In recent months, Six Sports Management has had the opportunity to support a leading football club in the French sports landscape in structuring its strategic plan for the next three seasons. The ambition? To provide the club with a tool enabling it to structure its growth for the seasons ahead by identifying clear objectives to achieve and relevant projects to deliver them. A particularly structuring exercise, but one requiring significant groundwork beforehand. Here is some feedback from the experience.
A strategic plan? What for?
While leagues operate at an increasingly relentless pace, many clubs are looking to give themselves a moment to step back from their day-to-day operations and take a broader view of their development. Yet few actually manage to do so. Some rely on costly strategy departments (OGC Nice, Olympique de Marseille, Paris Basketball), while others turn to external expertise. Most, however, try to tackle the exercise with the resources available to them, often without prior expertise in what is a particularly delicate undertaking.
Drawing up a strategic plan represents a genuine opportunity to sit down with both administrative and sporting teams and define a clear direction for the development of the organization. Within clubs, different departments tend to operate in silos. While the commercial department will have its own view of the club’s marketable value, the communications department will focus on safeguarding its own vision of the club’s identity. The sporting department, meanwhile, will most often focus on results on the pitch, hoping that the other departments will not ask it to make its players available for their projects. Everyone in their own corner, and all will be well.
Moreover, as they develop, each department has specific projects it wants to pursue, based on an analysis of its context and the opportunities it presents. With multiple projects competing for attention, decisions are made on a case-by-case basis, often depending on sporting and financial results. This day-to-day approach prevents the creation of long-term value by making it difficult to plan ahead, and tends to prioritize projects that are further along in the pipeline, sometimes at the expense of more transformative initiatives, simply because of cash constraints.
Drawing up a strategic plan therefore provides a framework for the development of the club.
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By identifying — and selecting — the relevant projects proposed by the different departments, it makes it possible to set clear objectives to be achieved within a defined timeframe, while providing an overall view of the expected outcomes (and, in particular, putting figures against them).
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It also gives managers across the organization the opportunity to understand the needs of their counterparts and to contribute to objectives that concern everyone. For example, the delivery of an infrastructure project could be optimized by simultaneously implementing a marketing project.
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A strategic plan is also an opportunity to formally establish various elements of the club’s operating model that are considered non-negotiable, such as certain aspects of its identity (never changing the crest, allocating 10% of ticketing revenue to social initiatives each season, etc.) or the club’s main ambitions (winning the French championship, achieving financial break-even every season, being a talent-development club, etc.).
Within an organization, staff turnover can have an impact on how it operates. Defining a multi-year framework makes it possible to provide all employees with clear working conditions, objectives to achieve and requirements to meet, without preventing them from pursuing other transformative projects, while limiting the potential impact of staff departures.
A strategic plan can ultimately serve two purposes: an internal one, aimed at managers and providing the benefit of an honest overview of the projects to be undertaken within the club; or an external one, positioning itself as a communication tool for articulating an ambition. While the first approach is particularly relevant for a mature club undergoing growth, the second can be highly valuable for a club in the midst of a restructuring process, or one whose acquisition has left its community waiting for a tangible development project.
How do you develop a strategic plan?
Drawing up a strategic plan involves several key stages, requiring the involvement of everyone working at the club:
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The first step is an audit. Each department must take the time to conduct its own analysis. Understanding how it operates and the context that has shaped it is fundamental to the approach. It is then necessary to look at what is being done elsewhere, the different contexts in which other organizations operate and the responses they have developed. Establishing a precise current-state assessment will make it possible to understand the club’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as the expectations and pitfalls to avoid in order to best meet the expectations of its community.
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This audit will identify optimization opportunities within each department. These will make it possible to define key objectives to be achieved: increasing attendance, increasing sales to employee benefit committees, and so on. These objectives should represent quantified and achievable growth drivers for the club, aligned with the ambitions of each department.
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To deliver on these objectives, transformative projects capable of generating sporting, financial or brand/identity value for the club must then be identified, quantified and assessed. They will be the key to delivering the club’s development ambitions and the foundation of the entire strategic plan.
Once an initial department-by-department exercise has been completed in silos, it will be necessary to look at the club’s project through a comprehensive, organization-wide lens.
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The first stage of a strategic plan is therefore to gain a proper understanding of the club. This means being able to answer the questions: who are we, and what does our community expect from us? It also means having a clear understanding of the club’s financial position and investment capacity. The strategic plan should begin by setting out the club’s long-term ambitions — sporting, financial and identity-related — followed by a snapshot of where it currently stands against each of these dimensions.
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The next step is to scrutinize all the projects identified by the various departments through the lens established beforehand: the club’s ambitions and its financial and human-resource capacity. The projects ultimately selected must be chosen with an overall perspective, maximizing synergies and collectively contributing to the club’s objectives.
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The strategic plan should therefore bring together an overarching vision, precise objectives and projects identified as relevant to achieving them. It is a complex and sensitive process, but one that can deliver significant benefits over several seasons by guiding the activities of the entire club with performance as the ultimate goal.
Once the plan has been drafted, it is then necessary to consider how its findings should be shared. It may be shared solely with the various managers, or with all employees as part of a drive for transparency and collective engagement. It can also be turned into a communication tool, but the wide range of potential audiences makes it essential to carefully consider its purpose beforehand, so that it can be drafted in line with everyone’s expectations without becoming an overview that could put certain stakeholders in a difficult position. Once again, this is a relatively delicate exercise.
Six Sports Management is a strategy consulting firm supporting sports organizations in their structuring and development. Working on numerous transformative projects for clubs, stadiums and arenas, event organizers and local authorities, we help create strategic plans with the ambition of enabling each stakeholder to structure its development in a competitive, relentless economic environment.