Sometimes a person comes along who just seems authentic, different, who sees and understands things better. Points out some harsh truths.
Robert Zimmerman would be one of those for sure.
🎶 Yes, and how many times can a man turn his head
And pretend that he just doesn’t see?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind 🎶
In our world of football, that person could be Angelos Postecoglou.
Gooner friends of mine will be checking out of the Column right about now. 😉. They shouldn’t.
Today is really about leadership and vision in general, as applied to sport. The Aussie is one who never pretends he doesn’t see. He always calls it.
I first ran across Ange when he joined Celtic three years ago, a very last minute plan B option after Eddie Howe knocked back the Glasgow club. I didn’t know him, and can’t claim to have been following his career to that point, but there was something I instantly liked. He’s my age and his family, like mine, is immigrant. His, from Greece to Australia.
And he likes an opinion.
I know the immigrant dynamic very very well, as it breeds a certain type of person. You either meekly hunker down into the cocoon of your local familiar community, looking for that cosy protection in your new home; or you go out strong, to take your place in the world. And likely do very well. That strain of the DNA is, by definition, soaked in drive and risk-taking.
Ange is the latter.
A decent, if unremarkable, footballer, who then built a very good CV in management in Oz, Japan and Scotland. Always with success and trophies. That, however, never cuts much ice in Little England, the home of football, as they like to dismiss anyone who hasn’t yet “proven themselves in the EPL”.
Alan Brazil, a Celtic-supporting Scotsman in this instance, opined on the arrival of Ange up north with this garbage. Frankly, an absolute disgrace of ignorance and arrogance, and his shame over that should never end. He is a famous football pundit, and parochialism must never be part of any insight. It’s a big world, which has lots of lessons to impart. Ange adapted to, and learned, the very pronounced Japanese culture of honour. That alone is a signal.
The Greek-Aussie took a vice-like grip of the Glasgow giants from day 1, turning them from the utter shambles he inherited, into a good side, playing fresh, exciting football, even if with very limited raw material. Something he has now repeated at Tottenham (who astutely stole him after two wonderful years winning everything in Scotland).
What’s the secret?
He had mediocre players at Celtic, and then inherited a perennially underperforming London team, with “something always missing”, and which had also just lost its talisman star striker Harry Kane.
No matter to Ange. Lemons and lemonade.
Fast forward only a few weeks.
This is NOT normal.
How do you walk into a place, especially if dysfunctional and on its knees, and energise it overnight? It’s not particularly his tactics, or coaching ability.
It’s simply leadership, that intangible quality of infinite value, and it is this we discuss today. Because everywhere we look, in every field, the world is very short of quality leadership. And that’s not a small problem, as we shall see when 2024 ends.
Ange Postecoglou reeks of leadership.
Can we define it? Not really.
We never stop. They do, but we don’t.
Here, as always, it is a simple message, as it has to be. Leadership is never full of big words and concepts. A Hollywood actor became one of his country’s great presidents with:
It’s morning in America again.
Personally, I’ve only directly seen these people maybe twice in my career. It is a thing to behold.
I was hired by EMI PLC as a CFO in Italy in 1994. I nearly never took the job, as they were also hiring a new CEO (my future boss) at the Virgin label. London HQ assured me that the eventual he/she wouldn’t be allowed to bring in their own finance person, that I knew they would want. I bought that promise, and one day a certain Roman called Riccardo Clary arrived in Milan. A chain-smoking Marlboro Red guy, always in a black suit, black polo, to match his thick dark hair. A total enigma, with an infinitely wide spectrum of moods and personalities. Without any formal education, he had risen in BMG (Bertelsmann Music Group) from humble radio promotion, to what here would be his first CEO role as the boss of a label. The big moment for him.
Feel your way for a bit?
Nope.
Like Ange, he waltzed into a record company that was more “Adam’s Family” than Arista and turned it around almost overnight. He got people to willingly work all hours for him, recruited easily the best talents from other companies, and artists just wanted to create for him.
Music label in Italian translates as “casa discografica”; a music home.
He made that home, and seduced humans to want to please the father of the household. Contribute to the household. That’s it. People wanted to feel a valued part of the family.
Clary knows best, let’s just follow him and do what he needs.
And, yes, he did try and bring in his own finance guy from Rome, but the PLC were true to their word and vetoed it, thankfully. Men of honour worth a shout-out: Ken Berry, Charlie Dimont, Tony Bates.
Leaders get the very best out of people.
So Riccardo did what I guess these people always do. He didn’t have the goalie he really wanted, so he coached me with patience into exactly the profile and skillset he needed. Clary got a real shift out of me, and we together became a top performer label in the EMI universe. Excess free cashflow to bathe in.
