I think everybody in first team operations knows that there is no typical day to day for anybody. You never know what you’re going to get thrown at you…we’re the cog that keeps everything going.
Louise DobsonHead of 1st Team Operations, Liverpool FC
From Good to Great in Football Operations
At the top end of European football, the margin between clubs is razor thin. Squads are broadly matched in quality. Coaching ideas travel fast. So where does competitive advantage actually come from? Increasingly, panellists at this year’s Teamworks Operations Summit pointed to the same answer: operations infrastructure — and specifically, how elite 1st teams are using Teamworks Hub to centralise, simplify, and sharpen the way they run.
Hosted by Conor Branson, EMEA Commercial Director at Teamworks, the session brought together operations professionals working at the sharp end of the Premier League, Eredivisie and the Bundesliga.
Louise Dobson, Head of 1st Team Operations, Liverpool FC
Bas Roorda, Team Manager, PSV Eindhoven
Dustin Haloschan, 1st Team Ops Co-ordinator, SV Werder Bremen
Their experiences differed in detail but converged on one theme: the clubs pulling ahead operationally are the ones who’ve made Teamworks Hub the single source of truth for everything from daily schedules to travel manifests to player communications.
The “One Stop” Philosophy
Elite operations teams used to run on a patchwork of tools — group chats, spreadsheets and travel documents that players may or may not open. At the top level, that fragmentation has a cost. Information falls through the gaps between departments.
Team operations is complex and for us it’s our job to make it easy…Teamworks Hub, we started last summer, was a big game changer for us.
Dustin Haloschan1st Team Ops Co-ordinator, SV Werder Bremen
Teamworks Hub eliminates that fragmentation. Panellists from clubs competing in European competitions were unequivocal: having every schedule, meeting, and communication visible to the right people in one place has transformed how their operations teams function. Players open Hub and see exactly what they need.
Communication at Scale
An elite European squad involves a head coach, multiple assistant coaches, analytics departments, medical staff, kit staff, media officers, and a large squad of players — all of whom need accurate, timely information that may change multiple times between Monday and Sunday. Managing that at pace, without a platform built for it, is simply not viable at the first team level.
Hub’s communication architecture was highlighted as a particular strength by panellists. The ability to segment messages — sending travel details only to travelling staff, pushing updates to specific position groups, notifying medical staff without cluttering the broader squad feed — means information reaches the right people without creating noise for everyone else. At clubs dealing with many staff across a first team operation, that precision is operationally essential.
Several panellists noted that Hub has effectively replaced the informal communication channels — WhatsApp groups, SMS, corridor conversations — that used to create information asymmetry within clubs. Everyone now works from the same data. That alignment, they argued, directly reduces errors and last-minute scrambles.
Travel Planning at an Elite Level
Away fixtures in European competition represent the most logistically complex weeks in any club’s calendar. Charter flights, hotel blocks, training ground access in foreign countries, equipment shipping, catering aligned to the squad’s nutritional protocols, visa and documentation management for a multi-national squad — the operations team holds all of this together.
Panellists described using Teamworks Hub to build travel itineraries that populate directly into players’ and staff’s schedules — departure times, hotel check-in details, pre-match timings, all visible in the same place as the rest of the week. There’s no separate travel document to distribute, no version-control problem when the flight time changes, no player who missed the updated itinerary. The platform holds the truth; everyone sees it in real time.
Dealing with change but staying consistent
One of the panel’s sharpest observations came in the discussion of coaching changes — a near-inevitable event at any club operating at the top level of European football. New coaching staff arrive with different training structures and different demands on how the week is organised. For the operations team, the challenge is absorbing that change without disrupting a squad that still has matches to play.
Without a centralised platform, a coaching change can mean weeks of operational disruption as new staff try to understand how the club functions. With Hub, the operations team can focus on the human side of the transition — building relationships with new coaches, understanding new demands — because the systems are already in place.
AI and what is next for First Team Operations
At the end of the session, the panel took questions from the floor, with attendees wanting to know what the future looks like for first team operations departments.
Unsurprisingly, AI was a common trend. Panellists envisaged AI working within Teamworks Hub to save time — perhaps surfacing scheduling conflicts before they happen, flagging travel fatigue patterns across a congested fixture list, automating the administrative layer of operations so staff can focus on their relationships with players and staff.
The challenge of having many different languages in elite first team squads was also a key topic. Clubs are already using AI to navigate this, especially under the remit of Player Care.
Key Takeaways
The Teamworks Operations Summit panel made one thing abundantly clear: at the elite level of European football, operational excellence is no longer a support function — it is a strategic function.
The clubs investing in the right infrastructure, building disciplined habits with Teamworks Hub, and developing operations professionals who think strategically and are not simply running smoother away trips or cleaner schedules.
They are protecting preparation time, reducing friction around the squad, and creating the conditions in which coaches and players can do their best work. In a game decided by margins, that is not a marginal advantage.
To learn more about how Teamworks Hub can streamline your first team operations, get in touch via the form below.
