Lee Hemmings was working as a stockbroker for Goldman Sachs when he started to notice the slow death of his own job.
He had enjoyed some of finance’s boom years – at one point he was the global head of Asian equity, sales and trading for Lehman Brothers – but in the early part of the last decade, things changed.
Like much of the world, what he did shifted online, and where he had previously acted as the connector, or the go-between, he found that increasingly websites started to cut the middleman out.
“My job was cannibalised by the business going from people speaking on the telephones to people speaking online,” Hemmings tells i. “It was the slowest redundancy in history.
“I connected a buyer and seller of stocks and shares in the simplest form, and if someone needed to buy a big block of shares, then I would go and find the person on the other side and we provided liquidity in the market, very much like a football agent does with players.”
As his attention shifted towards what was next, Hemmings, already a football fan, spotted what he considered a gaping hole in the football transfer market. For a multibillion-pound global industry, the transfer market is still remarkably cloak-and-dagger, allowing agents and chief executives to form uncomfortably close relationships. It is poorly regulated and despite attempts to tackle that in some of the biggest deals agents still pocket obscene fees.
The Football Association revealed last week that Premier League clubs spent £263million on agent fees last year, with Liverpool alone accounting for £30m of that.
Hemmings explored how other technology companies had disrupted different markets. Uber is the world’s largest taxi company but owns no taxis. Airbnb is the biggest accommodation provider but owns no real estate. The world’s most valuable retailer, Alibaba, sells other people’s products.
Facebook is the biggest media platform but creates none of its own content.
“I just sat there looking at the football market thinking something needs to change here because it’s archaic,” Hemmings says. “We wanted to bring a communication tool to the transfer market so initially clubs could understand what each other wanted to do.
“If you think of all the other markets, all the other disruption we’ve seen, it just seemed like a natural progression.”
Seven years, an MBA and more meetings with clubs worldwide than he can count later, having gained support and the ear of Pere Guardiola, Manchester City manager Pep’s brother, and Jose Ramon Capdevila, Real Madrid’s former head of football operations, as a business partner, Player Lens is one of football’s best kept secrets.
“It’s a great platform,” Pere Guardiola tells i. “Everything is moving online. You have Airbnb, you have Uber, you have all of these platforms in all markets and industries except football. That’s why I became interested.”
Hemmings, a thick-rimmed spectacle wearing 46-year-old, takes me through the system.
It is like real-life Football Manager. Users can search for players based on transfer fee, expected wages, availability, attributes, position, style of player, comparisons to players. When a player of interest is identified the user can click through for more detailed statistics and videos of that player’s highlights or entire recent matches.
“We’re not saying that people may sign someone immediately based on what we’ve given them here,” Hemmings says. “But it gives you a quick understanding within the platform, whether it’s a player that you want to go and pursue.”
What they offer is intricately detailed: players who are listed for transfer can even specify countries or leagues in which they would or would not like to play.
“That’s important because otherwise it spreads too widely, you might get random phone calls from people in Asia that you don’t want, you might not want to advertise into certain parts of the world,” Hemmings says. “So you can be specific.”
The idea germinated in 2013 and the platform launched two years later. Hemmings had been approached by an IT company to build a trading system. Instead, he suggested to the company’s owner, who had worked for Microsoft for over a decade, that they build an exchange platform to trade players.
“So it was built by some really clever guys,” he says.
He took an MBA at Liverpool University which had a focus on business and entrepreneurship in football. “That got my foot in the door and some Manchester City staff were really instrumental in helping us set this up,” he says.
Then he raised some seed capital, and away they went.
Much of Hemmings’s job has been presenting and selling the platform to clubs. It was one such meeting with Real Madrid, early on, when their head of operations Capdevila, liked what he saw so much he joined as a business partner.
They saw initial success during the emergency loan market, when clubs would lose a player to injury on a Saturday and that evening were desperate for a quick fix, turning to Player Lens to search for suitable replacements.
Like any social network it is only as good as its user base. They have signed up clubs from the Big Six to League Two and have around 600 clubs involved worldwide. They have teams from Brazil to Syria to Croatia. Gremio, who had Ronaldinho move to Paris Saint-Germain and Lucas to Liverpool, are on there.
Connecting International markets is, Hemmings says, one of their strongest points, as is the transparency it lends to the transfer process.
“We’re trying to bring a lot of what the sporting director does online,” Hemmings says. They are more the LinkedIn of football than, say, the Facebook of football, but are really their own entity altogether.
Over time, the system has developed so that players can advertise themselves. They have a major player on the platform selling himself at the moment, although Hemmings is unable to say who due to confidentiality agreements.
“This is a tool predominantly for clubs,” he says. “They don’t want to spill their business everywhere. We’re quite secretive in the business that we do.”
Agents can list players they want to move. Player Lens charge a fee for players to list themselves and agents to list players, but only to ensure that serious professionals sign up.
“We just try to be honest,” Hemmings says. “We’re not in the business of selling dreams. We don’t want someone signing up thinking we’re going to get them a job. It’s not going to happen. This is a tool for the professional industry.”
It is not quite at the stage where they will be moving Neymar back to Barcelona for a world record, but they are growing.
“I still think some transfer deals have to be done on the phone, or face to face, you have to have that kind of relationship, but most of the job can be done online now,” Guardiola says. “Clubs want all the information, players want to be on a platform where they can show everyone that they are there.”
They have seen increased usage since the coronavirus outbreak. As cultures change, perhaps the football transfer market will finally fully embrace technology.
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