Why Athlete Management Is Broken (And What We’re Building Instead)

I’ve spent most of my life inside football environments.

As a player, you learn pretty quickly that careers aren’t shaped only on match day. They’re shaped in the background. Training plans written on whiteboards. Last-minute changes dropped into WhatsApp groups. Performance data collected with good intentions and then quietly forgotten.

When I stepped into building OPN, it wasn’t because I wanted to build software. It started with a feeling I couldn’t ignore.

Athlete management has become far more complicated than it needs to be, and the people inside the system pay for that complexity every single day.

The reality inside most clubs

If you’ve worked in football, this will sound familiar.

Coaches juggling spreadsheets, PDFs, messages, and tools that don’t talk to each other. Performance staff spending more time organising data than actually interpreting it. Players unsure what’s expected of them from week to week. Important information living in someone’s head instead of a system.

None of this comes from bad intent. It’s the result of patchwork solutions built up over years.

A tool gets added to solve one problem. Then another tool solves another problem. Before long, everything is fragmented, and the only way to keep things moving is more manual work.

As a player, you feel that fragmentation. As staff, you get buried by it.

The features people value most aren’t the most complex ones.

What surprised me once we started building

OPN is now 16 months old. In that time, we’ve watched staff use dashboards and players engage with their own app, not in theory but in real environments, week after week.

A few things became very clear.

Simplicity beats power. The features people value most aren’t the most complex ones. Clarity changes behaviour. When players understand why they’re doing something, engagement improves. Adoption matters more than perfection. A simple system that’s used every day beats a complex system that isn’t.

As a former player, none of this shocked me. But seeing it play out in real usage and behaviour reinforced something important. Technology doesn’t fail clubs. Overcomplicated technology does.

Our philosophy: fewer tools, clearer thinking

From day one, we’ve tried to build OPN around a few core ideas.

There should be one source of truth. Staff and players should be looking at the same reality, not different versions of it. Cognitive load should be reduced. Tools should make decisions easier, not create more admin. Players aren’t just data points. They need context, feedback, and ownership, not just numbers.

That also means saying no to features that look impressive but don’t actually improve day-to-day life inside a club.

Have we got everything right? No. I’d be lying if I said it hasn’t been hard. Falling back into old habits and missing the bigger picture was always going to happen. But we’ve learned quickly, and we’ve made meaningful progress faster than most.

OPN wasn’t built because the industry needed another platform.

Why we’re sharing this now

I didn’t want our first blog post to be a product update. I wanted it to explain why we exist.

OPN wasn’t built because the industry needed another platform. It was built because too many people inside sport are working around systems instead of being supported by them.

Over the coming months, we’ll use this blog to share what we’re learning from real usage, talk openly about what works and what doesn’t, explain the thinking behind the features we choose to build, and explore the realities of modern athlete management beyond the buzzwords.

If you’re a coach, performance staff member, or player who’s felt the friction of broken systems, this conversation is for you.

We’re building in the open. And we’re just getting started.

By Aaron Wildig