase a system - they were building one themselves. But the discussion that followed wasn't transactional. It was constructive, and reaffirming.

Beyond the Pitch: The Administrative Reality

The club spoke openly about the operational reality behind elite football.

They talked about the friction of scattered systems - scouting reports living in one tools, salary data in another, transfer clauses tracked via memory or spreadsheets. One senior tea member described their current workflow bluntly: "I do it all in Excel."

They'd used off-the-shelf platforms. Outgrown them. And ultimately chose to build their own, driven by a need for tighter control over sensitive data, better adaptability to internal workflows, and a belief that their scale and resourcing justified it.

We respected that. And frankly, we agreed with much of their rationale.

But we also saw a clear dividing line between the 5% of clubs that can take this path - and the 95% that can't.

What it Reinforced

Conversations like these are valuable not because they change our direction, but because they sharpen it.

We've long believed that the biggest gap in football isn't data availability - it's the structure around it. Clubs aren't short of information. They're short of time, clarity, and tools that work together.

Hearing a club at the top end of the spectrum grapple with many of the same issues we're solving at scale reaffirmed our appraoch. It shows that the architectural decisions we've made - the need for modularity, control, cross-functional tools, and identity-mapping - are not niche preferences. The're universal needs.

Some clubs will want the entire platform. Other might need just one or two pieces - reporting, scenario planning, financial oversight, or ID unification - that slot seamlessly into what they already use. We're building with that flexibility in mind.

This wasn't a learning moment. It was a confirminjg one. A discussion rooted in mutual ambition and shared recognition that football's backroom engine still has plenty of room to grow.

What the Industry Still Misses

What stood out most wasn't any single relevation, but rather the familiarity of the challenges being navigated - challenges we hear across clubs of all sizes.

Whether it was reconiling player identities across different data providers, keeping track of conditional clauses buried deep in transfer deals, or trying to give departments more autonomy over their budgets without losing oversight - it was clear that even highly capable clubs are stitching things together.

There's growing recognition, too, that the people around the players - nutriotionists, medical leads, scouts - need better tools, not just to perform their roles, but to stay aligned financially and operationally with the rest of the club.

None of this was framed as failure. It was just the reality of how clubs have had to operate - until now.

Building for the Clubs Who Can't Afford to Build

Pelly doesn't claim to replace in-house systems at the biggest clubs. But we do aim to match that level of thinking - and make it available to those who can't justify an internal engineering team.

Our job is to meet clubs where they are, and help them operate at a higher-level - without asking them to reinvent their entire infrastructure.

The outcome isn't just better scouting or planning. It's confidence. Clarity. Fewer mistakes. And ultimately, time returned to the people making the decisions.

If you're curious - whether you're building, buying, or somewhere in between - we'd love to talk. Not to pitch. Just to listen, share, and improve what football looks like behind the curtain.

Because the game deserves better tools. And the people running it do too.