Recipe for hiring a winning DevOps empowered team?
I believe DevOps is orthogonal to your question, i.e., it changes nothing compared to a "classical" approach (or to hiring any team at all, not only for software development). You identify what your key needs are (for example, an "architect" who is able to structure large software systems; some "hacker" who is able to fix a Kernel driver if needed; a "tester" who likes to test and such; and finally maybe a "DevOps engineer" who excels in creating good CI/CD tooling). 

But all of them need, to stay with your image, to be able to kick the ball. I.e., they all need to work together in the context that the team is working in. They all need at least some basic understanding of what the other team members are doing; if you have a strict CI/CD pipeline, then they all need to be able to develop in that frame; and so on.