Startup FC - The opposite of what we have always done

Nowadays, entrepreneurs and startup businesses are one of the main drivers of innovation in our modern societies. Such businesses are not only frontrunners when it comes to innovative technologies or business models but also with respect to management frameworks and organisational design. Compared to these lean and agile organisations, today’s football clubs rather appear as hierarchical constructs, led by a few decision-makers and with little exchange with adjacent disciplines. In most cases, the strategic power is highly concentrated at a single person - the general manager (head coach). While the average tenure of a head coach in the top leagues has fallen to less than 18 months, such a monopolistic leadership structure is no longer appropriate. While the majority of clubs still work this way, simply because that’s what they have always done, there is an exciting counterexample currently evolving in Europe. To protect the intellectual property, let’s call the club we are looking at Startup FC for now. 

A few years ago Startup FC was just another unnoticed plane jane inside the football industry. The club wasn’t doing bad but was still best described as ordinary, average and moderately stable, although personnel fluctuation was as high as everywhere else in football. It needed a stimulus from the outside to induce the turnaround. One of the club’s board members met an ambitious yet inexperienced entrepreneur at a mutual friend’s anniversary party. The young fellow was so enthusiastic about his vision and the novel business he founded that he could not help but tell the people around him about it. Our Startup FC’s board member was listening carefully and found himself quickly infected by the entrepreneurial spirit. The guy’s business just received a seed funding round from a renowned venture capital fund, so it seems there was more behind than just drivel. Startup FC’s board member went home, equipped with a new mission that should completely change the way the club’s inner mechanisms were working. During the next week’s board meeting, he was able to convince the other board members to put the whole club to the test.

Heretofore, the club had a managing director who was responsible for mainly all of the business aspects of the club, including a marketing department that took care of the club’s Facebook account. There were a head coach and a manager who were responsible for the first team. The club had a few scouts traveling around and scouting talent rather opportunistically, without a central database. Reports flew into the manager’s and head coach’s office in various formats. Most of the transfers are executed through the manager’s personal network anyway, it seems like no need for standardisation since it has always been done this way. The coaching staff was supplemented by an assistant coach, a goalkeeping coach, an athletic trainer, two physiotherapists, and the local sports physician. For some time now there is also an analyst who provides the trainer team with video recordings and analyses, which are superficially scanned by the trainer team.

One of the first actions the board undertook was to conduct a four-day workshop in cooperation with a design thinking consultancy and an acquaintance from the local startup accelerator. The goal of this workshop was to develop the overall vision of the club. This vision was supposed to guide the executive team through the intended transition process and beyond. It should act as the polestar for all subsequent activities. The really good work of all participants resulted in a crystal clear vision statement.

“At Startup FC, we believe sporting success can only be achieved with operational excellence. We pursue progress on and off the pitch and therefore challenge ourselves every single day, trying to constantly improve us and the club as such. There is no alternative to constant learning and growth together, we beat the competition by outthinking not outspending.” 

Based on this vision, the board took the next important step: Hiring an executive team that is willing to live this vision and allocate the former concentrated power back from one single head coach to a capable team.

After a meticulous hiring process, all key positions have been staffed and the executive team, consisting of a Chief Operating Officer (COO), a Chief Financial Officer (CFO), a Chief Development Officer (CDO) and a Chief 1st Team Officer (CTO), immediately started to draft a completely new organisational design from scratch. Here is the resulting organisational chart of Startup FC:

Some of the departments aren’t too different from what the other clubs are doing, while some appear quite unconventional. Most of the departments subsumed under the CFO are known or self-explanatory. Worth mentioning here is definitely the Revenue Generation unit. This is a special department that constantly seeks new ways of generating revenues, often in the form of cross-functional task forces with other departments. One of the most profitable projects of this unit was the establishment of an online education platform together with the marketing team which is producing the content for this platform. The program contains courses for local sunday league coaches, fitness, tactic, and technique courses tailored for football players and many more. It became not only a new revenue stream but also enhanced the club’s reputation on a national scale. Further, talented youth players who are growing up with digital media cherish the innovative appearance of Startup FC and in some cases, they decide in favour of Startup FC’s Academy instead of joining the allegedly stronger neighbour club. In general, the marketing team does a pretty good job. The team consists mainly of young professionals who, for an exciting job in football, creative freedom and a modern working atmosphere, forego part of the salary they could earn elsewhere. By utilizing Growth Hacking techniques, adapted from other industries, they were able to quickly increase the outreach of their content and to create a remarkably allegiant audience.

