What the Bench Taught Me About Boardrooms

In a professional club, nobody thinks the head coach personally develops every player. There is a set-piece specialist, an individual-development coach, a goalkeeping department that reports sideways, and a head of performance who will tell the manager that a player is not fit to start.

In a company, the equivalent structure is one executive coach and a hope.

Specialisation is not fragmentation

The objection is always that a person needs one relationship, not five. Sport tried the single-relationship model for eighty years and abandoned it, not because relationships stopped mattering but because the volume of things a modern athlete needs stopped fitting inside one head.

What holds it together in a well-run club is not the head coach's charisma. It is a set of explicit boundaries about who owns which decision, written down, with a named person who can overrule the manager on medical grounds.

The part business gets right

Confidentiality, and it is not a small thing. A player has almost none — their fitness, form and future are discussed by twelve people and then by a stadium.

That is the trade sport made for its specialisation, and it is worth being clear-eyed that it is a trade rather than a free lunch.

What I would take across

One idea, and it is the cheapest: the succession clause. Sport increasingly hires an assistant with a written path to the top job. Business promotes by surprise and then wonders why the first ninety days go badly.