The halo effect covered us both, and I was sent around the world by the group CFO to tell other companies how to be a modern finance person in the changing music business. Managing volatility in the creative industries with EQ.
Clary changed me in every way, and maybe he says the same the other way. It was a good double-act. Ying and Yang, where he was clearly the leader, and I was Tom Hagan.
That’s his face. A total one-off.
The story of us, in the last great years of the musicbiz, is a book in itself, but not for today.
Suffice to say that I’ve seen true leadership, unfathomable in its reasons for success, up close. It absolutely exists, and leaders, coaches and captains do matter. It is them, who are the differentiator. And it is not a myth.
So I still look for that magic every day, because humans will walk through walls for these people, and they are worth their weight in gold. As an operator, owner, and investor. Find your leader.
They seldom work by shouting or fear, but charisma, making people feel important and valued. All of us normal folks are individually different, so leaders adapt, able to motivate all and sundry, using different buttons every time. I saw it done with both mega-artists, and accounting clerks. Sometimes a joke, or a flirt, or a surprise invite to join a big event above their station. Noting all the small things.
Angelos Postecoglou (Big Ange) is one of these characters and just has something about him. No matter how long and hard you try to articulate it, with a nice phrase, a cute line, it’s best said simply as:
He’s a man’s man with gravitas and credibility. A father-figure, a best-mate, a guy you know will always be there, come what may. No backing down, no stopping.
A leader is instantly recognisable, but it’s hard to describe why.
They almost always suffer no fools, and have a serious issue with the bluffers in life, the chancers, the fakes. They will accept average talent, and improve them, but never the waster.
And they will stand up for their family very publicly…
…but won’t hesitate to “educate” you, in private.
If you’ve been triggered by that, sport isn’t for you. Life probably isn’t either. It’s called “standards”.
Ange is indeed a very hard man, like his own father, whom he references here in a Pacino-esque speech, when managing the Oz national team.
Leadership is action and communication.
Internally to your group, and externally.
It’s seldom about money, and those who are only interested in that are not the right sort. Ange is an absolute master in reading people, as were Ferguson, Shankly, Stein, Clough.
Likewise, he deals with the media like Ian Botham swatting bouncers for six. The sports hacks are always trying to put their next headline into someone’s mouth and lay a minefield of traps. He sees that a mile away.
The thorny issue of pricing and tourist fans.
This is a superb answer.
Understanding fan expectations.
Fans drink this line up. He utterly connects with them.
We all have our favourite interviews of Ange and he is genuinely box office in the purity of his authenticity. But, in recent days, this one below demanded to be today’s Column.
And its importance goes well beyond the Australian.
The “aren’t-you-feeling-the-pressure” rubbish.
This is what you get from scribblers who have never needed to manage a P&L in their life. The Aussie is asked if he is suffering the pressure to get into the top four, qualify for the Champions League, and access all that juicy UEFA money.
This will be known for years as the “dragging me down” reply.
It’s an important answer, because this question has become de rigeur in our game and that is, in fact, a tragedy. In every country in Europe, our game is reduced to a binary KPI of qualifying for the Champions League in 4th place. More than other things much more important, like winning a cup, building an enduring balanced squad, bringing on academy players, having a medium/long term plan for the roster, improving the fan and community relationship.
All the important stuff for the long-term value of the “asset”.
In this one question lies the source of most of the ills of our sport, all across Europe.
And Ange knows this. He points out very correctly that the whole vibe around Newcastle now, compared to twelve months ago, is much more negative, and yet they DID qualify for the Champions League. Touchè.
The endless focus on topline revenue maximisation in the short-term is, by a distance, the biggest impediment in sport/football. It’s crippling us. When will we realise that it is really not about maximising revenues? That desperate quest is a very poisoned chalice.
It’s not the answer we’ve been looking for.
🎶 Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
The battle outside ragin’
Will soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’ 🎶
When will football wake up and heed the call?
Logan Roy, in a previous Column said it best…
You idiot! As a business vision, European football is a fucking basket-case of stupidity. Every fresh penny they make, whoring their product out, is pissed away the same day. It’s a dick substitute for billionaires wanting the fame and relevance that a bank account won’t give them. Wealthy bad actors spunking the top-line up the wall on players, like Imelda Marcos in a Gucci store. That obliges everyone else to do the same, with insolvency the inevitable bastard child of their relegation/promotion. Even Connor could see all this.”
All proper fans can actually assess the true progress of their clubs, beyond revenue records, massive player spending, PR splashes on big-ticket sponsorships, and fresh capital from Arabia or America.
They know.
Chelsea, PSG and Manchester United have had all of these things and are still clearly sick; very sick. They are clubs totally out of balance. These graphs of financial losses in the billions make for dramatic reading.
