Why Every Organisation Needs a James Milner
When we look back in years to come, pages will read: James Milner is an English former professional footballer, who held the record for the most Premier League appearances (658) and the longest continuous career in the Premier League (24 years) with six clubs, winning 13 major trophies, including three Premier League titles with Man City and Liverpool.
Yet, when we look back at the Premier League greats, he will be but a footnote behind the likes of Gerrard, Scholes, Lampard, De Bruyne, Ronaldo, Rooney and Henry. Unlike the names in this esteemed list, he won’t have been classed as a Star Player or Indispensable; he won’t have topped the goals or assists charts; but he was ever present, consistent, always needed when called upon, and probably most importantly, there was a reason why he was highly valued at every club he played for.
Preamble
In football, the greats are judged by individual moments of brilliance, maverick moments and personality.
The same can be said in most workplaces, where performance and talent frameworks are heavily skewed towards a familiar type of profile: top performers, high potentials, future leaders, and stars.
In football, these are the people discussed when it comes to World Honours. In business, they are the people most often discussed in promotion conversations and succession planning meetings, that are highlighted on nine-box grids and fast-tracked into new roles.
But there is another group that is less acknowledged or celebrated, but no less important and without whom, organisations quietly fall apart.
These are your core contributors.
The People Who Hold the Place Together
Core contributors are ever-present. They understand the business deeply, know how work really gets done, and carry the institutional knowledge and memories that no process map can fully capture.
They set the standards around work ethic and business practice
They advocate others and provide much needed psychological safety
They are the people others go to when something breaks.
They teach newcomers the shortcuts that never made it into procedure documents.
They provide continuity and calmness during periods of change, transition, or uncertainty.
They use their visibility to highlight the time, effort and strengths of others.
Culture, in many organisations, lives with and through them.
Football Understands This Better Than Business
Great managers rarely build teams entirely around stars. Instead, they anchor squads with experienced professionals who understand the system, translate the manager’s vision on the pitch, and steady the team when they’re up against it or need control in games.
Think of:
Phil Neville (Man Utd & Everton): the trust lieutenant who filled positions without fuss and put the team first
Ashley Young (Aston Villa, Man Utd & Everton): adaptable and competitive whilst continually reinventing himself
Wataru Endo (Liverpool): not flashy, but the steady hand that makes the system work and allows others to shine
Scott Carson (West Brom, Derby & Man City): his value measured by his standards and dressing room influence
Mr Dependable: You Know Exactly What You’re Going to Get
However, for me the clearest modern example of this is James Milner. Across Manchester City, Liverpool, and more recently Brighton, he was trusted in multiple roles, under different managers, in various tactical systems. Very rarely grabbing the headlines, but always there when needed and a calming influence on the pitch and in the dressing room.
No frills.
No drama.
Just gets on with it.
Managers trust him implicitly, not because he’s spectacular, but because he’s reliable, trustworthy, adaptable, composed and a true culture carrier. James Milner may well be the epitome of a core contributor, but any combination of his characteristics exist in people which to me highlights that a core contributor is not one type of person. Instead, it’s a category of a contributor whose value goes beyond their squad status or job description.
Loyalty as a Leadership Signal
What’s often overlooked is what these type of players say about leadership itself. Despite fringe roles, injuries, mistakes or dips in form, clubs retain them because of their work ethic, presence and influence, which sends a powerful message to the squad that: being a team player matters.
Reliability matters. Professionalism matters. Loyalty matters.
There is value in fulfilling that role, which builds trust not just with the individual, but across the entire squad.
In an era obsessed with talent, potential and individual performance, there is something reassuring about football teams that recognise the value of contribution, character and trust. This is what reinforces behaviours to help the team come together, make them successful over the longer term, and ultimately create a good culture and promote harmony within the dressing room.
The Leader’s Real Challenge: Reinvention, Not Replacement
This dynamic isn't just for the pitch; it’s the engine room of every high-functioning department. And so, the challenge for leadership isn’t whether these people matter. It’s how to continue nurturing and motivating them as the organisation evolves.
Not everyone needs to become a people manager. Not everyone should be forced into leadership tracks to remain valued. Sometimes the highest impact comes from reframing the role.
Take the Settlements Analyst who has matched trades since time began. They know every broker, every edge case, and every unwritten rule. Rather than diminishing their value through automation, imagine elevating it:
Formal mentoring for new joiners.
Codifying practical knowledge into procedures.
Acting as a bridge between operations, technology, and change teams.
