It turns out football can tell us something about leadership. It's overrated.

I’ve long been intrigued by the widespread obsession with football managers and what they can teach us about leadership. I have always believed that there is little to be learned that can be generalised to other completely different contexts.

On many occasions, I’ve attended senior management conferences featuring rallying keynotes from famous ex-athletes or retired football managers, as if sharing their experiences from contexts that had little in common with the work lives of their audience would somehow catalyse a change for the better in the collective brain. Invariably, this made no difference whatsoever other than as a welcome temporary respite from the drudgery of their daily work life. Any bump in enthusiasm vanished within a day or two as things snapped back to normal dysfunction like a released elastic band.

Photo by Abigail Keenan on Unsplash

But then I got to thinking: maybe we can learn something. Most prevailing management thinking, education and literature is based on the “heroic leadership” model I discussed in previous posts. Given our evolutionary aversion to uncertainty, the simplistic idea that the “right” leader can “deliver” success is extremely comforting. We repeatedly see this bias in leadership research. For example, research published in 2020 by the Boston Consulting Group’s Henderson Institute(1) claims that by studying the tenures of 7,000 CEOs worldwide, they could “identify how much and how they affected their companies’ performance trajectories.” Clearly, the underlying bias is that the performance outcomes of the entire organisation were caused by the CEO alone, just one individual. It’s ridiculous when you stop to think about it. What about serendipity, unexpected trends, accidental discoveries and the efforts of thousands of other employees?

If we wanted to test the ‘it’s all about the leader’ hypothesis, we would ideally choose a group of companies competing in an environment with as many controlled variables as possible, leaving just the leader and the context (in this case, the unique characteristics of the organisational ‘system’).

Luckily, we have one such environment: the English Premier League, the most-watched football league in the world. The ‘beautiful game’ rules hardly ever change. The pitch dimensions are prescribed, and the goalposts literally never move. A maximum of 11 players per team are allowed to play at any one time. Independent referees and video surveillance punish breaking the rules on the field in real time, making it difficult to win by cheating. Opportunities for innovation in the playing of the game are virtually non-existent. Players can’t use any assistive technology besides football boots and hair gel. Any moves or formations one team devises are easily and swiftly copied. Artificial intelligence can’t play football for you. It’s the closest thing to a controlled organisational environment we have.

In football, as in the broader world of work, the cult of the heroic leader is alive and well. Successes and failures are laid at the feet of the managers, who receive CEO-like pay and God-like adulation (on the way up, at least). With very few exceptions, the only way to become a Premier League manager is to have a successful track record of leading other clubs from this or similar leagues to trophies. If the manager’s skill was the primary cause of success, then in theory, transferring the ‘successful’ manager into the different organisational context of another football club should reliably produce the same glory.

But (unsurprisingly) it would not appear to be so. By April 2023, 13 of the 20 English Premier League clubs had parted way with their managers in just one season. Only one (Graham Potter at Brighton) left of their own accord - an astonishing 60% failure rate. In 2012, the average tenure of a Premier League manager was just over four years. By 2022, it had dropped to two years. In any other branch of research, you would have to conclude that there was little evidence to support this hypothesis that future success was even highly correlated (nevermind causation) with the previous track record of newly appointed managers. But where are the headlines about context being more critical than the last success? Despite the overwhelming evidence, we still believe that the heroic ‘proven manager’ model will deliver future success based on past performance.

The same shocking failure rate is at work in the wider corporate world. In 2017, research from the Corporate Executive Board (now part of Gartner) estimated that 50% to 70% of executives fail within the first 18 months in a new role, regardless of whether they were promoted from inside the business or recruited as an external hire(2). It turns out context trumps the illusion of responsibility for past success. It seems that another evolutionary hangover known as belief perseverance, our tendency to hold on to our beliefs in the face of insurmountable evidence to the contrary, is alive and well.

So, football can teach us something about leadership. It’s overrated.

Excerpts from Magnetic Nonsense: A Short History of Bullshit at Work and How to Make it Go Away

Need any help sorting out nonsense in your organisation? www.disruptionspace.co

1. Leadership Matters: When, How Much, and How? Martin Reeves, Peter Tollman, Gerry Hansell, Kevin Whitaker, and Tom Deegan, BCG Henderson Institute, June 2020

2. https://www.businessinsider.com/reasons-executives-fail-2015-3