In Progress No. 19

A New Paradigm for Athlete Contract Negotiations | What Does Discipline Cost? | Anti-Burnout

Apr 16, 2021

Knowledge

A New Paradigm for Athlete Contract Negotiations

Despite having two years remaining on his current deal, Kevin De Bruyne signed a new ~$100 million contract with Manchester City last week. That’s a ~30% increase from his current deal and extends the PFA Player of the Year’s stay at the Etihad Stadium to 2025.

The interesting part?

Kevin De Bruyne didn’t use an agent to broker the deal, conducting negotiations with Manchester City himself, and the management team at Roc Nation assisting remotely.

The company that helped De Bruyne formulate the data to use in negotiations is Analytics FC. Recognizing the shift that big data was about to play in the future of professional sports, former West Ham scout and Brentford B coach Jeremy Steele founded the company in 2015.

The vision was simplistic: work hand-in-hand with the biggest football clubs, federations, and agencies worldwide to provide predictive analytics that allows their organizations to make smarter decisions.

Kevin De Bruyne utilized their flagship product, called TransferLab, a software system powered by smart algorithms that calculates a player’s “contribution value.” The contribution value is determined based on hundreds of metrics. Essentially, it tells you the effect a player has had on their team’s chances of scoring or conceding goals — among other things.

By working with a company like Analytics FC, Kevin De Bruyne could intelligently quantify and communicate his contributions to Manchester City through data — receiving a 30% raise in the process.

Kevin De Bruyne working with an analytics company to quantify his past, present, and future athletic contributions through data, while saving millions of dollars on agent fees might seem like a surprise now, but it won’t in the future.

All professional athletes will be armed with a portfolio of data when negotiating contracts in the future. It’s not a matter of if, but a matter of when. Using data to negotiate contribution value is a no-brainer.

Wisdom

What Does Discipline Cost?

Discipline and hatred walk in lockstep for people living with too many constraints. Without freedom, the things we do become the things we hate. As David Perell writes in The Price of Discipline, duty is prison for many kids. In an anxious world, duty is seen as an antidote to bad outcomes. We become conditioned into believing that positive academic outcomes are the best way to be happy and successful.

More and more parents are encouraging more and more children to fight zero-sum battles like the college admissions process. This childhood rat race is packaged as ambitious, even though it actually rests behind a facade of sheep-like, anxiety-creating complacency.

This is the worst way to grow up. And it doesn’t get better in adulthood. The same patterns of discipline that lead us astray in childhood also compel us to chase phantoms of success in adulthood. It is the classic fallacy of competition: we become obsessed with our rivals (i.e. peers) at the expense of our self-proclaimed goals. Without the freedom to experiment, we get caught on treadmills in between discipline and a longing for escape.

If we want to raise healthy, high-agency children, we should give them the freedom to make decisions without removing them from the consequences of those decisions. Giving children agency now will help them avoid a dark cycle of work, pain, and reckless release in the future. Even if a life of indulgent hedonism is fun in the short-term, it ultimately leaves a void in the heart.

Insight

Anti-Burnout

We all burn out after a long enough period of focus, now more than ever. Screen fatigue is no joke. Burnout is equally a function of your environment as it is a function of your brain. A sterile-looking (home) office with suboptimal sunlight and dead air is energy-taking. We may think our environment is negligible in determining how we work and what we work on, but it is. To avoid burnout, don’t just drink more coffee. Spend more time in environments that are energy-giving — bright light, fresh air, music playing. Ideally with a view. Environment plays a big role in our productivity and mood while working.