Taking the emotion out of decisions is the way forward at a football club

W hen we became the major shareholders at Grimsby Town in 2021 we chatted to the manager, Paul Hurst, and set out two commitments that we continue to stand by. The first was that, as owners, we would never go into the changing room. This is a surprisingly common occurrence, as demonstrated by Todd Boehly at Chelsea. For us, this is about setting clear expectations and boundaries of trust and we limit our visits to the training ground for the same reason. These spaces are for the manager and players and they should know that. Owners, while setting the tone, should trust the people they hire to run the club, in our case the manager and CEO.

The second commitment was that after a game the manager has no obligation to see or speak to us. After a busy day we want the manager to be able to get home and see his family but, just as importantly, we feel that no good decisions about anything will be made immediately after a match.

Put more elaborately, we want to take the emotion of match days out of our decision-making process. In this I have been influenced by Daniel Kahneman, the renowned psychologist and Nobel laureate who wrote the brilliant book Thinking, Fast and Slow where he introduces the concept of System 1 and System 2 thinking. These are distinct cognitive processes that shape human decision-making and judgment and this analogy is particularly useful in relation to sport.

System 1 thinking, often referred to as intuitive or automatic thinking, is fast, effortless and operates largely on unconscious processing. It relies on heuristics: mental shortcuts that allow for quick assessments and immediate responses to stimuli. It enables us to make snap judgments, recognise familiar faces and react swiftly to potential