Or consider the Market Data Commercial Lead who knows every vendor relationship inside out. They understand products, licensing models, and legal language fluently. That experience is gold, and it positions them perfectly to:
Shape governance and usage frameworks.
Inform product roadmaps.
Support Front Office teams in making smarter data choices.
They don’t just manage vendors, but they actually protect value.
Age, Change, and the Reality of Adaptation
Football is honest about something many organisations avoid: Age catches up. Recovery takes longer. Fitness dips. Patterns of play that once felt natural become harder to sustain. The same dynamic exists at work. Processes you built, refined, and ran for years can now be automated almost overnight.
The Identity Shift: When a task is replaced by AI or automation, the person doesn't just lose a job function; they often feel they are losing their identity.
The enduring advantage humans have is not speed or efficiency — it’s adaptability. The ability to evolve, reinterpret experience, and reinvent contribution.
The Science of the “Glue Player”
There is a strong behavioral and psychological foundation underpinning why core contributors matter so much. Broadly speaking, research into high-performing teams points to three pillars:
Psychological Safety: These individuals make it safer for others to perform. They are the "steady hands" who reduce anxiety during moments of pressure, through high collaboration and learning. Amy Edmondson explains this brilliantly in her book The Fearless Organization.
Intrinsic Motivation: Progression doesn‘t always mean promotion. For many core contributors, their drive is long-term engagement, creativity and resilience through mastery, autonomy, and purpose. Daniel Pink argues in his book Drive that this approach leads to better engagement and productivity.
The "Glue Player”: in his book Team Intelligence: How Brilliant Leaders Unlock Collective Genius, Jon Levy presented this concept that all successful teams have the person that multiples eveyone’s results. They connect teams, transmit culture through their behaviour, and stabilise performance when the things are in transition. A key part of this is the psychological safety the create and how they are intrinsically motivated.
This will be explored more explicitly in a future piece through the lens of the DISC-based talent framework I have previously used when leading and managing people. Here, different contribution styles are recognised and developed without forcing everyone into the same buckets and measures of success.
How do you identify the “Glue Players”?
The first thing to understand is that this is not something you quantify in metric or a KPI, but nor is it something that is just intuition.
Step 1 involves redefining what you’re looking for. You’re not looking for high revenue generators, loudest voices or top talent that is most likely to get promoted.
You’re looking through a different lens through people that hold relationships across functions, bring stability during times of change, transfer knowledge informally, and are disproportionately trusted. Some may summarise that as those who hold soft power.
Step 2 is what I like to call the “low variance” test where you challenge yourself with three questions:
Who do you trust with the messiest problem when failure isn’t an option?
If three people resigned tomorrow, whose departure would quietly hurt the most?
Whose presence reduces anxiety in the room?
The answers to these questions is your first indication, where the GLUE players often appear repeatedly, without being on any “top talent” or “emerging leaders” list.
It’s at this point, it can then start to think about formalising this into a very simple scoring chart under the below criteria:
G - Ground Reliability = (1) Consistency under pressure (2) Low drama, low volatility (3) Trusted in a crisis
L - Lived Knowledge = (1) Institutional memory (2) Knows informal processes and systems (3) Understands second-order impact
U - Unifying Influence = (1) Cross-team connector (2) Cultural stabiliser (3) Informal mentor
E - Evolving Contribution = (1) Adaptability to new process and tools (2) Willingness to shift role identity (3) Growth through reinvention
Those scoring high in G + U especially are often invisible glue.
The simple truth is that most talent frameworks reward and optimise for upside. People are “steady”, “solid”, or “know how things really work” are an after thought, but to these are the cultural anchors and most valuable during change and transformation because their value is contextual, not flashy.
Humanity Over Performance
Footballers understand something deeply pragmatic: no career stays at its peak forever. And consequently, that realisation pushes them to plan for life as they get older, whether that be management, coaching, punditry or something different altogether.
Organisations would do well to learn from that mindset.
Instead of making decisions and designing systems that quietly edge out experienced people, the opportunity is to help them transition into roles where judgment, perspective, and wisdom can be leveraged to aide businesses moving forward. In some cases, if you look at how contracts are managed in football, that might be a revised package on lesser terms.
Final Thought
Ultimately, every career eventually reaches a point of transition and in today’s world, AI is to people, what age is to sport stars. But teams, whether on the pitch or in the workplace, are strongest when they respect and embrace the history of all those who came before.
The visionaries. The stars. The doers. The underrated. The versatile. The James Milners.
The real competitive advantage isn’t just high potential. It’s also durable contribution.
