Surprise champions: three sports management models inspiring Italian business
Marco Alfieri tells how group culture, vision and governance enable the achievement of unexpected goals. In sport and business
Is it possible to associate sport and business? Can a sports club look in the mirror and see itself as a business? The line between top-level sport and business dynamics is increasingly thin and these aspects are increasingly close and mirror each other, sometimes even touching. Above all, modern professional sport, all budgets and numerical calculations, algorithms and coefficients, can give the impression of being something planned at the table and programmed down to the smallest detail. Excluding for a moment the sporting factor in itself - and of course the technical and athletic gesture that rightly makes all fans and supporters throb - the management-business component, as well as the economic-financial side of a sporting enterprise certainly cannot be relegated to the background, now more than ever.
The difference, in high-level, predominantly team sports, is made precisely by the organisational and economic context in which the athletes have to operate, the sports 'project' that must find its legs precisely in a skilful (and better if shrewd) management of resources and in a planning capacity of equal - if not greater - difficulty than that of a company in any other sector.
The most successful teams, the most successful clubs - in any sport - are usually those with the greatest financial resources and the best ability to invest them. But these same clubs are not necessarily a replicable example for the vast majority of competitors. Instead, of particular interest are the stories of a few clubs that, almost surprisingly, have carefully sown and grown teams that have somehow become examples of efficient sports management, achieving results far above expectations.
Marco Alfieri tells us in his latest book, entitled Surprise Champions (Egea editions), three particular stories of sports clubs that can also serve as a model for companies in other sectors in planning a winning future starting from a careful and wise management of resources. The cases of Imoco Volley Conegliano, Aquila Basket Trento and Bologna FC 1909 recounted by the author are those of three clubs with a very different history, status, and organisation, and yet they are all three virtuous cases of provincial realities that have reached levels of sporting excellence, challenging much more emblazoned and structured giants, bearing witness to great leadership skills, corporate management, planning, innovation, courage, valorisation of talents and rootedness with the reference communities. Virtuous models that can say a lot, indeed, to all companies.
Several aspects of great value emerge in these companies from Alfieri's reconnaissance: outsiders who become protagonists, young and dynamic leadership, sustainable economic management, territorial rootedness combined with a logic of social restitution, corporate stability, clear roles and widespread governance, long-term strategic vision, work culture and talent enhancement, real meritocracy, a winning mentality, innovation, skilful management of defeats, great tension towards the objectives to be achieved, authentic teamwork.
