Not sure if this is the right thread but I will still keep it here anyway...in the next post I will post the case study "Ferguson's Formula" published in the Harvard Business Review in October 2013 and which is of greater relevance to this thread
Meet the Harvard professor who is shaping the destiny of football stars
Harvard’s Anita Elberse has attracted interest from the likes of Sir Alex Ferguson, Gerard Piqué and Kaká. Here’s why
Some call him the greatest coach in history. Before retiring in May 2013, Sir Alex Ferguson spent 26 seasons as the manager of Manchester United, the English football (soccer) club that ranks among the most successful and valuable franchises in sports. During that time the club won 13 English league titles along with 25 other domestic and international trophies—giving him an overall haul nearly double that of the next-most-successful English club manager. And Ferguson was far more than a coach. He played a central role in the United organization, managing not just the first team but the entire club. “Steve Jobs was Apple; Sir Alex Ferguson is Manchester United,” says the club’s former chief executive David Gill.
In 2012 Harvard Business School professor Anita Elberse had a unique opportunity to examine Ferguson’s management approach and developed an HBS case study around it. Now she and Ferguson have collaborated on an analysis of his enormously successful methods.
Anita Elberse: Success and staying power like Sir Alex Ferguson’s demand study—and not just by football fans. How did he do it? Can one identify habits that enabled his success and principles that guided it? During what turned out to be his final season in charge, my former student Tom Dye and I conducted a series of in-depth interviews with Ferguson about his leadership methods and watched him in action at United’s training ground and at its famed stadium, Old Trafford, where a nine-foot bronze statue of the former manager now looms outside. We spoke with many of the people Ferguson worked with, from David Gill to the club’s assistant coaches, kit manager, and players. And we observed Ferguson during numerous short meetings and conversations with players and staff members in the hallways, in the cafeteria, on the training pitch, and wherever else the opportunity arose. Ferguson later came to HBS to see the ensuing case study taught, provide his views, and answer students’ questions, resulting in standing-room-only conditions in my classroom and a highly captivating exchange.
Ferguson and I discussed eight leadership lessons that capture crucial elements of his approach. Although I’ve tried not to push the angle too hard, many of them can certainly be applied more broadly, to business and to life. In the article that follows, I describe each lesson as I observed it, and then give Ferguson his say.
Some books/research on the links between football and finance (not research papers actually)
From £20 a week to Fifa millions: the best books about football money
The Super League fiasco exposed the sport’s complex relationship with finance – and these books by David Conn, Kelly Smith and more are brilliant
While we wait for the inevitable slew of books about the heart-of-stone-not-to-laugh fiasco of the European Super League, we can familiarise ourselves with the luridly complex relationship between football and finance. The most assiduous and perceptive follower of the money is David Conn. He was one of the first writers to analyse, in his 1997 The Football Business, how a new financial model was changing the culture of the game both on and off the pitch. Later, as a lifelong Manchester City fan, he was well placed to chart, in Richer Than God, how the scruffy, under-achieving poor relations to swanky United were elevated into the global elite via the almost unlimited resources of the Abu Dhabi royal family. Most recently his study of the sport’s governing body, The Fall of the House of Fifa,charted an organisation that when formed looked askance at individuals making profits from staging football matches, yet ended up as the target of FBI wiretaps more usually deployed to counter organised-crime racketeering.
Of course the problem for most football clubs, even today, is a perilous lack of money, not a grotesque surplus of it. And it wasn’t until comparatively late in the sport’s history that the cash began to feed through with a maximum wage of £20 a week still in place as late as 1961. In When Footballers Were Skint, Jon Henderson recalls the good old days when players’ employment status was akin to serfdom, on match days they mingled with fans on public transport and contractual disputes could centre on the club being tight with its Christmas cigarette allocation. And even when big money did come into the game its distribution was blinkered and narrow. England’s first professional female player, Kelly Smith, recalls in her autobiography My Story, that when she started playing in the official FA Women’s Premier League in 1994, far from being paid she actually had to “hand over a fee, for referees, pitches and so on. It may have had ‘Premier League’ in its title but it certainly didn’t feel Premier League to me.”
It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that football memoirs tend to feature money more than most sporting lives. The standard anecdote remains the young player’s First Big Contract, but there are also less orthodox financial dealings. Jonathan Wilson’s biography of Brian Clough,Nobody Ever Says Thank You, covers not only triumphs on the pitch but also the less heroic subject of bungs, the brown envelopes stuffed with cash received by managers for facilitating a transfer. By contrast, in David Peace’s novel The Damned United, the Clough character is disgusted by fellow manager Don Revie’s fondness for stuffed envelopes to bribe officials.
So was it all more wholesome back in the day? Well, in 1888 the Football League itself emerged after a split over money, in this case professionalism v amateurs, a tale engagingly told by Richard Sanders – complete with avaricious owners and clandestine meetings – in Beastly Fury: The Strange Birth of British Football. And, although those Premier League clubs not invited into the ESL were vocal in their disapproval of the project, the Premier League was likewise born after the bigger teams duly broke away from the Football League, to the detriment of smaller clubs, inevitably in search of more money. That early-90s schism is catalogued in Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg’s The Club, in which a confluence of events – economic boom, the arrival of satellite TV and a sclerotically run sport mired in violence and squalor and vulnerable to predators – prepared the ground for the unimagined wealth of the football world, for better and for worse, we have today. The venal and ham-fisted antics of the ESL billionaires and bankers might have been the latest instalment in a long story, but no one believes it is the final chapter.
