The leading journal Nature recently compared professional footballers with researchers: short contracts, constant mobility, league tables of one kind or another, and the same eventual move from performing to managing. I wrote a short Correspondence letter about what the comparison leaves out.

Football stopped assuming that its best players make its best managers a long time ago. Managing at the top level requires an assessed licence in leadership and people management, and a World Cup medal earns no exemption. Yet in academia - and arguably in biosafety - we promote on technical record such as publications and assume the rest arrives with the title.

For a biosafety readership the point is not really about academia. Whoever leads a team sets the risk appetite inside it. Ask a biosafety professional for their hardest cases and few are about containment engineering: work starting before the risk assessment is signed because a deadline moved, an induction handled by whoever was free that morning, a near-miss unreported because nobody could predict how the boss would take it. These get written up as compliance failures. Most are management failures in a lab coat.

There is an uncomfortable overlap here too. Good certification exists in our own field, but it is not always mandatory. Plenty of us arrived by the technical route and picked up the managing of people the same way everyone else does — on the job, at somebody's expense. What we would ask of the people we advise, we should be willing to ask of ourselves.

None of this needs a new layer of bureaucracy: just training attached to the moment someone first takes charge of people rather than experiments. A badge is a floor, not a culture. It only removes the defence of never having been taught.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-02427-2