The greatest threat to a good decision isn’t the wrong call. It’s not seeing the possibility at all.
Personality profiling and performance strategy for football clubs, and for the people who lead them. Mike Holden, working remotely from Spain.
A staff that overachieved, then stalled, and nobody could say why.
Exeter City had the smallest budget in League One and kept finishing above where anyone expected. But the backroom team kept hitting mid-season ruts that nobody inside the building could diagnose.
I profiled all eight of them. The problem wasn’t effort or skill. It was an observation gap. A group strong on the concrete and immediate, structurally light on the bigger shape of the season. Nobody’s fault. Just the natural chemistry of the room.
The result was constant reaction to the next game, then the next, then the next. Once the gap was visible, it could be worked on. That is the whole method: make the blind spot visible before it turns into a crisis.
Three ways to work together.
Manager and Executive Profiling
Hiring a manager or planning succession? I profile the leadership styles behind the shortlist and map them against the strategy and culture you actually need, not the one the CV suggests.
Performance Strategy
A season split into eight blocks, with a clear theme and a clear job for each. Delivered remotely, alongside a manager or executive. Can include profiling of key staff and players, so the conversations and the direction improve together.
Player Profiling
Understanding how a player is wired changes the conversation you have with him. Used for squad management and recruitment, for loan players who may feel forgotten by their parent club, and by agents who want to understand and present their clients better.
The same method for anyone who has to lead people.
Leadership Coaching
One-to-one coaching for executives who manage teams. Less motivation, more visibility: where you lean, where you go blind, and what that costs the people who report to you.
Apply →Personality Profiling Sessions
A private session for a player, manager or executive: a written profile, a clear read of how you operate under pressure, and the option of ongoing one-to-one work afterwards.
Apply →Clubs do tactics. I do strategy.
Inside a club every day has to matter. That urgency is what makes a training ground work, and it is exactly why nobody inside can step back and see the shape of the season. The distance is the value.
Short-term thinking you can’t escape from the inside. Managers, executives and teams, living one match at a time.
Remote work that chunks one problem, a 46-game season, into eight blocks of five to seven games. Detached from the daily emotion by design.
Blocks is an application of periodisation to a whole season. The full framework, and a course version of it, lives at binary.football.
I’m Mike Holden.
I’ve spent more than twenty-five years analysing football: first as a punter and journalist, then, from 2025, inside a professional club as a personality profiler and performance strategist. It was a role nobody had held before, so I had to invent it.
My work sits where personality psychology meets probability. I use the Objective Personality System, built on Jung’s cognitive functions, to see how people and groups are wired, and binary, number-first thinking to decide what to do about it.
Psychology has drifted towards the soft and the reassuring. Mine is plain and direct. Light and dark are both part of the picture, and a good decision needs to see both.
Based in Spain. Work is remote, with visits where it matters. Client work is confidential and current clients are never named.
Six principles. Everything I do traces back to them.
Quality decisions come from frameworks, not foresight.
Cover all bases. Leave no blind spots.
Make the subconscious conscious.
Understand probabilities before choosing a frame.
Seek helpful clarity, not definitive answers.
Good decisions compound. Bad blind spots compound faster.
Learn to read people the way I do.
Join the waiting list
You’ll hear first, and early members get the launch price.
Tell me the situation.
Every enquiry is read by me personally. If there is a fit, I’ll reply with a short, specific proposal, usually a small defined first piece of work before anything larger.
Everything you send is treated as confidential.