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Meet the Harvard professor who is shaping the destiny of football stars
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2019/dec/27/harvard-alex-ferguson-professor-course-anita-elberse
Ferguson’s Formula
Some call him the greatest coach in history. Before retiring in May 2013, Sir Alex Ferguson spent 26 seasons as the manager of Manchester United, the English football (soccer) club that ranks among the most successful and valuable franchises in sports. During that time the club won 13 English league titles along with 25 other domestic and international trophies—giving him an overall haul nearly double that of the next-most-successful English club manager. And Ferguson was far more than a coach. He played a central role in the United organization, managing not just the first team but the entire club. “Steve Jobs was Apple; Sir Alex Ferguson is Manchester United,” says the club’s former chief executive David Gill.
In 2012 Harvard Business School professor Anita Elberse had a unique opportunity to examine Ferguson’s management approach and developed an HBS case study around it. Now she and Ferguson have collaborated on an analysis of his enormously successful methods.
Anita Elberse: Success and staying power like Sir Alex Ferguson’s demand study—and not just by football fans. How did he do it? Can one identify habits that enabled his success and principles that guided it? During what turned out to be his final season in charge, my former student Tom Dye and I conducted a series of in-depth interviews with Ferguson about his leadership methods and watched him in action at United’s training ground and at its famed stadium, Old Trafford, where a nine-foot bronze statue of the former manager now looms outside. We spoke with many of the people Ferguson worked with, from David Gill to the club’s assistant coaches, kit manager, and players. And we observed Ferguson during numerous short meetings and conversations with players and staff members in the hallways, in the cafeteria, on the training pitch, and wherever else the opportunity arose. Ferguson later came to HBS to see the ensuing case study taught, provide his views, and answer students’ questions, resulting in standing-room-only conditions in my classroom and a highly captivating exchange.
Ferguson and I discussed eight leadership lessons that capture crucial elements of his approach. Although I’ve tried not to push the angle too hard, many of them can certainly be applied more broadly, to business and to life. In the article that follows, I describe each lesson as I observed it, and then give Ferguson his say.
https://hbr.org/2013/10/fergusons-formula
From £20 a week to Fifa millions: the best books about football money
The Super League fiasco exposed the sport’s complex relationship with finance – and these books by David Conn, Kelly Smith and more are brilliantWhile we wait for the inevitable slew of books about the heart-of-stone-not-to-laugh fiasco of the European Super League, we can familiarise ourselves with the luridly complex relationship between football and finance. The most assiduous and perceptive follower of the money is David Conn. He was one of the first writers to analyse, in his 1997 The Football Business, how a new financial model was changing the culture of the game both on and off the pitch. Later, as a lifelong Manchester City fan, he was well placed to chart, in Richer Than God, how the scruffy, under-achieving poor relations to swanky United were elevated into the global elite via the almost unlimited resources of the Abu Dhabi royal family. Most recently his study of the sport’s governing body, The Fall of the House of Fifa, charted an organisation that when formed looked askance at individuals making profits from staging football matches, yet ended up as the target of FBI wiretaps more usually deployed to counter organised-crime racketeering.
It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that football memoirs tend to feature money more than most sporting lives. The standard anecdote remains the young player’s First Big Contract, but there are also less orthodox financial dealings. Jonathan Wilson’s biography of Brian Clough, Nobody Ever Says Thank You, covers not only triumphs on the pitch but also the less heroic subject of bungs, the brown envelopes stuffed with cash received by managers for facilitating a transfer. By contrast, in David Peace’s novel The Damned United, the Clough character is disgusted by fellow manager Don Revie’s fondness for stuffed envelopes to bribe officials.
So was it all more wholesome back in the day? Well, in 1888 the Football League itself emerged after a split over money, in this case professionalism v amateurs, a tale engagingly told by Richard Sanders – complete with avaricious owners and clandestine meetings – in Beastly Fury: The Strange Birth of British Football. And, although those Premier League clubs not invited into the ESL were vocal in their disapproval of the project, the Premier League was likewise born after the bigger teams duly broke away from the Football League, to the detriment of smaller clubs, inevitably in search of more money. That early-90s schism is catalogued in Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg’s The Club, in which a confluence of events – economic boom, the arrival of satellite TV and a sclerotically run sport mired in violence and squalor and vulnerable to predators – prepared the ground for the unimagined wealth of the football world, for better and for worse, we have today. The venal and ham-fisted antics of the ESL billionaires and bankers might have been the latest instalment in a long story, but no one believes it is the final chapter.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/29/from-20-a-week-to-fifa-millions-the-best-books-about-football-money
management on the occupational
subculture of English professional football
A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of
the requirements of the University of
Brighton for the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy
Mostly analysis of culture change due to diffusion of foreign coaches / players into English Football and backed it by Data