Why get an MBA when you can watch a sports documentary?

Sports documentaries are not generally considered part of the management canon. While Clayton Christensen, a famous business thinker, was writing about “disruptive innovation” in the mid-1990s, British television produced “Graham Taylor: An Impossible Job”, a bleak portrait of England’s national football manager. In 2005 a pair of INSEAD professors told bosses to go after “blue ocean” markets in a best-selling book. Neil Warnock, another English football manager and the ascetic hero of the documentary “Warnock”, told his players before a match: “By all means enjoy it, but enjoy it by being fucking disciplined.”

Nowadays it is business schools that have run out of big ideas and dressing rooms that seem to be full of them. After the pandemic-era success of “Drive to Survive”, a Netflix show following Formula 1 racing teams that is now on its ninth season, and “The Last Dance”, a ten-parter about the Chicago Bulls’ 1997-98 basketball season, streaming platforms decided that viewers’ appetite for touchline philosophy was unlimited.

So great is the glut of sports documentaries that an entire MBA course might be constructed from titles released this year, only on Netflix and just about men’s football. A boss seeking instruction on corporate turnarounds can start with one about Liverpool’s comeback in the 2005 Champions League final, which with a running time of 78 minutes is far longer than the comeback itself, which took about six minutes. Another, mulling expansion into new markets, could consult “Norway: The Dark Horse”, which follows the country’s national side, for a quick primer on Scandinavian management. “The Bus: A French Football Mutiny” is a textbook tale of a toxic workplace.

Many such pictures are heavy on puffery and light on practical instruction. Amazon’s recent “A Beautiful Obsession”, which follows Josep “Pep” Guardiola during his final season in charge of Manchester City, a top English football team, is a rare management gem. He is responsible for a big operation (the club has annual revenues of about $1bn). His performance is scored every week. And as the custodian of a brand with both a local and a global identity, Mr Guardiola answers to Noel Gallagher, of the band Oasis, and Khaldoon al Mubarak, of Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, whose chairman owns the club.

Whereas most management trends rest on a single piercing idea, Mr Guardiola is a wildly successful boss in the schizophrenic style. Before one fixture he insisted on dressing-room hugs. After losing the match, not so much: “When I see your fucking face complaining about something, my decisions, I fucking kill you,” he growled. A rare fountain of ordinary management-speak is the team’s captain, Kyle Walker, who offers such pearls as: “Make sure we stick together out there.” But he is shown the door at the end of the first episode.

Ideas that seem novel in business schools are common sense on the touchline. In a paper published last year researchers use “neural network-based machine-learning” to show that bosses are aged by the stress of managing firms during difficult periods. Mr Guardiola uses his fingernails to scratch his head when he is under intense pressure, leaving red marks that demonstrate the same point. His methodology bears some marks of “digital transformation”—a model considering 43 different measures rates players and informs personnel decisions. Still, professional sports remains the last bastion of the whiteboard.

Mr Guardiola’s dressing room will strike most bosses as an inhospitable and unfamiliar place. They should ask themselves why. One reason is that it contains no women. But it is mostly because people care less about winning than Mr Guardiola. That is quite alright: a firm where middle management adopted his style in the pursuit of, say, selling car parts, would be a dreadful place to work. Still, much of the economy is driven by organisations, such as AI labs and hedge funds, which rely on the maximal use of the rare talents of a very small number of prima donnas. Views into the workings of such firms are extraordinarily rare, which is what makes Mr Guardiola worth watching.

Investors paying vast sums to buy sports franchises at a record pace have a more practical reason to binge sports documentaries. While Saudi Arabia licks its wounds over the failure of LIV (see previous story), it might do some post-match analysis by watching the series about the golf league which aired on Fox Sports last year. Joshua Kushner might not have attempted his abortive privatisation of world football had he watched one of the many documentaries that illustrate how much fans care about it.

Master of Ball Administration

Sports teams are special institutions. They are, of course, the ultimate trophy asset for those with billions in the bank. But they are also a vehicle for commerce, and one which many believe is mostly immune from the disruptive potential of AI. The narrow version of this argument is that, unlike movies or television shows, live sports cannot be created by AI models. The expansive version is that we are approaching a world where the jobless need something to fill their time, and that most of their attention (and perhaps their identity) will revolve around sports teams. In such a world the team manager becomes society’s foremost philosopher, and the fly-on-the-wall Netflix series his magnum opus.