Such joint projects across multiple departments have been working very successfully for Startup FC. The units within the scope of the club’s COO are primarily operating that way. Apart from the Marketing team, which we already know, the COO also coordinates the Medical department and the club’s internal Innovation Lab. The Innovation Lab acts as a kind of an internal service provider for the other departments. It is continuously monitoring the academic and scientific landscape for innovations that may be useful for the club, be it with regards to injury prevention, nutrition, management styles or even novel software tools to increase the efficiency of internal processes. Therefore, the department maintains a good exchange with the local university as well as the regional start-up scenes and accelerator programs. Many students are joining the Startup FC Innovation Lab on a temporary basis to do some research within the scope of their Ph.D. programs - a classical win-win situation. Another core element of the work of the Innovation Lab is the hosting of scientific events like the yearly football innovation conference, which also includes a hackathon for ambitious developers. Currently, the department works closely together with the Medical staff on a tool to prevent injuries of their players, based on artificial intelligence and machine learning. Basically, the tool is fed with a bunch of historical training data and anticipates critical physical exposures, thus helping the coaching team to steer the training exposure. If you are specifically interested in that topic, I gladly recommend you to check out the work of Rossi et al. I was privileged to see Luca Pappalardo speak about it at a conference last year - very impressive. 

The Startup FC’s executive team is complemented by the CTO, the Chief 1st Team Officer, and the CDO, the Chief Development Officer. The CTO is focusing on putting together the 1st Team Performance department. This department combines all colleagues that are responsible for what happens on the pitch. Here we find the classical roles like the head coach or the assistant and fitness/athletic coaches. We have a team manager and a dedicated relocation manager for new players. These guys are responsible for instance to help the players settling down in the new city or to assist with other challenges of daily life. The department also consists of match analysts, a nutrition expert and a dedicated set-piece coach. Since all these fellows are part of a coherent department the pressure on the head coach is reduced, which, in turn, leads to a slightly lower concentration on short-term success instead of following the mid- and long-term roadmap of the club. A talent manager takes care of young players to help them master the transition from the Academy to the senior team. He is also the linking bridge between the 1st Team Performance department and the Academy which is a department on its own and subordinated to the CDO. The Academy fosters a lively exchange between all youth teams and the other departments of the club and employs social workers and pedagogues to take care of the kids’ non-football development and their wellbeing aside the pitch. The development (on and off the pitch) of each and any academy player is closely monitored to offer the best possible education for the talents and to forecast the necessary transfer activities (creating a shadow squad). The monitoring is facilitated by the Data department, which is also led by the CDO. The Data department maintains a comprehensive database that centralizes all the data produced in the club, not only the match-related data - the Data department is an actual business intelligence machinery. Among other use cases, it creates dashboards and ad hoc reports for the Marketing team to e.g. monitor the ROI on their campaigns, it stores Medical data and joins it with tracking and performance data and, of course, administers the scouting database. Built on modern technologies like data virtualisation and automated ETL, the Data department thereby created a single source of truth for the whole club. The numbers delivered by the department build the starting point for many decision-making processes and provide foundations for vibrant discussions. Thanks to this department, analysts and coaches have all reports, dashboards, and analyses at their fingertips. Making data-driven decisions is key to establishing replicable and transparent processes, not only in football but in all kinds of today’s business areas.

“If You Can't Measure It, You Can't Improve It.”

