I’ve spent a good part of my career arguing, in one form or another, that organizations that develop people well outperform organizations that don’t — and that this is true whether you’re running a technology company or evaluating a football club’s business operations. So it probably won’t surprise anyone that I believe football clubs should be run with the same operational discipline as any serious company. What might surprise people is how carefully I think that analogy needs to be applied, because taken too literally, it breaks in some interesting and important ways.
The Case for Treating Clubs Like Businesses
Start with the obvious argument. A football club is a business. It has revenue lines, cost structures, a workforce, a brand, and long-term capital decisions that determine whether it’s healthy in five years or in crisis. Too many clubs, historically, have been run as if none of that were true — as if passion and tradition were a substitute for financial discipline, succession planning, and clear governance. That mindset has bankrupted historic institutions and will keep doing so as long as it persists.
The clubs I find most impressive, as someone who studies organizations for a living, are the ones that have imported the best habits of well-run companies: rigorous financial planning, professionalized recruitment processes, clear reporting lines, and a genuine data culture that informs decisions instead of intuition alone. None of that dilutes what makes football special. If anything, it protects it, by keeping the institution solvent and stable enough to keep competing.
Where the Analogy Holds Up Well
Governance is the clearest example. A well-run company has clear accountability for decisions and a structure that survives any single individual leaving. A well-run football club needs exactly the same thing, because managerial and executive turnover in this sport is faster and more brutal than almost any industry I’ve studied. Talent development is another. Building people, not just extracting short-term performance, is as true in a football academy as it is in a growing company — I’ve written about this at length because I believe it’s the single most underappreciated lever in either world.
Where the Analogy Starts to Break Down
Here’s where I diverge from the purely “run it like a business” crowd. A football club’s core product isn’t really a service or a good in the conventional sense — it’s competitive sporting outcome, delivered live, in real time, with no ability to quietly fix a bad result the way a company might quietly patch a bad product release. There’s no version control on a Saturday afternoon. That changes the risk calculus in ways a standard business framework doesn’t fully capture.
There’s also the matter of stakeholders. A normal business is primarily accountable to shareholders and customers. A football club carries something closer to civic or emotional ownership — supporters who have inherited their attachment to the institution across generations, in a way that has no real analogue in most commercial sectors. Ignore that layer and you get decisions that look rational on a spreadsheet and land as a betrayal in reality. I’ve watched well-intentioned, business-minded leadership make exactly that mistake by underestimating how much the emotional contract with supporters actually matters to long-term value, not just sentiment.
The Synthesis I Actually Believe In
My real position isn’t “run clubs exactly like tech companies” or “leave football alone, it’s sacred and should ignore modern business practice.” It’s that the operational disciplines of good business — governance, data-informed decisions, long-term people development — transfer almost completely. The cultural and emotional dimensions of the product do not, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of mismanagement.
The clubs getting this right tend to separate the two cleanly: professionalized, disciplined operations behind the scenes, and genuine respect for what the club means to the people who’ve supported it for decades, out front. That combination is rare, and it’s exactly what I look for whenever I think seriously about football’s business potential.
The Takeaway for Anyone Building or Investing in Sport
If you’re evaluating a football organization the way you’d evaluate any company, do it — you should. Just don’t stop there. The businesses that will get football right over the next decade are the ones sophisticated enough to know exactly where the standard playbook applies, and disciplined enough to know where it has to be rewritten for a sport that means more to people than a quarterly earnings call ever will.
