Clubs know who their best players are. They do not know who has the most left in them.

HEADROOM is an instrument for deciding where development attention goes, and for pricing what closing one player's limiting factor would be worth.

The decision nobody has a model for

Recruitment has models. Physical load has models. Development has opinions.

So coaching attention gets spread evenly across a squad, or aimed at whoever the academy already believes in, or at whoever asks loudest. Every club does this. Very few would defend it if you asked them to write it down.

The reason is not carelessness. It is that nobody has an instrument for the question. Deciding who to develop, in what order, and whether the work is worth the hours it takes, is currently a conversation rather than a calculation.

A different question

Identification models rank players by how good they are. That question is well served and getting more so, because the data behind it is bought rather than made.

HEADROOM asks something else. How much value would be created if we closed the one limiting factor that is holding this player's price down?

A player's worth is set by his best, most reliable qualities. A single weakness lets opponents suppress those qualities. Close it and value that was already there is released.

That is what developability means, and it is not the same as quality. A very good player with nothing closable left scores low. A flawed player whose one trainable weakness is suppressing something elite scores high.

Six steps

1. 1.The problem. Coaching hours are finite and currently unallocated.
2. 2.Screen. Four questions decide whether a player is a development project at all. Any single no and no score is produced.
3. 3.Score. Four factors produce a Developability Index between 0 and 100, with the breakdown shown beside it.
4. 4.Rank. Return per hour turns the score into an allocation decision.
5. 5.Act. The score names the constraint. The practice design layer turns it into what happens on the grass.
6. 6.Re-score. Developability is a state, not a trait. Run it again at the end of the block and watch the number move.

One number, so this is not abstract

A 21 year old wide forward. Elite carrying into the box, one footed in his end product. Defenders show him inside and his output sits far below his carrying volume.

He passes all four screening questions. His Developability Index is 76 out of 100, with a moderate interference risk flag beside it, because retooling delivery while he is carrying a heavy load is not free.

What it does not do

HEADROOM does not do the coaching. Value gets created on a training pitch by a coach who is there every week. What this does is name the gate, design the work against it, log what happened, and price it honestly.

Any product that implies otherwise has not been delivered yet.