Barcelona, Eintracht Frankfurt… Lincoln City? Innovation in League One

What do Barcelona, Eintracht Frankfurt and Lincoln City have in common?

The answer is not the career arc of a former La Masia starlet bracing himself for a match against Exeter City, but the links between the clubs — and plenty of other European big hitters — in innovative thinking.

And that is literal in its meaning: Barcelona has its Innovation Hub, Eintracht Frankfurt its EintrachtTech team and, in a first for the EFL, Lincoln now have an innovation director looking to squeeze the most out of the club’s potential using outside-the-box thinking.

It might sound like business jargon, but Lincoln’s logic as a League One club competing in a division against rival clubs with ever-growing budgets is the simple need to find new ways to get ahead, which do not rely on millions of pounds of losses every season.

“It’s thinking about things a little differently,” says Jason Futers, Lincoln’s director of innovation and growth, who was appointed in December.

“It goes back to the point of lots of people saying there’s no money in football and, as somebody who is coming into the industry and looking at it, there are hundreds if not thousands of companies who disprove that. It’s about tapping into that in a way that stays true to the club’s values, generates revenue, builds wealth and moves things forward.

“One of the things we can plug into is using the football club as a distribution channel because sport and football are so attractive — generally football clubs pay other companies to work with them, but we’re asking whether we can partner with more companies to be a distribution channel for start-ups. There are clubs out there that have innovation hubs but that typically has taken a lot of money. They’re not investing necessarily in physical assets, often it’s around digital data and technology.”

The rise in innovation departments comes as more clubs look to generate revenue — or add to the on-field performance of teams — in different ways to the usual three revenue streams for clubs in matchday income, sponsorship and TV money.

At Frankfurt, which Futers says is the closest comparable model to what he aims to achieve at Lincoln, the innovation department started as two people focused on redeveloping every digital aspect of the club from e-ticketing to merchandise and analytics tools to effectively become an in-house software developer. After realising their systems needed an update, Frankfurt found external companies could not offer anything bespoke to suit their needs in football and so the innovation department was born.

The Bundesliga club has since expanded the team to collaborate with companies looking to make their stadium, the Deutsche Bank Park, a tech-savvy arena that tests new smart waste management and energy technology, which can then be rolled out into other industries.

Other clubs such as Barcelona have a vast innovation hub focusing on sports science, analytics and new media among other areas of research. At Club Bruges in Belgium, the innovation team has added value to fans’ experience rather than just revenue. They solved a matchday problem of too many fans arriving at the ground at the same time by trialling discounts for purchases made in the stadium for fans who entered more than half an hour before kick-off. It reduced waiting times at kiosks and made getting into the ground a smoother experience for match-goers.

For Lincoln, the new approach could see them partner with external companies to incentivise fans to reduce their carbon footprint using green technology and in return, the club would get a stake in the business. Other ideas discussed, but not yet in development, could see them work with new technologies being researched at nearby universities or even performance-related tools such as trialling new bespoke boots or blood-sugar monitoring patches to improve players’ physical health.

“There is still the idea of ‘marginal gains’, which now is such a hackneyed term, but what we want to do over a period of time is turn the dial for the club.

“When I first spoke to Liam (Scully, CEO), he told me not to come in and tell him to increase the price of cheeseburgers by 25p. That’s not going to give the club a competitive or financial edge. That mindset of, ‘Oh that’s just how we do it’, or, ‘Well, football is not a normal business’ — well, Adidas, for example, wouldn’t think of it in that way and that’s just not an issue here at Lincoln. At any club trying to do something like this, it doesn’t work if you don’t have a stable foundation.

“If you have those things and the mindset to try something different, then why not? Otherwise, you’re just going to stay in that cycle of trying to fund losses.”

Lincoln realise that with a number of ex-Premier League clubs in League One, such as Derby County, Bolton Wanderers and Portsmouth, plus ambitious League Two outfits such as Wrexham and Stockport County with sizeable budgets looking to enter the division soon, finding new ways to gain an edge will be vital if they are to continue to operate as a top-half club.

It requires the buy-in of football staff as well as those in the business operations — and in former Leeds United Under-21 coach and England Futsal head coach Michael Skubala, they have a forward-thinking manager who knows that the less obvious route can still be effective in reaching the top.

