Hugo Scheckter

A conversation tool developed by Shrewsbury Town's Natalie Wood is now being adopted more widely across the game 🗣️ The Conversation Circle encourages discussions between players & adults, helping staff better support their wellbeing 💙🧡 More info 👇 shrewsburytown.com/news/2026/may/…

It’s one of the honours of my life to have been asked to lead @UEFA's Player Welfare project on behalf of The Player Care Group. We have been working since 2025 to help the 55 National Associations of UEFA to develop policies to better support their female players through several core pillars and will be rolling out how to guides, training and templates over the coming months & years. A huge thank you to the entire Women’s Football department at UEFA for being so welcoming & engaging, particularly Colm Hickey & Claire Savin. I’m lucky to be supported by an expert group of our leading consultants from across the Women’s game to check, challenge & improve what we do – I’m loving the learning we’re doing every day on this project. It was a privilege to be invited to Oslo for my first UEFA Women's Champions League final and I loved meeting so many passionate, engaging professionals from across the world in an information exchange topped off with an end-to-end game between FC Barcelona & OL Lyonnes. Congrats to FCB for the win! This is just the start – there are a number of exciting announcements coming this summer – it’s such a pleasure to work with such a great group of confederations, leagues & clubs across the world who are passionate about creating the best conditions for their players! @PlayerCareGroup #playercare #playerwelfare #UEFA

JOB ALERT: The Player Care Group are supporting NUFC Women to find a Player Performance & Lifestyle Lead. This role will lead the design, coordination and delivery of a Performance Lifestyle and Player Liaison programme. Closes on Sun 17th - JD & apply: careers.newcastleunited.com/job/nuw-player…

The Player Care Group was delighted to be invited to the @Bundesliga_EN first ever Player Care meeting in Dortmund last week – with Founder & MD @HugoScheckter presenting on Player Care in leagues worldwide as well as how to gain buy in with leadership to invest in #PlayerCare.

@KFILE Good to know Graham & I were apparently classmates @GWtweets #onlyatgw @gwhatchet

Graham Platner was interviewed in 2008 for CNN/MTV special on veterans adjusting to life in college.

A look at #PlayerCare in Brazil's Série A from @globo - with 8 teams having a Player Care provision. It's great to see this work ever expanding across continents and to read about the innovative work being done in different cultures around the world. ge.globo.com/futebol/brasil…

@vince_bartram Not sure even you could have helped me Vince! All good here mate hope you are too!

@HugoScheckter Harsh....but fair. Obviously needed a better gk coach?😂 Hope you're well Hugo?

My school football scouting report aged 11… Brutal

Of course, there's much more to it - and with @PlayerCareGroup we've designed 170+ objective Player Care standards for clubs of all sizes to be able to consider and improve themselves. These standards are peer reviewed by some of the best people working in Player Care around the world and appropriate for professional clubs across the world and can be used by clubs to understand what 'good' really looks like, what's reasonable for your club and how you can go about putting it in place.

3. Less distractions off the pitch means more focus on it - it's impossible to be at your best at work when things are difficult at home - and when you're in a foreign country, away from friends & family for support, in a different culture & language, every problem can feel that much more difficult to solve. Having a proactive Player Care department can not only help solve those problems, but help the families build that community locally so they can support themselves too.

Why should clubs bother with a dedicated Player Care provision? I've been lucky enough to run a #PlayerCare provision at 3 different Premier League clubs and helped set up and/or upskill departments at top level clubs in Germany, Italy, England, the US, Mexico & many more - I'm going to explore today why this provision helps clubs to achieve their goals. A number of owners/sporting directors I speak to aren't sure about putting in a Player Care resource - whether a single person or a department. They're worried that it will create dependant, lazy players who won't perform to their best. However I've found clubs that have invested in proactive, appropriate Player Care have found the following benefits: 1. Protecting Marginal Gains - We hear of clubs having incredible performance, data, nutrition and analysis teams but then you find out that the players are still in a hotel after a number of months, eating takeaway food and unable to understand the language at the club. Performance needs to be about the whole person, not just the time they're at the training ground or those marginal gains will be lost. (1/4)

@suttyshow @DavidPalman Thanks for this, super helpful. This is about 15% I think of what there is, a random selection. You can see the bag of what’s left next to it. I seem to remember my shiny book was confiscated at school so there aren’t any in here that I’ve found

@DavidPalman @HugoScheckter Hi mate, impossible to tell value based on that one picture , anyone who gives u an offer is assuming the worst and basing their value on worst case scenario. Slightly a pain but a few photos of 40 laid out next to each other isn’t too time consuming and then I can see cards

Found an old bag of my #pokemon cards from about 20 years ago. Anyone know the best place to understand value?

@DavidPalman They’re from late 90s/early 2000s. No idea on value tbh

@HugoScheckter Fair, I get that! Do you have a number in mind for the bag? Any idea what year(s) they're from?

@DavidPalman Thanks mate but there are like 300 there - think the time it would take won’t be worth it. Appreciate the offer tho!

@HugoScheckter I'm going to a card show in June. If you send me photos of each one individually I'll tell you if you've got anything worth firing off for grading or selling. DM me

@moggehh91 Cheers very useful!

@HugoScheckter The 1999 jungle pikachu on top has a lot of recently sold on eBay at around £18 but there’s also one that was graded a 10 by ace grading that sold for £816 hope this helps Hugo!

@RosDror Have DMed

@HugoScheckter REPORT

A 3 person Player Care team costs a Premier League club around £200,000 (approx €240,000) a year in salaries. A 15% reduction in failed transfers - a conservative estimate on the impact of Player Care based on research from Liverpool FC's own Director of Research speaking at a Statsbomb Conference in 2021 - would save that same club around £3M (€3.5M) annually. That's a 15:1 return. Before you factor in squad stability, player happiness, or the reputational cost of a high-profile signing publicly struggling. I'm not saying Player Care prevents every failed transfer - it doesn't - but any support we can put in place to reduce the chances of failure are clearly worth investing in. The clubs we've worked with who do this well don't just see it as pastoral care, they see it as protecting a multimillion pound asset & their performances. Instead of asking us how much it will cost, they ask how they can do it better. Player Care is a spectrum, not a binary in terms of whether clubs have it or not. At The @PlayerCareGroup we've developed a set of 170+ peer reviewed Player Care standards for the 1st team, helping clubs worldwide implement & improve their Player Care provision. In 2024 we commissioned a report into 'failed' transfers and the backgrounds, languages & ages of those players to dig more into the value of proactive Player Care. For a full copy of the findings, comment REPORT below or DM me.

@petecouhig Have DMed

@HugoScheckter Sounds very interesting Hugo, would love to read the full report.