The parallel between football and business

Using a clear example: how does Cristiano Ronaldo prepare himself to always be at a high level of performance? As in any professional activity, on the one hand, it is necessary to have the knowledge to perform, but also to manage all the personal, physical, emotional, and cognitive aspects that may affect the performance. In the same way, an executive will only be able to carry out his activities effectively and efficiently if he takes some care with these conditioning factors, because they are what will support a successful leadership.

Based on this assumption, we joined the best management school in the country - Nova SBE - and the largest sports organisation in Portugal - the Portuguese Football Federation - in a partnership of excellence to create the Centre for High Performance Leadership, with the aim of contributing so that executives can achieve their potential and have more capacity to respond to the demands that daily activities place on them. This program becomes even more pertinent at a time of pandemic, since the conditions of the last year and a half have greatly diminished our response to stimuli, and are also associated with sedentary lifestyles that inevitably affect performance.

The business and football worlds will not only cross paths in the metaphorical field, they will be interconnected during the programme: participants will have classes at the Football City and at the Nova SBE campus.

The Federation will bring its entire health and performance unit, which consists of top national and international physiologists, the coordinator, who is also a doctor for the National Team A, our nutritionist, and a psychologist who, besides being a professor at the Higher Institute of Applied Psychology, is one of the biggest references in our country in the area of Football Psychology, having been connected to the professional team of Sport Lisboa e Benfica for over 20 years. On the Nova SBE side, it is planned to share experiences and teachings about leadership.

Basically, the important thing is to understand that this parallelism between business and football can help improve performance in both activities, and that aspects linked to life, to emotions, to the way one reacts, prepares, recovers or manages fatigue can be decisive in performance, on the field and in any organisation.

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This text is a republishing of an interview originally published by PME Magazine.