A conversation tool developed by Shrewsbury Town's Natalie Wood is now being adopted more widely across the game 🗣️ The Conversation Circle encourages discussions between players & adults, helping staff better support their wellbeing 💙🧡 More info 👇 shrewsburytown.com/news/2026…

It’s one of the honours of my life to have been asked to lead @UEFA's Player Welfare project on behalf of The Player Care Group. We have been working since 2025 to help the 55 National Associations of UEFA to develop policies to better support their female players through several core pillars and will be rolling out how to guides, training and templates over the coming months & years. A huge thank you to the entire Women’s Football department at UEFA for being so welcoming & engaging, particularly Colm Hickey & Claire Savin. I’m lucky to be supported by an expert group of our leading consultants from across the Women’s game to check, challenge & improve what we do – I’m loving the learning we’re doing every day on this project. It was a privilege to be invited to Oslo for my first UEFA Women's Champions League final and I loved meeting so many passionate, engaging professionals from across the world in an information exchange topped off with an end-to-end game between FC Barcelona & OL Lyonnes. Congrats to FCB for the win! This is just the start – there are a number of exciting announcements coming this summer – it’s such a pleasure to work with such a great group of confederations, leagues & clubs across the world who are passionate about creating the best conditions for their players! @PlayerCareGroup #playercare #playerwelfare #UEFA

JOB ALERT: The Player Care Group are supporting NUFC Women to find a Player Performance & Lifestyle Lead. This role will lead the design, coordination and delivery of a Performance Lifestyle and Player Liaison programme. Closes on Sun 17th - JD & apply: careers.newcastleunited.com/…

The Player Care Group was delighted to be invited to the @Bundesliga_EN first ever Player Care meeting in Dortmund last week – with Founder & MD @HugoScheckter presenting on Player Care in leagues worldwide as well as how to gain buy in with leadership to invest in #PlayerCare.

A look at #PlayerCare in Brazil's Série A from @globo - with 8 teams having a Player Care provision. It's great to see this work ever expanding across continents and to read about the innovative work being done in different cultures around the world. ge.globo.com/futebol/brasile…

My school football scouting report aged 11… Brutal

Found an old bag of my #pokemon cards from about 20 years ago. Anyone know the best place to understand value?

A 3 person Player Care team costs a Premier League club around £200,000 (approx €240,000) a year in salaries. A 15% reduction in failed transfers - a conservative estimate on the impact of Player Care based on research from Liverpool FC's own Director of Research speaking at a Statsbomb Conference in 2021 - would save that same club around £3M (€3.5M) annually. That's a 15:1 return. Before you factor in squad stability, player happiness, or the reputational cost of a high-profile signing publicly struggling. I'm not saying Player Care prevents every failed transfer - it doesn't - but any support we can put in place to reduce the chances of failure are clearly worth investing in. The clubs we've worked with who do this well don't just see it as pastoral care, they see it as protecting a multimillion pound asset & their performances. Instead of asking us how much it will cost, they ask how they can do it better. Player Care is a spectrum, not a binary in terms of whether clubs have it or not. At The @PlayerCareGroup we've developed a set of 170 peer reviewed Player Care standards for the 1st team, helping clubs worldwide implement & improve their Player Care provision. In 2024 we commissioned a report into 'failed' transfers and the backgrounds, languages & ages of those players to dig more into the value of proactive Player Care. For a full copy of the findings, comment REPORT below or DM me.

Introducing the Conversation Circle. An offline, printed tool to better facilitate conversations between trusted adults & young athletes. We explain more here: youtu.be/7aYmSGRTVyE

Running a business is hard - as we ramp up to launch our first physical product on Friday, the last 6 months have been challenging in many new ways. If anything, I'm an accidental entrepreneur - I never dreamed of running my own business or making huge profits. By many metrics, I'm not a very good one either. I've not taken a penny of funding since launching 5 years ago, we don't focus on scale, profitability or reach. We don't do paid social and we don't pay for referrals, have sponsors or any partner companies. I've got a business degree, but so much of what I do is on gut feel. Does this 'feel' like the right direction for us, or for me? Will I be proud of this? Will I be excited by this? Will this help people? If any of the answers are no, we tend to leave what we're considering on the side. For the last half a year, much of my focus has been away from what I've known my whole career - sport, interpersonal connections, proactive support - and onto lead times, minimum order quantities, inventory management & even the ever changing world of tariffs. My belief is that by doing the latter, we'll improve the former - through deliberate, practical tools to aid intergenerational relationships. On Friday at 3pm UK, we'll show you what we've been working on. It might not have the best margin or go viral - but I'm bloody proud of it, bloody excited for it, and I know it'll help people. Stay tuned! @PlayerCareGroup

The Premier League's top six was gatecrashed 11 years ago. Ronald Koeman's Southampton, featuring Nathaniel Clyne, Morgan Schneiderlin, Sadio Mane, Dusan Tadic, Victor Wanyama, James Ward-Prowse, Toby Alderweireld and Graziano Pelle among others, were disrupting England's elite.