Idea. Potential. #4
The self-plug edition. You knew it was coming. This is a moment for me to plug all that is me and us, friends and colleagues and family. All relevant, I promise, and all still on the theme of brilliant, helpful and inspiring ideas. Stick with me this time and then normal service will be resumed.
Watch
Those of you that know me know that football and marketing has been my professional home for 16+ years. But not just any football; more the social side of the game. Think ‘we want our ball back.’
The club that I work for (FC Nordsjælland), and the movement that it’s part of (Right to Dream) are central to a global struggle to change the way football is done. If cars, bling instagram show-offs and bad behaviour are the first things you think of when you think of professional footballers, then the players we produce are the antidotes. We’re the youngest club in Europe, and have one of the highest percentages of academy players in our first team. In two academy sites — one in Ghana and one in Denmark — we nurture and grow purpose-driven players who care about causes. They have a ‘why’ beyond the game, and a dedicated character curriculum (implemented from 11 years old), focusing on 7 core behaviour traits, which ensures that they become whole human beings with opportunities after they’ve left the game behind.
The women’s team (which has just visited the academy in Ghana for the first time) has won back-to-back promotions and is now threatening champions league football next year. I recently had the pleasure of seeing a promo video produced by Gurls Talk and Nike featuring the amazing girls from the Right to Dream Academy. The movie, called Spit Fire Dream Higher, is a tapestry of stories about the will to play football, no matter what.
Think
Is talent a cultural product? There’s a very smart guy here who is developing his thoughts on how it just might be. Joe Mulberry — Director of Recruitment at Right to Dream — is one of the new breed of thinkers that’s redefining the science of talent in elite sport. He’ll flip if you say he’s Jonah Hill’s character from Moneyball, but there’s some similarities. This tweet is the beginning of the development of a hypothesis on the cultural origins of talent, using one very specific data point. Clever eggs among you will be able to work out the significance of the dates.
See
He’s my dad. Just so we are clear on the state of my impartiality on this particular subject. Michael Simpson has been painting huge canvases which make reference to the infamy of religious history for 50 years. He’s someone who practiced his whole life (he started earnestly when he was 7, and is now 79) but his notoriety came when he was 73 years old as a winner of the John Moore’s painting prize. The Tate Modern among others now own his work. This show at Blain Southern in Mayfair is a sweep of themes that have featured over the last half-decade: benches, confessional booths, and ‘leper squints’ (thin apertures built into the side of medieval churches to allow undesirables like the poor and sick to watch services from outside). It’s a testament to a lifetime of patience and hard work. We’re proud of you dad.
