The First Red

What if the most important signals in your organisation are the ones no dashboard measures?

When struggling coach Declan Maguire watches a football match, he doesn’t watch the ball. He watches the spaces between plays: who talks, who reacts, who steps up—and who disappears. From those observations he builds a radical idea: that performance isn’t driven by capability alone, but by the behaviours that shape how those capabilities are used.

Across nine years and hundreds of matches, Declan tracks the signals others ignore—Reds, Blues, and Greens—until the patterns reveal something extraordinary.

Meanwhile, Carrickmore Town FC has everything money can buy: a world-class performance centre, cutting-edge analytics, and a dashboard glowing green across forty-seven metrics. But beneath the numbers, something is quietly breaking. When Ballymore United, an amateur side with a leaking clubhouse and volunteer committee, draw Carrickmore in the cup, Declan believes he sees what no one else does.

The question is whether behaviours can overcome capability—and whether the future can be seen before the scoreboard changes.

What if you’re measuring everything… but not seeing the full picture?