Talk to "The Gaffer"
The new training aid that will guarantee footballers are prepared for those crucial negotiations.
Disclaimers
1. Legal
If you can’t be bothered reading the thousand-ish word justification below (which is mostly lies anyway), this month’s project comes in the form of a pretty rubbish app: thegaffer.streamlit.app
It’s basically a WhatsApp simulator that lets you pretend you’re texting a football manager, whether that’s a custom-built personality designed to match the traits of your actual coach, or just an off-brand version of some of the modern coaching greats. To be clear, the views expressed by the “managers” in this app do not reflect those of any real coaches, or even me, the person who built it. They are entirely fictional, and depending on your chosen inputs, may be foul-mouthed and unreasonably aggressive.
Also, if at some point the app stops working, it’s probably because I’ve reached an API request limit, so you might need some patience and a bit of page-refreshing, depending on how much it actually gets used.
2. My Wellbeing
In case it wasn’t already obvious, I started this Substack as a thinly veiled excuse to collate some stupid data science projects into a coherent portfolio — ideally one that convinces someone to hire me when I finish my PhD next year. But the more I work on it, the more it feels like I’m just broadcasting a mental breakdown in real time.
I’m prefacing this month’s post with this because, having just finished building this, I realised when any friends and family see it they might start drafting “everything alright?” texts. So just to save the effort: better than you’d think, given that I’ve spent the hottest weekend of the year fine-tuning a chatbot so I can exchange insults with fictional football coaches.
The Rehearsal
One of the most important parts of modern football is the relationship between players and coaches. Whether it's match prep, tactical feedback, or just figuring out if you’re starting at the weekend, communication is key. And in today’s game, no tool seems more crucial to that exchange than WhatsApp. But for people like me, who can’t send a simple email without extensive rewrites before altogether deleting the draft, that poses a problem.
Top-level pros are starting to hire professional help for key negotations, like data analysts to help them quantify their value in contract discussions, while I’m stuck sending “Hi mate, just wondering if you still need a right back?” to prospective coaches at 11:43pm on a Friday night, followed by immediate regret.
Maybe, then, the real gap between some of us amateurs and the elites isn’t the fitness, talent, or mentality (all of which I’ve obviously got in spades) — it’s just the ability to send a perfectly normal message to a coach.
Recently, I watched Series 2 of The Rehearsal, Nathan Fielder’s TV show where he builds elaborate simulations to help people prepare for difficult moments in their lives — like confessing to a white lie, or flying a commercial aircraft to prove a point about pilot communication. To achieve the latter, he recreates the childhood of heroic pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger to understand how he developed his skills for communicating under pressure, which he deployed during the “Miracle on the Hudson”.
It was during a particularly horrific sequence (Fielder experiencing Sully’s infancy, above) that I started to wonder if I could apply some of Fielder’s methods to grassroots football. Maybe what amateur players really need isn’t another pointless rondo or pressing drill, it’s a safe space to practice texting their manager asking why they got dropped, before doing it for real.
Meet: TheGaffer.
The Gaffer
A slightly more sincere inspiration for this month’s project came from Twelve Football’s Earpiece — an AI-powered scouting and analytics tool that runs through WhatsApp. You message it like you would a human, and it replies with stats, charts, and scouting breakdowns as if it's your own personal analyst. It’s a great idea: instant professional help in your pocket.
With TheGaffer, I wanted to build something similar, but for a different footballing problem. Rather than “who should we sign for our midfield”, it’s designed for asking “how do I tell the manager I’m too hungover to play, again?”. Instead of delivering useful data, TheGaffer gives you a chance to simulate WhatsApp conversations with a football coach: one who might be supportive, modern and forward-thinking, or someone a bit more old-school who’s mostly just horrible.
To give users more control than WhatsApp normally allows (and crucially to avoid spending any actual money on building this) the whole thing is made with streamlit and Mistral AI’s free API tier. If the app is no longer working by the time you read this, blame them.
One of the main features I’ve implemented is the ability to build a custom personality, using sliders for adjusting temperament, communication style, aggression, and coaching philosophy. This is particularly useful if you have your own coach in mind that you want to rehearse for.
If this app works as well as I expect, though, you’ll be ditching your Sunday league coach soon enough to play for some of the game’s top coaches. With this in mind, you’ll need to be able to practice speaking to them, too. I don’t want to get sued by any real football managers or anything for effectively creating WhatsApp deepfakes of them, so borrowing the “parody law” legal loophole from Nathan Fielder’s Dumb Starbucks, I have created the Aldi equivalents of some of the most distinctive voices in recent-ish football: Perp Gondiola, Jargon Klapp, Sir Alistair Fergleson, Joesay Moreenyo and Miguel Artutu.
Enter The Simulation
When you enter the app, you’ll first choose a rehearsal scenario. You can start with a blank canvas, meaning you have to initiate the chat yourself, or pick from a short list of classic football negotiations (e.g. “Ask for more game time”, “Request a transfer”). Choose a scenario, and The Gaffer will kick things off with some variation on "What’s this I’m hearing about you wanting to leave?", depending on their chosen personality.
On the subject of choosing personality, you can either go fully bespoke with a Custom Gaffer, using sliders to adjust temperament, aggression, communication style, etc., or you can select a Preset Manager, which gives you an off-the-shelf off-brand version of an existing manager.
Once you’ve made your picks, it’s time to begin the conversation. For this demo, I ran the same scenario (requesting a transfer) with three different gaffers: a Custom Gaffer with all of the personality traits maxed out (to make them as unpleasant as possible), the philosophical Perp Gondiola, and the “mentality monster” Jargon Klapp.
To keep things fair, I responded to each manager’s opener with the same generic message, just to see how each would react.
The custom-built gaffer, designed to be highly informal and aggressive, jumps straight into a tirade of insults and a slightly sarcastic use of “mate”. Perp, naturally, takes a more measured approach: he opens with a rhetorical question, answers it himself, then closes with another rhetorical question — each a bit more passive-aggressive than the last. My beloved Jargon is the only one who actually puts an arm around me, gently reminding me that we're a family, and that we should really be talking this through in person.
I won’t go into all of the details about how it got to this point, but my lengthy conversation with the custom-built gaffer ended on a bit of a sour note.
It was only after spending an hour of arguing with this completely fictional coach that I truly understood the power of what I’d built. Even if my interaction wasn’t real, the emotions it was evoking certainly were. I am now battle-hardened and ready to one day send a real WhatsApp to a real coach, whatever they throw at me, maybe, if I get round to it. And when it ends up being the catalyst for your dramatic rise through the footballing ranks, I’d love to hear how TheGaffer changed your life too.