Free kick for business

Book review of 'EDGE: What Business Can Learn From Football'

EDGE

What Business Can Learn From Football

Ben Lyttleton

HarperCollins

312 pages; Rs 650

The 2009 classic Soccernomics revolutionised football analysis. The massive success of the book led, inevitably perhaps, to the setting up of a consultancy called Soccernomics Agency, which dispenses advice on strategy, data analyses and even media management. Edge: What Business Can Learn from Football, the latest book from the Agency, can be best described in marketing jargon as a “brand extension”. 

Its author, writer and broadcaster Ben Lyttleton joined the original Soccernomics team, Simon Kuper, the popular writer, and Stefan Szymanski, the inspired number cruncher, as the third member of the consultancy. He wrote a useful book in 2014 on the art and science of the penalty kick, that, in true Soccernomics tradition, involved reams of data and lots of interesting facts for the hard-core fan to devour. 

With Edge he is seeking to address a different audience — the world of business. This is a shrewd strategy, given the vast amounts of money corporations disgorge on advertising, sponsorships, corporate boxes, and hospitality in this most attractive of vanity businesses. As an intellectual exercise, though, it is flawed.

The notion that success in sports can serve as a guiding philosophy for life in general or business management in particular has been around for yonks. Lazy thinkers will always spot deep lessons in Alex Ferguson’s management of a football club and work out ways to apply it to large, complex corporations. Sir Alex, who can never be accused of sloth of any kind, has succumbed to this line of thinking, with a post-retirement tome called Leading.
 

In fairness, Mr Lyttleton understands the tenuous relationship between football and business. He has devoted about two and a half pages of the Prologue pointing to the obvious differences: “We can all agree that football and business are not the same,” he writes. “Your company will not release its results every three days. The …media won’t pore over every decision you and your colleagues make. The weather is unlikely to affect your performance. The visual acuity of one man who could be 30 yards away won’t become a defining moment in your life. At least, for your sake, I hope not.”

So why this book? Mr Lyttleton proceeds courageously with his explanation. Having spent loads of quality time with any number of football clubs, he’s seen, up close, how they build and nurture talent. Deploying familiar management jargon, he explains, “Every club looks for different Key Performance Indicators to develop their winning team.” The “edge” in this case is the competitive advantage that accrues from these KPIs. 

Mr Lyttleton argues that the search for the competitive advantage in football is no different than in the business world. “You are no longer competing with people in your city anymore, but globally. New businesses are disrupting the landscape and changing outlooks. …Football offers solutions.”  

 Okay, let’s go with this and see what he’s got. In the section called “Cohesion”, he’s chosen to lead with Athletic Club De Bilbao. Really? A club that last won the Spanish title over three decades ago and has hovered mid-table for most of the noughties? Mr Lyttleton has based this chapter on a one-off event: Winning the Spanish Super Cup in the 2015-16, beating the mighty Barcelona over two legs. 

This is, undoubtedly, a huge achievement for a middling team. But it scarcely addresses a critical issue for corporations – big or small – about sustaining that advantage. Devoting so much print to Bilbao is a bit like praising Nirma for giving Hindustan Lever’s Surf a run for its money when it was launched. Newspapers – creating the first drafts of history and all that – expended huge amounts of newsprint on case studies. Did Nirma’s advantage last? No, it dissipated quite quickly. That’s why football and business are worlds apart. 

The book abounds with similar underwhelming (and sometimes strange) examples that reveal Mr Lyttleton’s impressively deep knowledge of European football. But in retrofitting footballing praxis onto business, he has reduced the world’s greatest game to wooden, jargon-laden management-speak. Example: England’s “Team Work Index” (TWI) is appalling, which is how they came to lose to little Iceland in the round of 16 during the Euro 2016. Then, unlikely little Leicester romped home with the Premier League title in the 2016-17 season because its TWI was high. The club then dropped back to its long-term Performance Capacity because of its original low TWI “while their runs in the FA Cup and Champions League diluted in-season cohesion”. The simplest explanation seems to have eluded him: If the supremely talented N’Golo Kanté hadn’t left, Leicester may well have been in with a shout (and yes, one player can make a difference: Recall Napoli before and after Maradona). 

Each section ends with “lessons” set out in convenient little boxes at the end of each chapter. Some are palpably clichéd: “Always set goals. Set them high, but realistic”; Or: “Be passionate, as without energy it’s imports impossible to be competitive”. And some are flat-out weird. One Marijn Beuker, head of performance and development of Dutch club, AZ Alkmaar, has this advice: “Choose what FEAR means to you: Forget Everything and Run — or Face Everything and Respond”.

Faced with this book, the football fan and the business manager would do better to Forget Everything and Watch Liverpool Beat Chelsea this Saturday.