The First Red: What Your Dashboards Aren’t Telling You

A business leadership novel. For fans of The Phoenix Project, Moneyball and Legacy.

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. Over nine years and hundreds of matches, he builds a framework that predicts outcomes before they happen: Reds, Blues, and Greens — behavioural signals that tell you what the scoreboard won’t show until it’s too late.

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 a volunteer committee — draw Carrickmore in the cup, Declan believes the behaviours tell a different story from the odds.

The First Red is never on the pitch.

The First Red is a business leadership novel about why capable teams fail, why dashboards lie, and what you can actually do about it. It comes with a full practical framework — the Five Plays, Declan’s Notebook method, and a probability forecasting tool — so you can start applying it the day you finish reading.

If you’ve ever looked at a dashboard full of green and known something was wrong, this book is for you.