A Work in Progress

Football Quotient

Rethinking talent development in Irish football

What if we stopped asking "How do we find better players?" and started asking "How do we develop the entire playing population?"

The Problem

Irish football assumes talent is found, not built. We treat players like a haystack to sift, not an asset to develop.

The Academy Model

We invest heavily in elite academies, national underage squads, and high-performance pathways. We defend their cost, their technology, their expertise.

And then we look at the national team and ask why we don't have enough players.

The academy model is built on a simple assumption: identify the talented few early, polish them intensively, and hope they make it. Everyone else is left to fend for themselves.

Sound familiar? It's the same logic that said only a minority of Irish children were "capable of profiting" from secondary education.

The Education Parallel

In 1967, Ireland introduced free secondary education for all. Before that, the respectable opinion was clear: only a small minority were capable of benefiting. The rest should leave school at 12 or 13.

The arguments against expansion were always the same:

  • × "Most people don't need this level of education"
  • × "Only a minority can truly benefit"
  • × "If we give it to everyone, standards will collapse"
  • × "It's too expensive; it's utopian"

In hindsight, those objections look not just wrong but faintly absurd.

What We Learned

If you want to change the trajectory of a nation, you don't just push the right-hand tail higher. You move the mean. You increase the number of people for whom "ordinary" education is richer, longer, and more demanding.

We would never again accept an Ireland that tried to compete in the world with only grammar schools for the few.

So why do we accept a football culture built on that precise model?

That's where FQ begins.

What is Football Quotient?

A framework for measuring and developing football ability at the population level

Football Quotient (FQ) borrows the mental tools we use for education and applies them to football. Instead of asking "How do we produce more world-class outliers?" we ask "How do we change the shape of the whole curve of football ability in a country?"

Core principle: What gets measured gets managed.

The Framework

We recognize that football ability includes physical, technical, tactical, AND behavioral components. FQ tracks all of them:

Physical Development

Speed, strength, stamina, agility, coordination — measured through timed drills, fitness tests, and age-relative benchmarks.

Technical Skill

Ball control, passing accuracy, shooting technique, dribbling ability — measured through structured drills and game scenarios.

Tactical Awareness

Positioning, spacing, reading the game, understanding systems — observed in small-sided games and match situations.

Behavioral Intelligence (Our Focus)

This is where FQ adds something new — measuring the mental game that's typically invisible:

  • • Decision Speed: Pattern recognition and choice-making under pressure
  • • Resilience: Recovery from mistakes, bounce-back ability
  • • Creative Solutions: Original thinking in unpredictable situations
  • • Leadership: Communication, team support, stepping up when it matters

Unlike traditional scouting, which asks "Is this player good enough?", FQ asks "How is this player developing across ALL dimensions?" and "What's their trajectory in physical, technical, tactical, AND behavioral areas?"

How It Works in Practice

At PlayerBuilder, we're testing FQ with real kids in real sessions:

Individual Baselines

Each player is measured against their own starting point, not arbitrary standards. We track improvement, not just current ability.

Behavioral Tracking

Coaches observe and record decision-making moments, resilience instances, creative solutions during sessions. Kids see their growth in areas that were previously invisible.

Progress Over Time

Parents receive FQ reports showing week-by-week development across all six axes. Growth becomes visible and measurable, not just a feeling.

Population-Level Thinking

As more players are measured, we can start to see the distribution: where are the gaps? What traits need more focus nationally? How does the curve change over time?

The PlayerBuilder Experiment

PlayerBuilder is our laboratory for testing the FQ framework

What We're Learning

Early results suggest that when kids can see their behavioral development measured — not just coach opinions, but actual tracked progress — they engage differently with their own growth.

Parents report that seeing "Resilience Factor: +15% over 4 weeks" is more meaningful than hearing "they're getting better."

But we're at the beginning, not the end. Sample sizes are small. The measurement tools are evolving. We're learning as we go.

Limitations & Honesty

We're not claiming to have solved Irish football development. FQ is a hypothesis being tested, not a proven solution.

  • • Small sample size (32 players per cohort)
  • • Early stage framework (still evolving based on results)
  • • Limited long-term data (need years, not weeks, to validate)
  • • No control group comparisons yet

This is honest experimentation, not marketing hype.

The Bigger Project

We're developing Football Quotient into a book exploring how Irish football could learn from Irish education's transformation.

The Core Argument

Just as Ireland transformed from educating only the elite to developing the entire population, Irish football needs to shift from finding talent to building it systematically.

FQ is our framework for what that might look like: measuring football development the way we measure educational outcomes, treating every player as an asset, changing the distribution rather than just polishing the tail.

The framework is evolving based on what we learn with real kids. This is a work in progress.

We're building this in public, learning as we go.

Join the Exploration

If this resonates, there are two ways to get involved:

Try the Programme

PlayerBuilder is where we test FQ with real kids. If you have a player aged 10-13 (or any age), join our next cohort and see how measurement changes development.

Register Now

Discuss the Ideas

If you're interested in the broader thinking about talent development, population-level measurement, or the education parallel, we'd love to hear from you.

Get in Touch

We're not claiming to have all the answers. But we couldn't not try.