What makes a football club successful?

The most obvious answer to this apparently simple question is certainly “the players on the pitch”. Yet, while this holds true matchday per matchday, there is much more to it. Just drill down, iterate the question and you will quickly find yourself going deep down the rabbit hole.

What makes the players successful on the pitch?

Again, an apparently easy question but while it’s just one additional layer of abstraction, a bunch of things come to mind. You might say, of course, you need high-quality players to be successful on the pitch. If you were now trying to ask how to get such high-quality players, you quickly find various factors impacting the players’ quality and performance. First of all, you need to identify the most talented players, so scouting must be important. At the same time, nowadays, everybody knows it’s not only about a single player’s potential but it is as important to assemble the players in a way that forms a powerful team, with the right tactic that fits the players’ skills as well as exploits the opponent’s weaknesses.

Since professional players are human beings, motivation and leadership certainly play a role as well. Obviously, besides a great scouting department, you need a capable head coach too. In order to enable your head coach to manage the players in the best possible way, some assistant coaches may be needed as well as some analysts for match and opposition analyses. Of course, to constantly perform on the highest level, players need to be physically fit and able to recover as quickly as possible from injuries.

Therefore, athletic trainers, physiotherapists, and actually a whole medical department would be a good supplement to the team. The list goes on, it’s obvious that you need a smart sporting director, an academy continuously producing first-team players wouldn’t harm as well, and to finance all this you might need somebody in charge of negotiating the best sponsoring deals, a marketing team that builds your club’s brand to increase its value and push matchday revenues by fancy merchandise campaigns and smart ticketing.

You can continue this exercise and sooner or later you will have gone through the full organisation chart of a professional football club.

On the one side, this means everyone is important and plays a valid role in the club — definitely yes. But on the other side, almost every club’s organisation chart looks nearly the same. Clearly, while it’s important to have all these roles in your club it’s not a guarantee to success but rather a necessary condition.

So what is it then, that differentiates the high flyers from just the ordinary clubs?

If you look back through the history of football, you will see what you can observe in the business world as well — professionalisation kicks in and takes over aspect by aspect of “the game”. Replace “the game” with whatever industry you want, it remains valid.

There was a time in football when having a physiotherapist or a dedicated athletic trainer was a competitive advantage. There was also a time when it was considered a major innovation to view the players’ nutrition as a critical performance factor — even preventing players from smoking and long nights in the pub was an actual performance boost on matchday at some point in history. Yes, that’s long ago, and you may think that’s just cracker-barrel philosophy. But what about scouting, video analyses or tracking data? Not too long ago, only a few clubs used GPS technology to track their players’ performance on the pitch and gather insights from scientific seeming parameters. Not too long ago, hardly any club used data to scout potential players. A couple of years ago, data was scarce in football and only the elite clubs were able to utilise it. Today, data is widely available, and every professional club has a chance to use it. The competitive advantage is turning from just having access to data to knowing what to do with data and especially how to apply data to the club’s individual needs and circumstances. You can observe the same patterns in the business world, things get optimised and novel tools are democratising competitions.

Still, there are clubs doing better than others and beating expectations continuously. What differentiates these clubs from their peers?

Money is what tends to come to mind first but is it really money that brings success?

Since 2019, German entrepreneur Lars Windhorst has injected €375 million into Hertha BSC. Look where they are now, where they were in 2019, and how the staff was fluctuating during this short period. Now compare this with, say, SC Freiburg.

Due to the high-pressure they create, such huge (near) one-time investments are often counterproductive for football clubs. The expectation of immediate success is backfiring and subverts any reasonable approach to improve the whole club sustainably. Therefore, bootstrapping is often the better way because it allows the organisation to scale step by step, at its own pace. It takes longer but creates much more robust foundations, compared to clubs being managed on steroids.

Due to the legal boundaries limiting the influx of institutional investors, the German Bundesliga is an interesting site to observe the impact of big money. If you look at the past ten years, you find evidence in favour of bootstrapping like Union Berlin, SC Freiburg, FC Heidenheim or Borussia Mönchengladbach, as well as their counterparts of failed investment-driven approaches such as 1860 Munich, KFC Uerdingen, Hamburger SV or FC Schalke 04. However, clubs like RB Leipzig or 1899 Hoffenheim are demonstrating that big money is not necessarily an unmanageable evil for a football club but can indeed be fuel for success. Sure, if you think about it economically, it’s always better to have money than be without it. However, virtually unlimited resources can make organisations stolid and unimaginative, while constraints foster innovation given you have the right people aboard.

As recently seen with the data wave, every innovation becomes a commodity, eventually. Hence, the key to long-term and sustainable success lies in the way a football club, as an organisation, functions at its core. It’s about how the people are working together, how the management is steering the organisation, how owners exemplify the vision, and how the culture (and not just the money) is driving actions over time. It’s about this extremely challenging balancing act between the need for three points on the weekend and the execution of a long-term strategy.

