[新聞]The Catalan kings
http://www.economist.com/node/18709691?fsrc=scn%2Ffb%2Fwl%2Far%2Fthecatalankings
Schumpeter
The Catalan kings
The management secrets of Barcelona Football Club
May 19th 2011 | from the print edition
A POPULAR debate among football obsessives concerns whether Barcelona—Barça
to its fans—is the best club soccer team the world has ever seen. Is it
better than the Santos of the 1960s (which was home to Pelé)? Or the AC
Milan of the 1990s? The answer is gloriously unclear. But Barça is surely
the finest team in the world right now: the standard against which other
ball-kickers must measure themselves. Consider the evidence. Barça recently
beat its old rivals, Real Madrid, to win the Spanish league. It boasts the
best player in the world: Lionel Messi. It goes into the European Champions
League final at Wembley on May 28th as the clear favourite (though it would
be foolish to underestimate Manchester United).
Barça is also a cash machine. It is number two in Deloitte’s league of the
world’s highest-grossing football clubs, behind Real Madrid; with revenues
of €398m ($488m) in 2009-10 (Real Madrid earned €439m). It has doubled its
revenues over the past four years. Last year Barça signed a five-year
sponsorship deal with Qatar Sports Investment for a minimum of €165m, which
would involve putting a commercial logo on the team’s shirts for the first
time. Barça and Real also have an advantage in that they receive a hugely
disproportionate share of the revenues from televising La Liga, the Spanish
premier league. That said, no one knows how profitable Barça is, nor how
indebted.
How has a club that is based in one of Europe’s unemployment blackspots
turned itself into the ruling power in the world’s most popular sport? An
obvious answer is that Barça plays as a team in a sport that has far too
many prima donnas. It keeps the ball moving, dominates possession and keeps
its opponents under constant pressure. But there is a less obvious answer,
too, and one that has implications beyond the football pitch. Barça has
provided a distinctive solution to some of the most contentious problems in
management theory. What is the right balance between stars and the rest of
mankind? Should you buy talent or grow your own? How can you harness the
enthusiasm of consumers to promote your brand? And how do you combine the
advantages of local roots and global reach?
Barça puts more emphasis than any other major team on growing its own
players. Other football teams often resemble the United Nations—the Arsenal
first eleven, for example, frequently includes just two native-born Britons.
Barça, by contrast, is still dominated by local players, and Catalan is
often spoken in the dressing room. Eight of the team’s leading players are
products of its football school, La Masia. That includes Mr Messi, an
Argentine who moved to Barcelona as a boy, and the team’s coach, Josep (“Pep
”) Guardiola. La Masia is unique among football schools. It is a boarding
school that puts as much emphasis on character-training as on footballing
skills. The students are relentlessly instructed in the importance of team
spirit, self-sacrifice and perseverance. They are also taught that Barça is
“more than a club”: it is the embodiment of Catalan pride that kept the
region’s spirit alive during the years when Spain groaned under the fascist
Franco regime. Fans regularly sport banners proclaiming that “Catalonia is
not Spain”.
Barça has used the idea that it is “more than a club” to cultivate a
two-way relationship with its fans. It is owned by its members (socis in
Catalan), who now number 150,000, rather than by shareholders or foreign
tycoons. The management is answerable to an assembly that consists of 2,500
randomly chosen socis and the 600 most senior members. The club supports many
sports other than football and runs a popular museum in Barcelona. After a
recent win more than a million people turned out to cheer.
Barça’s management style chimes in with the thinking of two admired
theorists. Boris Groysberg, of Harvard Business School, has warned that
companies are too obsessed with hiring stars rather than developing teams. He
conducted a fascinating study of successful Wall Street analysts who moved
from one firm to another. He discovered that company-switching analysts saw
an immediate decline in their performance. For all their swagger, it seems
that their success depended as much on their co-workers as their innate
talents. Jim Collins, the author of “Good to Great”, argues that the secret
of long-term corporate success lies in cultivating a distinctive set of
values. For all the talk of diversity and globalisation, this usually means
promoting from within and putting down deep local roots.
The beautiful name
Barça has also blazed a trail in nurturing its brand—a tough job in the
internet age, when gossip is plentiful and trust is scarce. The proportion of
brands that consumers trust fell from 52% in 1997 to 22% in 2008, according
to Y&R, an advertising agency, and traditional forms of advertising are
becoming less effective. To combat this problem, some firms try to involve
consumers in developing their brands. Lego, a toy brickmaker, invites
Lego-heads to its headquarters to work with its designers. Asda, a
supermarket, invites regular shoppers to suggest what it should sell. But so
far nobody has gone as far as Barça in giving customers a direct say in big
decisions.
Barça has made its share of mistakes. The team’s attempt to widen its
recruitment net by setting up a soccer academy in Argentina has been
abandoned. Traditionalists worry that it is selling its Catalan soul in
pursuit of slick commercial deals. And soccer is an unpredictable business.
The team went through a bad patch in the early 2000s; another slump could see
its fickle foreign fans disappear or, worse, switch their allegiance to
Chelsea. That might cause Barça’s revenues to plunge. But for the moment
the club is on the top of the world: an example not just of sporting prowess
but of smart management.
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