Short thread on sports. First, sports culture and the love for sports do not guarantee success. In 2008, I had a meeting in Virginia, USA, that I will never forget - with an interesting gentleman called Phil de Piccioto, founder of Octagon, world’s largest sports management firm. https://twitter.com/zmuhaji/status/1360920352461885442

2. Octagon manages top athletes including Steph Curry, and at some point did manage Michael Jordan, Anna Kournikova, Michael Phelps - and does many sports consulting. We met at his office, in an imposing building full of activity and photos of athletes they manage.

3. As we sat, I commented on Kournikova photo - and he went out of his office and came back with her autographed shoe of hers still with clay dust and gave it to me - my first sports memorabilia. My first question was: why, with our passion for football, we are still unsuccessful

4. His response: passion doesn’t guarantee success. Football is business, and like any other business, it requires investment and patience. Success can’t come with ad hoc committees or popular mobilisation. Football requires “an infrastructure for success”.

5. He mentioned that the ingredients for “infrastructure for success” include: a solid system for identifying, nurturing, and developing talent; solid system for monetisation of talent; and competent sports administration at private and public sectors.

6. He then went on talk about the larger purpose of sports: to unite people and give them pride. He said that, with this purpose, and if you can’t build football “infrastructure for success” quickly, you can find “a cheaper sport”, and still meet those purposes.

7. He said the cheaper sports are mostly individual sports. He said he consulted one East Asia country about sports success - which had similar problems as ours. He suggested a new sport for them: fencing - an Olympics sports where participants try to touch each other with swords

8. Nobody cared about fencing in that country. But they took it up. It was cheap to train and to finance. And within six years, they won three gold medals in Olympics. The country had never won a single medal before. And country went crazy: people were united and proud.

9/9. He mentioned that, if we were interested, he could consult us on blueprint for success for football but it may take 15 years to achieve success. As a side note: Phil’s studied anthropology in college and his first job out of college was digging bones in Ngorongoro area.