Great Teams Are Built Through the Middle
With the World Cup underway, football is on a lot of people’s minds. A sport has helped me explain something I keep seeing in organizations more clearly than any business framework has. The first time I used a sports lens this way, it was baseball — and the roster-building frame I wrote about there still holds. I touched on the midfield idea briefly in the debut episode of Zurich North America’s Future of Risk AI miniseries, where I joined Kristen Bessette, Chief Data Officer at Zurich, to talk about what AI is actually delivering so far. This is the longer version of that thought.
You don’t need to follow football (soccer, for North American readers) to follow this. I’ll explain what matters as I go.
The Formation Most Organizations Are Running
Most AI teams I encounter have the same problem.
Too many forwards. Too many defenders. Almost no midfielders.
The forwards are easy to spot. They want AI in every meeting, every workflow, every tool. They are prompting their way through tasks that used to take days and pushing hard for more. Their energy is real and their instincts are often right. The problem is they are frequently playing in a different match than everyone else in the building.
The defenders are easy to spot too. Compliance, legal, risk, security. They are not wrong to be cautious. GenAI-related data policy violations more than doubled in a single year, with sensitive data (source code, regulated information, intellectual property) flowing into AI tools faster than most security teams can track. The defenders are doing their job. The issue is that without someone linking the play, their job becomes blocking rather than protecting.
The result is a team that generates a lot of activity and very little momentum.
What a Midfielder Actually Does
In football, the midfielder is the hardest position to play well and the easiest to undervalue because the value is invisible until it disappears.
There are three versions of the role worth knowing.
The first is the orchestrator, the regista. Controls tempo, sees the game three or four passes ahead, delivers the ball so precisely that teammates arrive exactly where they need to be. Rarely on the highlights reel. Always on the trophy photo.
The second is the engine. Box-to-box, relentless work rate, winning the ball back before the forwards have to defend, doing the things no one else wants to do, making everyone around them better in ways that never show up in the box score. Celebrated in retrospect, underrated in real time.
The third is the complete midfielder. Capable in both directions, able to score in big moments, but defined above all by the ability to hold a team together when the shape is breaking down.
Three different profiles. One position. The common thread is that none of them are the most celebrated person on the pitch in any given week, and all of them are the reason their teams win over the course of a season.
The Organizational Version
The pattern holds across organizations of every size. This is not a role that fills itself, and the absence is rarely invisible for long.
The gap between AI forwards and AI defenders is not a culture problem or a communication problem. It is a personnel problem. Someone needs to hold both conversations, and most organizations have not put that person in place.
This is not the first time organizations have faced this formation problem. Every major technology shift produces the same gap. What is different now is the speed at which it compounds.
In AI terms, the midfielder is the person who understands enough about the technology to evaluate what it actually produces, not just whether it is fast but whether it is right, and understands enough about risk, compliance, and organizational context to know where the guardrails need to go and why. They are not evangelists and they are not blockers. They are translators. When a new deployment is being discussed, they are the person in the room who can speak to both sides without losing either one.
The IAPP’s 2025 AI Governance Profession Report found that effective AI governance professionals need to understand AI while also having experience in governance, risk, and compliance, and be able to translate legislative requirements into actionable policies. That profile is not common. A global survey of 1,735 executives by AICPA, CIMA, and North Carolina State University found that only 24 to 27% of organizations report having adequate AI-skilled talent, IT system readiness, or regulatory preparedness.
The forwards are pushing. The defenders are holding. The pitch between them is largely empty.
Goals Still Win Games
Before this becomes a brief for caution: a team of twelve registas loses to a team with a striker who scores.
Governance without outcomes is not strategy. The forwards in your organization are an asset. Their urgency is valuable. The midfield’s job is not to slow them down. It is to make their energy usable at an organizational scale, repeatedly, without the team losing possession every time something goes wrong.
A 2025 enterprise AI adoption survey found that at companies without a formal AI strategy, only 37% of executives report being very successful at adopting AI, compared to 80% at companies with a strategy in place. The midfield does not replace attack. It makes attack sustainable.
The engine midfielder does not win matches by winning the ball back. They win them by winning it back and giving it to someone who can finish.
The best teams are not built around any single position. They are built around a system where each role understands its relationship to the others. The midfielder matters because the system needs one, not because the midfielder is more important than the striker or the defender.
Why Most Organizations Skip Straight to Hiring
When I talk to leaders about this gap, the first instinct is almost always to post a job description. Find someone with a technical background and compliance experience and put them in a newly created role. That is not wrong, but most organizations take the third step first. Before the hire makes sense, two things usually need to be in place.
The first is structural. The midfielder needs a position on the pitch that actually exists. I have watched organizations bring in exactly the right person and then watch them get pulled toward one camp or the other within six months because the role had no real mandate, no standing in the rooms that mattered, and no clarity about who they reported to. The role gets absorbed. The gap reopens.
The second is developmental. The best midfielders I have seen in organizations were not hired as midfielders. They were forwards or defenders who were given exposure to the other side of the conversation over time. A compliance person who spent a year embedded in a product team. A technical lead who was put in front of legal and risk on a regular basis and coached through it. The regista does not arrive already able to read the game at that level. They are developed over years, with intent.
The IAPP report noted there is no clear best practice for how to build and organize an AI governance team, and that AI governance skills will continue to evolve alongside new types of AI technologies and policies. That ambiguity is real. It is also an opening. The organizations that build this capability deliberately, through structure and development rather than a single hire, will have something in three to five years that competitors cannot buy from the external market because the external market will not have enough of them.
The Question Worth Sitting With
Look at your current AI efforts and ask who is linking the play.
Not who is pushing hardest. Not who is saying no most often. Who is standing in the space between those two conversations, fluent in both, with the standing to move the ball in either direction?
If you cannot name that person, you do not have a midfield problem yet. You have a results problem that has not fully surfaced.
The fix is not a job posting. Start by looking at who you already have on the pitch. Someone in your organization is probably already playing this role informally, without the mandate or the standing to do it properly. Find them. Give them the position. And if you are that person, doing this work without the title or the mandate, this is worth making visible. Then build around it.
Where is the midfield in your organization right now? Who’s playing it? I’d like to hear where you’re seeing this.