To paraphrase Peter Drucker, who said: “If You Can't Measure It, You Can't Improve It.” You cannot know whether or not you are successful unless success is defined and tracked. Each department follows one to three KPIs according to which all actions are ultimately optimised. These KPIs are transparent for everyone. This is not to increase the pressure to succeed but to promote cross-functional cooperation. If everyone knows where the other one stands, it is easier to help each other. The Data department sends out the so-called Club Feed weekly by publishing the status of all KPIs internally. In addition to the hard figures, information on current problems and project steps are also published.

To ensure seamless workflows and knowledge retention independent from single persons, each department and sub-department (teams and task forces within the department) is assigned to document all recurring workflows and best practices in playbooks. Even though a person is leaving, the knowledge can be preserved and the onboarding of new staff can be done much faster due to accurate documentation. Recurring jour fixes for certain important topics are bringing together people from different departments. These meetings are at fixed dates and have fixed durations which are strictly adhered to. This is important in order to stay focused on the most important questions and keep the discussions target-oriented. A series of modern tools, which one would otherwise rather assume in startup companies, rounds off the collaboration in the club. There is, for example, Slack for instant communication, Zoom for smooth video conferencing or Notion for project management. In general, the whole infrastructure is cloud-based so everyone is able to contribute from wherever at any time.

At many clubs, transfer activities are one of the most controversial topics, often led by just a few or even only a single decision-maker. Startup FC works differently. There is a transfer committee, consisting of the whole executive team as well key members from the 1st Team Performance department, the Academy and, of course, from the Data department. There is no newly signed player who did not pass the data-based evaluation and the qualitative live scouting done by at least two different scouts. Since decision-making is distributed over several shoulders, the (media) pressure on the individual functionaries is reduced. Even if, despite all the evaluation, a transfer goes wrong, it is never the individual who is criticised, but always the entire committee that has jointly agreed to the commitment.

Besides the organisational structure, there are a couple of other interesting things going on at Startup FC. One of the club’s core philosophies is, for example, to treat their players as employees instead of assets. What does this mean? During the evaluation of new players, a strong focus lies on psychological and social attributes. For the concept of the club to work, it needs players who want to live and create it - participation is key. Startup FC not only aims to leverage the footballing skills of its players but also the other competencies the players have or want to develop. Therefore, every player is encouraged, but not forced, to participate at the club’s educational program. If players are interested, for example, in media they can contribute to the Marketing team. Another advanced vocational training is offered on demand. In the past, several players took advantage of the educational program to study management practices or becoming physiotherapists.  

Another topic handled in a significantly different way is the bonus system. Economics and social sciences show that human beings are more loss-averse than they value gains, so why not turn around the player’s bonuses? At Startup FC players start the season with a balance of 100% bonus payments in different dimensions like goals, minutes played or contribution to internal projects. This 100% threshold is related to a target, individually discussed and set up together with each player in advance of the season. If they miss a target, the respective proportion of the player’s bonus is deducted. On the other side, if they overachieve an accelerator kicks in and they can earn more than 100% of bonuses (the total amount is capped at a certain maximum payout). This compensation model is also new for Startup FC, the club just introduced it two seasons ago and is observing if it has a positive impact on the team’s performance. Build, measure, learn, the infinite cycle.

Build, measure, learn, the infinite cycle.

If we were at Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction (German: X-Factor: Das Unfassbare), Jonathan Frakes would now ask you if all that really happened or if it was a complete fabrication.

I can tell you, this is not another story about the rule-breakers at FC Midtjylland or Brentford F.C. and of course, you already know it, it’s complete fiction. Although many of the thoughts of Startup FC may seem unrealistic or simply not viable, I want to invite everyone to question the way it has always been done and to be open to innovation and learning from other industries. I believe there is still space for improvement in football - on the pitch as well as off the pitch in the offices, academies and board rooms. Needless to say, the seasonal competitions in football and the pressure of the need for short-term success impede organisational innovation or even disruption. But still, I also believe that there is a path to beat the competition with smart decision-making and open-minded leadership. It’s not all about money.

Thank you so much for sticking with it up to here. I hope you had as much fun reading as I had writing and could find one or the other exciting thought. If you come from the football business, please feel free to write me your opinion or thoughts about it. I always welcome constructive feedback and am very curious to know how insiders view these things.