The Dreaded Analogy

The comparison of business to sport is perhaps the laziest move in the executive lexicon. Yet, four weeks of World Cup football are hard to resist.

The quality gap between the contenders has strikingly narrowed over the last decade or so. Most teams now play roughly the same game. Talent development, coaching methods, and tactical recipes have diffused globally. What was once the preserve of a few nations has become an open playbook.

Even the boots have followed. Almost every player wears some shade of pink. Teams no longer merely play the same way; they look the same.

Business has been experiencing a similar evolution. McKinsey reported in ‘Strategy’s biggest blind spot: Erosion of competitive advantage’ (2026), that the rate at which market leaders and laggards trade places, which they call the ‘shuffle rate,’ has risen across most industries (including in footwear) since 2014. What was once a competitive advantage, it concluded, is now merely a standard of doing business.

Both in soccer and business, globalization has delivered on its promises. But the consequences have been different. In football, it has produced more drama on the pitch. In the economy, it has produced more drama in people’s lives. The former is greater entertainment. The latter is greater anxiety.

By making soccer and business significantly more sophisticated, globalization has made it less forgiving. There are two immediate implications.

The first one is that the marginal competitive edge lies less in never‑before‑seen genius and more in the ruthless minimization of error. In his essay 'The Loser's Game' (1975), Charles Ellis discussed the evolution of the asset management industry. He established that once everyone is skilled enough that no one can reliably out-play the rest, brilliance cancels, and the contest is decided by who makes the fewest mistakes: A game of winners becomes a game of losers.

The second one comes from Michael Porter. In 'What Is Strategy?' (1996), he acknowledged the urge of companies facing increased competition to minimize mistakes by maximizing what he called ‘operational effectiveness.’

Porter, however, warned that seeking to ‘perform similar activities better than rivals’ is not, in itself, a strategy. It may even be a trap: chased by everyone, operational effectiveness yields only deeper competitive convergence. In that context, strategy remains the sole reliable source of differentiation.

In a world where everyone has the same playbook and the same pink boots, the only lasting edge begins with assuming, with a fair degree of humility, that competitors are at least as good as oneself, and to let that assumption drive an unromantic focus on execution with judgment and discipline.

On its own, this guarantees nothing. But, it is the only ground on which a flash of genius such as an Mbappé shot can compound, rather than be cancelled by mistakes.