Making Player Trading as Simple as Spotify · Jake Schuster, Gemini Sports

What we talked about.

Jake Schuster, founder and CEO of Gemini Sports, joins Sunny Ray to explain why player trading in professional sports still runs on outdated tools. Gemini Sports builds a mobile app that gives general managers and sporting directors AI powered predictive information as a single source of truth, without requiring a data scientist. Schuster, who holds a PhD in sport science and taught himself three programming languages out of necessity, draws on experience with the All Blacks, the Dutch Olympic Federation, and Florida State to describe how elite organizations actually make decisions under pressure. He argues that player trading has changed little since Moneyball, and that clubs now need to outsmart the market on price and timing rather than just find undervalued talent. As a nontechnical founder, Schuster credits his success to finding exceptional people rather than building everything himself, a lesson shaped in part by burnout that cost him his grandfather's funeral. The conversation covers explainability, why soccer lags other sports in trusting multiple models, and what a sporting director should be able to do from their phone each morning.

Gemini Sports founder Jake Schuster on turning player trading into a Moneyball style mobile app for sporting directors.

The questions, and the answers.

What are you building at Gemini Sports, and what problem are you solving?

Gemini Sports is like Moneyball as a mobile app. In player trading, where decisions cost hundreds of millions of dollars, decision makers lack the information they need to act with conviction and efficiency. We give them that information in a mobile app as a single source of truth, powered by AI, because the old tools were built for a previous generation.

You did a PhD in sport science and ended up learning three programming languages. What question could you not answer without them?

I could not answer any question without a huge headache. Everything came together through silos and had to be organized piece by piece manually, which was not good enough because sports moves faster than traditional engineering or analysis work. I had to find a way to get to critical roster decisions quickly, in a way that was user friendly for executives who live on their phones.

Working with the All Blacks, what did you learn about how elite organizations make decisions under pressure?

It is all about people, having the best people around you who communicate, trust each other, and take critical feedback well. The All Blacks are from a country the size of Colorado yet are the most successful sports team in history, not because of facilities or fancy training but because they work together, keep the important thing the important thing, and focus on it.

What changes about the player trading problem as you move between different worlds and industries?

Player trading has not really changed since Moneyball came out 25 years ago outside baseball. It is not about being cleverer or more niche than everyone else, that is table stakes now. It is about outsmarting the market. Running a club is like running a hedge fund, you need the right price and the right timing, not just the right asset. About 8 billion was spent by Premier League clubs last transfer window, and only about 42 percent of those assets will be worth more in two years.

You are not an engineer, you are someone who sees a problem and finds the right people. How did you learn to do that?

Entrepreneurs mainly need a high pain tolerance and stubbornness, plus the ability to get great people in a room and be passionate enough about the mission that they want to join. Being a nontechnical founder has actually been an advantage, because I know what I do not know, so I bring in people who can bring the vision to life instead of having sunk cost bias in my own code.

A decade of travel inside professional sport pushed you to start something. What was the last straw?

I once booked myself into completely the wrong country for a meeting, which was a sign. But the real last straw was missing my grandfather's funeral. He was my father figure, and I had convinced myself I had spent enough time with him near the end of his life. It took months before I realized what I had actually been doing to myself.

What did practitioners keep asking you for that no vendor in the market was willing to build?

Ease of use and having all the information in one place. People say they have an adequate setup, then show you three different screens open only on desktop that never talk to each other. If you are making 100 million dollar trading decisions, everything needs to be on one screen. Decision makers live on their phones and WhatsApp, not at a desk, so the tools have to work there too.

What breaks at a club when they rely too heavily on a vendor, or try to build everything in-house?

We are always going to rely on vendors for something, whether that is our models or someone else's. Building in-house is cost prohibitive and slow. Soccer is oddly behind other sports like the NFL or baseball, where a dozen models get compared openly. In football it becomes a measuring contest between vendors instead of a focus on workflows, which is really what matters.