Each country has a monopoly of its own leagues of football or. You can only move up and down leagues from higher to a relegation and then get promoted. You cannot move across countries. Each main league in each country has roughly the same number of teams. Each league systems are closed national systems so Spain, France, and Germany, etc. each have their own. The rules are pretty much the same, the stadiums are pretty much the same. They mostly play games on the same weekend days. Yes, populations are different. Spain’s population is 46M, France’s population is 67.75M, Germany’s population is 82M and Italy’s population 59M. England and Wales population is a combined 59M. There is nice piece here at the BBC on it.

Various European nations have won the main cross-country tournament so cross-country capabilities are good. The playing field should be even. But not all leagues are born or deliver equal economic value.

In fact, the English Premier league is crushing all other leagues combined when it comes to spending power. The English Premier league just crushed it when it comes to the mid-season player transfer window where the 20 teams in the English Premier leagues spent four times more than the combined 120+ teams of the main country's premier leagues together. A staggering 815M English pounds to 198M English pounds in the combination of the four major countries. Whose combined populations total 250M versus 59M in England and Wales. Markets nearly five times larger spending of four times less on their national past times, that they all share.

Who got it right, the English Premier League or the combined Bundesliga, Serie A, La Liga and Lique 1?

The English Premier league (truly first amongst supposed equals) is crushing it financially for five reasons that teach us a lot about global market value and much more importantly how the traditional economic models are radically shifting.

Global appeal is the new norm, even if the product feels very local. The NFL needs to hurry up here

Ask kids in China about the Warriors and odds are they will talk about the US basketball team. Ask soccer hungry kids and parents about soccer teams in the USA and the chances they talk about Manchester’s two teams, City and United or Arsenal or Liverpool far more times than the combined totals of all MLS teams they might think about. Global brands can now play in one place and really be seen as aspirational symbols elsewhere. This means where a company invests in building that brand may well occur way outside its core market for traditional consumption (on the soccer field). The NFL needs to hurry up and recognize this in its global expansion.

The English premier league completely understands how much of its value is built from the eyeballs that watch its team at some crazy early time in the morning or buy its three or four annual playing uniforms or follow the teams on social media. Liverpool had 20M followers on Instagram in 2019, it is now over 40M, 38M on Facebook, 6M+ on TikTok as of the end of 2022 an 21M on Twitter. These are far from audiences than you could ever have in a stadium or even watch games. In comparison the most iconic American sports team, the Green Packers have a mere 5M Facebook fan.

Social media drives attention, viewing, consumption and market size of opportunity that allows these teams in one country and in one league to spend that much money. Well PSG, the leading French team is really good too. They have over 38M Facebook followers. However, something else is driving this enormous economic difference and it’s about strategic intent.

Strategic intent is vital when playing fields feel even in a digital scale world

The English Premier league has always been the very aggressive neighbor to the European leagues. In relatively even markets (same game, same number of teams) the league that aims for a vast future (global, TV deals, huge resource sucks of the best talent) wins. Incremental management cannot get the level of differential needed to gain share in a flat world. This is as true for leadership in these increasingly even worlds, as it is for sport. Customers head to dominant market share players (Apple, Amazon, Google, etc.) because of the promise of a differentiated experience that digital size gives. It is very consistent illustration of the power of strategic intent to drive truly outsized returns.

From a business leadership perspective, the idea of playing it is safe, or waiting and seeing what might happen is no longer a viable strategic alternative. Markets are even, knowledge is commonly known and moments for action (transfer windows in this case) are in frequent and well known. Leaders need an inherently aggressive strategic intent, and they need to understand the moment when to act. The idea of progressive share grabs or consistent but low growth rates will not lead to exponentially different performance. The English Premier league fully understands the dynamics here and they are re-defining how the DNA of leadership is being re defined in front of us.

Value is greater than the sum of the assets you might see on the surface

Your team might win on the soccer field. It does not mean it is making money off it. Assets are greater than the sum of what you might see on the surface (or on the field). For example, think about the economic power of your social media or your infrastructure or even your CEO. In a world where we might not be sure what levers to pull for success knowing the potential value of everything you have, everything you do and what is built to deliver it is the new magic formula. Amazon Web Services (AWS) was born from an internal infrastructure need that appealed to a new demographic of younger, cloud native developers. Originally working outside their own traditional IT infrastructure’s, they built a whole new world of rapid prototyping and applications. It is now the norm but less than eight years ago it was an extreme outlier.

Value as greater than the sum of the parts customers saw when they bought off amazon dot country. Fully understanding what types of those sub dermal components really drive value is essential. From the measured economic impact in how you hire to even how you fund ideas like automation (Chat GPT) how we invest and see assets as to change. The English Premier league has learned and applied that less very well.

It might sound odd that a professional sports league is changing the way we should be thinking about leadership. It really is one of the best living examples in the power of strategic intent in a level playing field world combined with the power to understand the true value of hidden assets too.