What European football teaches about building a team

I follow European football, and the more time I spend building a company, the more it looks like a lesson in building teams. A squad is a small organisation under huge pressure, judged every week in public, with a budget, a culture and a manager trying to hold it together.

Here are the football lessons for startups that I think are worth taking seriously, drawn from well-known stories in the European game rather than from any one club.

Football lessons for startups start with the squad, not the star

Every few years, a club tries to win by collecting the most famous players it can buy. The best-known example is Real Madrid's Galácticos era in the early 2000s: Figo, Zidane, Ronaldo, Beckham, signed one after another.

It worked, for a while. But a widely told part of that story is what happened when Claude Makélélé, a defensive midfielder who rarely scored and rarely made headlines, left for Chelsea in 2003. The team had plenty of stars going forward and not enough people doing the unglamorous work behind them. The holding role he played became so associated with him that people still call it "the Makélélé role".

The lesson for a startup is direct. A team is not a list of impressive CVs. Somebody has to do the quiet work: support tickets, invoices, testing, documentation, the follow-up email. If everyone wants to be the striker, nobody covers the space behind.

Balance beats raw talent

Leicester City's Premier League title in 2015-16 is the story every underdog likes to tell. Bookmakers had offered odds of 5,000 to 1 against them at the start of the season. They won the league with a squad that, on paper, was nowhere near the richest clubs.

What made it work was not a secret superstar. It was a clear plan that suited the players they had: a compact defence, fast counter-attacks, and players who understood their roles exactly. N'Golo Kanté covered enormous ground in midfield. Jamie Vardy ran in behind. Riyad Mahrez created. Each piece fitted.

Small companies should take this seriously. You will rarely have the biggest budget in your market. What you can have is a team where each person's strengths fit the plan, and a plan that fits the team you actually have, not the one you wish you had.

The manager's real job is culture

Football managers get credit for tactics, but the great ones are mostly builders of culture.

Sir Alex Ferguson managed Manchester United for more than 26 years, from 1986 to 2013. Over that time he rebuilt the squad several times, letting famous players go when he felt the team needed to change. What stayed constant was the standard: work rate, hunger, and the idea that no individual was bigger than the club.

Jürgen Klopp's teams at Borussia Dortmund and then Liverpool were known for gegenpressing, winning the ball back quickly after losing it. That style only works if every player commits to it, including the forwards. It is as much a shared attitude as a tactic.

For a founder, this is the most useful football lesson of all. Your team will copy what you tolerate. If the standard is clear and you hold it yourself, people rise to it. If it moves depending on your mood, the team learns to wait and see.

Have a clear way of playing

Pep Guardiola's Barcelona of 2008 to 2012 is remembered for a very particular style: short passing, control of possession, and players who always knew where their teammates would be. Arsène Wenger's Arsenal "Invincibles" went the whole 2003-04 Premier League season unbeaten with a different, faster, more direct style.

Very different approaches, but both had something in common. Everyone in the team knew how they were supposed to play.

Startups often skip this. People join, work hard, and pull in slightly different directions because nobody has said plainly what "our way" is. At Bolo Media, the way of playing is simple to say: make it easy for a small business to get a good video ad in its own language, Gujarati or Hindi, without a studio. Decisions that don't serve that are worth questioning, however clever they are.

Recruit for the system, not the highlight reel

In recent years, clubs like Brentford and Brighton have become known for using data and careful scouting to find players who fit their system, often before bigger clubs notice them. They then sell some of those players on for much more, and replace them with the next ones their process identifies.

The lesson is not "use data". It is that recruitment should start from how your team works. A player who looks brilliant in a highlight video may be a poor fit for your system. The same is true for hiring. A candidate who interviews well but does not fit how your team works will struggle, and so will the people around them.

My years as a project manager taught me how much a team depends on fit and clear roles. I wrote about the shift from that role to running my own company in what I had to unlearn going from project manager to founder.

Seasons end, and you rebuild

Football has a rhythm founders could learn from. Every season ends. Clubs review, let some players go, bring others in, and change what isn't working. Even the great teams have to rebuild, because players age and opponents adapt.

Companies don't have a fixed season, which makes it easy to avoid that honest review. Picking a moment every few months to ask "what's working, who fits where, and what do we change?" is a habit worth borrowing.

Closing thoughts

I am not going to tell you which club I support. That is a debate for another day, and it isn't the point here.

What I take from football is simple: talent matters, but balance, culture and a clear way of playing matter more. The teams people remember for decades usually had all three. That is a good standard for any small team, on a pitch or in a startup.

If you want the story of how I came to be building a company of my own, why I left a stable job in 2026 to start Bolo is a good place to start.