The EPL is a blood bath of insanity.
Brighton FC instead is very much IN balance.
What is it they do? That would be a clue, a benchmark, from which to learn. No?
The owner is a man with an outlier understanding of risk, probability, all informed by data. He perceives perfectly the concept of a value bet.
From “Sport’s Perfect Storm”.
The Brighton player strategy is a selection of value bets, on the buy and sell side. To date, executed perfectly, taking advantage of market inefficiencies.
In fact, sport, and life, are all about assessing various pots of risk, and calculating whether the expected return is inefficiently priced. But crucially over the correct timeframe.
Short-term results can fool you; but the phrase to remember is:
Reversion to mean over time.
Brighton ignores the hot takes of the moment and operates long term. Thinks laterally and differently. And ignores the ill-informed.
This club has harmony and balance among ownership, boardroom, CSuite, football dept, and coach. I am sure the commercial side also is not in a silo. Most clubs are the exact opposite.
With the quantum of capital now at stake, so much of football management today is about having the full data, and then the maths skills, to work out the mispricing of risk. To see where the value bets lie, and take advantage.
Brighton have proven this. Few others have.
Whilst missed by most, one of the most disturbing pieces of news for me in the football sector was the departure of Ian Graham from Liverpool. This physics PHD is, in my humble opinion, exactly what is needed to put protocols of discipline around the emotions and volatility of sport, especially football.
Fenway, John Henry, is the original Moneyball data organisation, and believed in what Graham was doing. It is alleged that Klopp was less of a disciple, preferring trusted boot room lieutenants from Germany.
We need to get beyond this old boot room, old boys club, gut feel, as it is frankly bullshit and directly causing all those losses.
The Klopp meme may, or may not, be exact, but it rings true. For example, I saw Liverpool under Ian Graham fully embrace the AI approach to risk assessment on injuries from Zone7 (disclosure, I was an investor).
The results were spectacular.
One has a smirk as things have changed now.
If only there was a German word for that kind of satisfaction!
Klopp, like so so many managers, never likes the outside influence of the wider club “organisation” and its independent benchmarking of his work. Zone7 was marginalised. Ian Graham left. Also ask yourself why Michael Edwards is returning to Liverpool only now, as Klopp is exiting.
All the dots are there to be joined and this is a story totally missed by our industry.
I have seen many many other clubs, elite and not, go through similar nonsense around the introduction of innovation and sport tech, especially on-field like Zone7. Listening to old boys, physios and doctors in the game for 40 years saying innovation in new products, AI, and machine learning wasn’t needed. Brentford is a club now “undertaking a formal review” as to why they have had so many injuries.
I can suggest they start by asking how they evaluated Zone7, and who did it. There are so many like them. Didn’t even look.
We have all that covered, gaffer!
This should be the headline of the above BBC article on football’s biblical losses. It’s the Upton Sinclair line that explains all. It always is.
No, dear boot rooms, you do NOT have that covered. With some exceptions, you all lose shameful amounts of money exactly because you really have no idea what you are doing long-term, have no concept of serious risk mitigation, and rely on random day-by-day “chance”.
Not addressing the massive cost of injuries that sport faces is utterly inexplicable, especially when AI is now proven as reducing injuries by 50% (I can say this dispassionately with no longer any skin in the Zone7 game). It is such a sad indictment that injuries are still treated as merely “bad luck”.
”Football people” are short- term in the extreme, and get “dragged down” further from pressure applied by fans and the media. So clubs are obsessed with top-line revenues when the answer is actually in avoiding big mistakes in the cost line, and getting better value for money, like Brighton.
The player market in football is totally inefficient. You see that in some of the jaw-dropping signings made by clubs. You’d be better sticking a pin in the donkey blindfold, and throwing wads of cash into the furnace. Same result.
There are very few football players in the world who do not have a pretty comparable alternative solution. There are even fewer game-changer players that should be able to command out-sized “rent”.
So it should really be a buyers’ market on players.
Instead, it is very much a seller’s market, based on desperation, time-pressures, poor due diligence and laziness. Sorry, but this is undeniably true. Yet our industry just refuses to accept it.
Top line revenue isn’t everything. Ange is so correct.
A smart person doesn’t ask him if he is feeling pressure to get into the top 4. Even after bad results like Fulham and Newcastle.
They should instead note that he has done an amazing job, considering what he took over, and is well ahead of expectations, with the right direction of travel. He has created a love affair with fans, and brought on some players exponentially well. Give him time to shape a squad in his own image, and remove the wasters. Spurs are now in a good place, having had the Aussie build superb foundations this season.
No wonder he says:
Stop dragging me down.
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