“Everyone always asks if I’ve always wanted to manage and ‘yes’ is the answer,” says Skubala, who does not come from a professional playing background but has worked as a PE teacher and in coaching at Loughborough University, the FA and the academies at Coventry City, Nottingham Forest and Leeds.

“I’ve never been in a rush because you look at the situation at some football clubs and it can be quite a volatile world to go into. Working at Premier League clubs and working for federations has been brilliant as a job, I had a great career at Loughborough, and I’ve worked in some great environments at some big clubs. But if you can go to a club where it has good leadership and knows what it is and what it isn’t and doesn’t get carried away with the ups and downs of football — that’s great.”

With new majority owners in U.S. businessman Harvey Jabara, Lincoln are entering a new era off the field as well as evolving on it under Skubala. He was appointed in November after leaving his role at Leeds — who he took charge of in the Premier League last February as interim manager after the sacking of Jesse Marsch — to replace Mark Kennedy.

Building on their FA Cup run of seven seasons ago under former manager Danny Cowley, in which they reached the quarter-finals, with investment in an impressive £1.3million ($1.6m) new facility at the training ground laid the foundation for a future as an established EFL club after promotion from the National League in 2017. They were promoted from League Two in 2019 and their highest League One finish since their EFL return came in 2021 under Michael Appleton, finishing fifth. 

Skubala is looking to create a team true to his principles while following a philosophy of developing players.

“It’s evolution not revolution in trying to implement my way of playing and the way we want to move forward as a coaching staff, which takes time,” he says, after picking up 19 points in 17 league games in his time as manager.

“We’re starting to see some green shoots of that in those slow style changes becoming more evident on the pitch. Lincoln isn’t a club that can go and pay millions of pounds for players. We’re more of a selling club, which means we have to find our own homegrown talent. So if we can go into the market and look for players that we can develop, we can move them on to better.

“Everyone gets caught up in systems in football because it’s a natural thing you can see on a sheet of paper. It’s about seeing a team that is trying to be front-footed, trying to be aggressive and trying to go after games.”

Partnerships at Lincoln are not just limited to the business side of things — an informal agreement with League of Ireland side Drogheda United has paid dividends in developing a pathway for academy players to the first team by exposing them to first-team football in a summer league allowing year-round learning.

Forward Freddie Draper was the latest success story to head to Drogheda on loan after goalkeeper Sam Long and defender Sean Roughan. After outgrowing Lincoln’s academy and heading to Ireland in January 2023, Draper then joined League Two Walsall on loan for the first part of the season, where he scored 10 goals. The 19-year-old was recalled last month amid interest from EFL rivals and is part of Skubala’s plans for the remainder of the campaign.

“It’s really smart,” Skubala says. “Depending on their level and whether they are outgrowing the youth team and need more senior football, but they’re not going to get it with us, then it’s a good thing to give them the opportunity to develop and then come back in pre-season with the chance to compete for a first-team place.

“Or if they’re not quite ready again, then go out somewhere at the next level higher than Drogheda. Freddie physically outgrew the youth team but wasn’t ready for the first team and needed more exposure in senior football, so went to Drogheda, came back and wasn’t quite ready, so went to Walsall. And that’s a nice pathway to see.”

Lincoln’s all-round approach to thinking differently and being willing to take risks to give them the edge requires openness from Skubala, his assistant head coaches Chris Cohen and Tom Shaw, and other technical staff.

The hope is that grand thinking can lead to a better experience for fans and improved results on the pitch.

“All those things between performance and club development, my job is to gatekeep what is right and wrong for the performance end,” says Skubala. “There are areas where we can support the business if it doesn’t affect the performance negatively. If it’s about innovation involving performance, we need to turn every stone if we are to get some advantages. It’s a nice partnership if we can use the business team to move the football side of things on as well.

“There’s some ex-Premier League clubs in this league with big resources behind the scenes. You look at the clubs coming up next year from League Two and they’ll have big resources. So it’s about finding those wins that give us an edge and an advantage on the football pitch where we know we can’t get resources at that level.”

(Top photo: Futers and Skubala; photos: Lincoln City)