Hello everyone, and welcome to the readers who joined this week!

I’m close to several people who are negotiating the purchase of a stake in a club.

Some are attracted by a club in Scandinavia with extremely high potential.

Others want to bet on the growth of Italian football because they consider it undervalued, and rightly so in my opinion.

Others instead aim to build an MCO according to a precise logic, which is no longer “the more clubs I own, the better,” but rather: “if I know how to manage one club well, I can replicate my model across multiple clubs”.

So every day I speak with people from different continents, different cultures, and different ideas.

People who have one thing in common: the desire to grow the football industry.

And every time the topic of restructuring a club comes up, I always bring up my concept of P.A.L.M.

PALM is not only a tree that I like very much and that reminds me of the sea, the sun, and many other things I appreciate about planet Earth.

It also stands for:

People
Alignment
Long-Term
Motivation

Today I want to talk to you about why I consider these four points essential to support the growth of a club in every division, in every league, in every region.

There is much more beyond P.A.L.M., but I believe that without these four ingredients, an owner loses time, money, health, peace, serenity, and the desire for football.

Are you ready?

If you were a club owner, I would explain it to you like this.

Football is a sport, yes, but it is mainly a human resources business.

Players, fans, executives. They are all people. And all people have strengths and weaknesses. And they behave differently depending on the context.

So if the club is managed by people who are not suited to the objectives it must pursue, it means there will be high turnover, the club will restart from zero every season, and growth will become impossible.

People are the most important thing in a club.

The CEO, the sporting director, the scouts, the CMO, the doctors, etc.

It must be clear why they are the right people for that club at that specific moment.

Now, let’s assume that your Club has the perfect people. Both on the corporate side and the sporting side.

If those people, for one reason or another, have different visions and push in opposite directions, then how do you reach your result? Impossible!

So the second most important thing in a club is that everyone is aligned. Everyone must know who does what and why. If an ant walks past the gym, people should know why it is passing there and why at that specific moment.

This creates the “compound effect,” the one Warren Buffett loves in the investment world. Because everyone acts knowing the positive and negative consequences of their own behaviour. They understand the impact of every action on other departments, other people, and the club in general.

Better, no?

It is genuinely sad when a coach criticises the sporting director in a newspaper, and vice versa.

Imagine two generals at war arguing while the enemy advances. Who wins?

Or imagine a CEO wanting to invest in youth development while the coach only trusts 30-year-olds and the sporting director keeps signing short-term players to save his own job. Everyone is working hard, but in different directions. The result is confusion, wasted money, and a club that stands still while competitors move forward.

Alignment is key in a club, and unfortunately, extremely rare.

How do you increase the probability of creating an aligned club?

Go back to point one: start with the right people for your club.

Now you have the right people who are aligned. You are already ahead of 90% of clubs with your budget.

What about your goals?

It is impossible to live in the short term and expect to grow.

If every year you have to rebuild the strategy and the club, you are wasting money and energy, and you probably already have all the fans against you. Either you are a masochist, or it is not a situation you enjoy being in.

Change is not always bad. But strong clubs think ahead. They identify the scenarios where change may become necessary and already have an idea of how they will react.

Let’s take the coach.

You must already know three things before the season even starts:

Why this coach fits your idea of football.

What risks come with him.

And what your plan is if it fails.

Too many clubs change coach emotionally, without a real succession plan. They react to the problem instead of preparing for the possibility of it.

If you have not planned the types of changes you may face and how you will react, then you will waste money, energy, and credibility with the fans.

You must always have three-year and five-year objectives.

And as the great Charlie Munger used to say: “Invert, always invert.”

Think about what you should do to fail, and then avoid doing it.

But understand this: if you do not live in the long term, it becomes almost impossible to achieve any meaningful objective.

Now you have fantastic and aligned people. Probably the best group of people in your league. And you also have a long-term strategy.

So you have built strong foundations, you have a competitive advantage through your human resources, and you have a machine that will most likely perform well.

The recipe is almost finished.

Let’s season the dish properly.

What do we add?

Careful.

Motivation must come after action, not before.

You must not build an environment where players and executives wait to feel motivated or wait for personal motivation before giving their maximum effort.

To achieve objectives, you first need discipline. You need people who do the work even when they are tired or do not feel like doing it.

Then, you need goals that are big enough to justify the sacrifice. If the goal is mediocre, at the first sign of friction, someone stops. Inside your club, it must be clear that suffering is the price of success.

Your club must be a place where identity matters more than willpower.

Not: “I want to train.”

But: “I am a person who trains.”

Not: “I manage the stadium.”

But: “I am a person who makes fans happy.”

You must create situations that reduce friction and decisions because you do not want an emotional club, you want a club that functions through systems: routines and measurable objectives.

If systems are missing, you risk becoming a firefighter instead of a club owner. You would spend the entire year putting out fires everywhere until you run out of strength or water.

Your club must not function thanks to the adrenaline of a victory. Everyone must have consistency. Everyone must deliver their best in every situation.

And if you executed the first three points well, people, alignment, and long-term objectives, then you probably already have human resources doing this even when you are not watching.

In the end, the motivation we are talking about here is a function of internal culture, high operational standards, meritocracy, and accountability.

Now you may be asking yourselves: why is it not like this in every club?

Why does the sporting side almost always fight with the corporate side?

Why does the CEO fight with the sporting director, the sporting director with the coach, the coach with the doctor, and so on?

Ego? Lack of clarity?

It all starts from the top.

If you do not know what you want to do with a club, how, and why, then it becomes very difficult to avoid all the risks and unpleasant situations we discussed today.

I could keep writing for hours about this, but that is not the objective today.

Today, I simply wanted to put into writing a concept I have repeated several times recently and share it with you.

Hopefully, it can help you.

P.S. Send me the name of a club that, in your opinion, represents the P.A.L.M. strategy well.

Keep winning!

Federico