And City still made forty-odd million pounds on him.
The piece made a case I think every recruitment leader should sit with. Once, a profit on a player meant something. You'd taken someone rough and made them better, and the market rewarded that work. Now, in a league flush with money, you can sign someone, watch them stand still or go backwards, and still cash in - becuse just having played in the Premier League inflates a player's value regardless of what you actually did with them.
Chelsea have done it with Liam Delap. Two goals in forty-one appearances, sold for a profit. West Ham did it with Mateus Fernandes - got relegated with him in the side, sold him for double what they paid.
The market did the work. The coaching didn't have to.
The version of this in your business
I don't think recruitment is exempt from this. I think most of us have lived a version of it without naming it.
You've had a strong year. Billings are up, a consultant's had a career year, they've landed on their feet somewhere brilliant when they eventually moved on - and it's tempting to file all of that under "good leadership." Sometimes it is. But sometimes the market did it for you. A hot sector. A candidate-short year. A desk that would have performed for almost anyone sitting on it. The person left looking like a success story, and you took the credit, because the outcome was good and outcomes are what we measure.
The trouble is, you can't actually tell the difference between coaching that worked and a market that was kind to you until conditions change. And they always change.
Here's the test I'd put to you: did the person who left your business leave better than they arrived - sharper, more capable, more resilient - or did they just leave luckier, at a moment when almost anyone in their seat would have looked good? If you can't answer that with confidence for the people who've come through your business, you don't yet know whether you're developing people or just renting a favourable market.
The other half of it: no downside
There's a second thread in that article worth pulling on. Because bad recruitment decisions can now be sold on for a profit, the piece argues, the cost of getting it wrong has all but disappeared. Sign a striker who flops, wait a season, flip him anyway. No reckoning required.
I'd ask you to look at your own desk with the same suspicion. If underperformance in your business never actually costs anything - no honest conversation, no real consequence, no change in how you manage that person - you'll never build the muscle to develop people properly. You won't need to. The market, or the next role, or simple churn, will paper over it for you.
That's the seductive part. It's not that coaching stops mattering. It's that you can go a long time without noticing it's stopped happening, because everything still looks fine on the surface.
What I'd take from it
I don't think the answer is some grand new coaching framework. It's smaller than that, and less comfortable: stop crediting yourself for outcomes the market handed you, and start asking, honestly, what you actually changed in the people who've come through your business. Not what happened to them. What you did.
Napoli signed a teenager from Georgia for about ten million pounds, built him into one of the best wingers in the world, and sold him for six times that. That's development showing up as profit. City sold a player who got worse and made almost the same money. That's the market showing up as profit, wearing development's clothes.
Know which one you're running.
