In April 2021, twelve of the biggest football clubs in Europe announced they were breaking away to form their own competition, a Super League, largely sealed off from the leagues that had made them famous. It was unveiled late on a Sunday night with all the confidence of a done deal. By the middle of the following week, it was gone. Nine of the twelve had pulled out. The whole thing had lasted roughly forty-eight hours, which must be some kind of record for the distance between a grand launch and a full retreat.
I am not a fan of every club involved, and I have no interest in scoring points off any of them, so let me get to why this sits so squarely in our territory. The Super League is the cleanest illustration I know of what happens when the parts of a system optimise for themselves and forget the whole that gives them their value.
Each of those clubs, taken on its own, was behaving rationally. They were chasing more guaranteed revenue, more certainty, more control over their own commercial future. From inside any single boardroom, the logic was sound. The problem is that “rational for my club” and “good for the game” had quietly come apart, and the clubs acted on the first while assuming the second would take care of itself. It did not. The fans, who are the actual lifeblood of the thing, recognised immediately that a competition you cannot be relegated from and others cannot climb into is not really a competition at all. The backlash was instant and it was total, and the clubs that had been so sure on Sunday were issuing apologies by Tuesday.
This is Enterprise-First Accountability, the discipline of prioritising the health of the whole enterprise over the interests of your own part of it. And football makes it vivid precisely because the “enterprise” is so obviously larger than any single club. A club has value because the game has value. The drama, the jeopardy, the possibility that a small team beats a giant on its day, all of it depends on the wider system that no single club owns. Strip that out to protect your own position, and you saw off the branch you are sitting on. You can win your corner and still lose the room.
Now, you might think this is a problem unique to football, with its tribal passions and its furious supporters. It is not. It is one of the most common failures I see inside ordinary organisations, just without the television cameras. It is the division that hits its own targets by quietly dumping work on another. The function that protects its headcount in the budget round while the enterprise as a whole is crying out for those resources somewhere else. The leader who wins the internal argument, defends the patch, looks after their own people, and never quite asks whether the whole is better off for it. Any one of those moves is rational from inside the silo. Repeated across an organisation, they slowly kill the thing everyone depends on.
The reason this discipline is so hard is that the incentives almost always pull the wrong way. You are usually measured on your part, not the whole. Your bonus, your status, your sense of having done your job all attach to your division, your function, your club. Enterprise-First Accountability asks you to act, sometimes, against that local interest, in favour of a whole that may never thank you for it and may not even notice. That is a genuinely difficult ask, and pretending otherwise helps no one.
But the alternative is the Super League. Twelve organisations, each defending its own position with complete rationality, producing collectively a result so bad that they had to abandon it within two days, having torched a good deal of trust in the process. The whole was worth more than the sum of the parts, and by grabbing for their parts, they damaged the whole that made their parts valuable in the first place.
So the question the discipline asks is uncomfortable and worth sitting with. When you make your case, fight your corner, protect your people, are you also asking whether the enterprise as a whole is better off? That is not instead of looking after your part. It is as well as. The leaders who hold this discipline are the ones who can argue hard for their division and still, when it matters, put the whole first.
I am not saying ambition is wrong, or that clubs and divisions should not advocate for themselves. But when every part optimises only for itself, the whole that everyone relies on quietly dies. The model predicts it. Football just had the decency to demonstrate it in under a week.