Football and Job Market Similarity
When it comes to the best football player in the world, many will argue either Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo. Both of them cluttered their profiles with prestigious accolades that hardly any player will equal them in the near future.
They scored hundreds of goals, lifted many league and club world cup trophies. The only difference between them is FIFA World Cup after Messi and Argentine brought the most coveted trophy home last year.
That’s what me and millions of football spectators see. As I delve myself to watch tactical analysis as often, I find best football players are those who suit well to manager’s tactic. It means your skill and profile less relevant if they only fill in to limited range of tactics.
In order to suit into wide array of squads, it is imperative to adeptly involved in 3 football phases. Those are defending, attacking, and transitioning.
The flourish of gegen-pressing arguably becomes the turning point when managers start urging their attackers to involve in defending phase once they are not on possession. We see the success story of such tactics when Jurgen Klopp and Liverpool managed to bring home trophies like Champions League in 2019 and Premier League in 2020.
Tactical development in football shapes the market as well. Many managers are not hesitant to sign strikers whose goal scoring records aren’t that great as long as able to defend and build up as a team.
In short, the market demands more all-round players, having stand out technical skill is a plus nonetheless. Having all-round players enable teams to improvise once the tactic doesn’t work well.
Most of top sides in Europe’s big 5 leagues have one or more all-round players. Bernardo Silva of Manchester City, Oleksandr Zinchenko of Arsenal, Federico Valverde of Real Madrid, Joshua Kimmich of Bayern Munich, and Marco Veratti of PSG.
All of I have described earlier makes me wonder. It looks like things in football recently more identical to job market in general.
I often observe recruitment announcement in social medias. Some companies expect applicants to have several technical abilities. The announcement looked hilarious some times that even made me shake my head. Not only the salary less decent, it was because they demand one candidates having technical abilities that were supposed to be done by 2–3 different individuals.
As a former recruiter, a workplace always faces budget to recruit more people. This budget constraint drives users to effectively using their human resources while their progress towards target is still on the right way.
On a recruitment poster to recruit an administrator for an instance, we put relevant requirements such as education, age, and working experience. However, we stated that additional skills such as able to edit videos and photos would be an extra point.
At that very same time as a recruiter, I also held three structural roles in my office in order to fill several positional voids. Board of Leaders in Headquarter office did notice that there were manpower shortages across departments and regional offices. However, they demanded chief of departments and regional offices to maximize their current manpower.
Budget is always the most visible constraint for companies and institutions, yet the tasks are always adding up since problems and commands from leaders are seemingly endless.
From the very first part of this writing, we see both football and job market demanding individual to be more generalist rather than specialist. However, the drive behind those markets doing so are obviously different.
In football, tactical fluidity is the main drive for market preference towards generalist individual while budget constraint is the culprit in job market. For many years to come, generalists are seemingly on high demand in both football and job market.