It’s one thing to develop a smashing strategy but the execution requires patience, resilience, and the ability to fine-tune along the way. While each match is limited to 90 minutes, the club itself is playing an infinite game. The clubs considered as top-performing (not only on elite-level but measured relative to their available resources) are usually the ones with owners and executives that understand they are part of such an infinite game. Looking outside of the football world confirms this notion. Organisations playing the infinite game outperform others in the long run.

And this is what divides good organisations from great ones — constant reinvention.

Fine and dandy, but what the hell does this mean in practice?

A football club is a complex system, but too often, people are still trying to apply solutions for complicated problems.

Complex systems are different, though. More fluid, in constant motion, and you can hardly apply mechanic solutions on large scale. Do X and receive Y doesn’t work. What works is implementing systems and environments that increase the probability to get Y more often and more reliably.

While specific aspects can be tackled with very granular tweaks, on an organisational level, the culture is key. And culture is made by people.

People over processes over tools. Great clubs master each aspect, but you cannot sustainably work on one of the latter before you mastered the previous one.

Clubs are hierarchically organised. That’s okay, you don’t need to be a fancy, non-hierarchical teal organisation by all means. What is important is that the club’s owners are sponsoring the culture. Sponsoring culture begins with having a clear vision, a thesis about the football world and how they position themselves within that ecosystem. The owners are crucial because they will remain the decision-makers in the very end. They must be willing to go through valleys without immediately throwing everything overboard and, at the same time, be vigilant and constantly subject the vision to a reality check and, if necessary, turn the right screws. As soon as the vision is compiled and convincingly articulated, it will (help to) attract the right people to execute. This is something that is often overlooked, but the impact of a clear vision and the chance to contribute to something big attract high-performing people. Especially in a competitive environment like sports, A-players wants to work with A-players. Good people attract each other. Of course, just having a vision is not a sure-fire success to get the best executives onboard but rather a necessary condition.

If a capable team has been assembled, it’s about putting the right processes in place. At this point, football can still learn a lot from the outside world. There are proven frameworks like OKRs or Scrum that can be adapted and deployed in football as well. This helps to detach the organisation’s performance from the results during the matchday. Even though the end goal remains to be successful on the pitch, having separated goals and initiatives for the club as an organisation is important – especially, due to football’s low-scoring nature. Some things might happen just due to bad luck. If you have tangible goals for the organisation, it helps you to remain calm during periods of weaker on-pitch performance because you see your organisation is still progressing and if these goals and initiatives are set up correctly, it will pay into the sporting performance in the midterm. It makes the whole club more robust in times of crisis and since the right processes are in place, you will notice undesirable developments and shortcomings much earlier. Great companies apply an infinite cycle of build – measure – learn. The quicker an organisation is iterating through this loop, the faster it will literally attract success. What often praised agility actually means is to test hypotheses in most of the time and resource-efficient way. Again, there are many frameworks out there, guiding through this cycle and certainly, there are some applicable to football clubs as well. Measurable actions are a precondition for learning. It is as important to see why things worked successfully as it is to see why some have not. Learning is key to success — undeniably.

Finally, the icing on the cake is appropriate tooling to facilitate the processes to execute the bright vision and strategy. Again, other industries are a few steps ahead of the football business. Thanks to the democratising waves of Software-as-a-Service disruptions in many areas, an army of robots is at your fingertips’ disposal at any time. The tech landscape is developing fast and many processes can be easily supported and optimised by cost-effective and easy-to-use tools. There is no need for huge IT projects anymore and no reason to step into a hefty vendor lock-in with one of the big players. Even if a club does not have the right resources in terms of tech-savvy people aboard yet, there is a huge pool of talent, eager to work in football, that can be hired remotely to introduce a few tools for example.

To wrap it up: Many clubs appear to swirl through ups and downs without a clear consistent vision. However, such a vision and aligned operations are a precondition for sustainable success. Once there is the owners’ commitment to a well-wrought vision and strategy, modern processes can be deployed to ensure the club is developing continuously as an organisation. At this point, clubs can learn a lot from looking at the outside world. Great companies of various scales demonstrate how organisations can function in 2022. It is important not to rest on intermediary success but to always look out for the next step to go, the next improvement, and the next optimisation under constraint resources.

To operate in this way, high-performing staff is needed. However, the right culture can be a USP to attract capable people. Football has the major advantage of being extremely attractive for people and talent, which is remotely available all over the globe, may trade some other perks in exchange for working in football. While this shouldn’t end in exploitation, it is a great chance to grow together if everyone is working at eye level. Apart from processes and management frameworks, it has never been easier to apply helpful tools cost-effectively. Nowadays, there are efficient solutions to streamline any aspect of an organisation. It ranges from data management to internal communication and collaboration tools, to project management, business intelligence and much more.

Think out of the box, and stay open to learning from other industries. Never run out of the next marginal step to get better and constantly reinvent yourself as an organisation. Keep track of what you are doing, learn from your gloriest victories and most painful losses. If there was any recipe for a football club’s success it might go along these lines.