Ferran Soriano, CEO of City Football Group: 'The challenge for a global football team is to turn its fans into customers'
Nearly 250 ESADE alumni attended the 2nd International ESADE Alumni Meeting this weekend in London. It was the first time the event had been held in Europe. With the success of this new edition, ESADE Alumni continues to implement its international strategy based on holding events in the world’s main cities (last year’s edition took place in New York) and the forthcoming opening of new chapters in various foreign capitals.
The London event was attended by the CEO of City Football Group and ESADE alumni Ferran Soriano (MBA’90), who shared with the attendees the ‘lessons learnt’ in his year of management in the world of football. Soriano recalled his time as vice-president of FC Barcelona and explained his current strategy at the head of City Football Group. ‘The challenge for any global team is to turn its fans into customers’, he said, explaining his commitment to creating ‘local teams grouped under a global brand’.
To this end, the company Soriano heads has leveraged the Manchester City brand to create football squads in New York, Melbourne and Yokohama. ‘The usual strategy for a company looking to expand into other markets is to create subsidiaries with shared services. Well, in the world of football we can follow that strategy too.’ For Soriano, it is necessary to address the needs of the millions upon millions of fans of the world’s top teams who live in far-off countries and do not have the option of regularly going to matches to cheer on their team in person.
Soriano: ‘A football team’s success does not depend on whether or not the ball goes in’
After years of experience managing world-class football teams, Soriano shared some of the leadership lessons he has learnt that can be applied to other facets of life. ‘No high-performance team has ever achieved good results through anything other than a combination of commitment times balance raised to the power of talent’, he explained. Moreover, depending on the team’s characteristics and members, its leader ‘needs to assume different roles’ in order to achieve results, and ‘consistently defending certain values’ is what makes ‘any leader credible’. Therefore, Soriano concluded, ‘A football team’s success does not depend on whether or not the ball goes in, but rather on a good management strategy.’
The other speaker at the event was David Vegara, a lecturer in the Department of Economics, Finance and Accounting at ESADE, who spoke about the global economic situation. The professor outlined some of the persistent ‘unknowns’ in global macroeconomics, such as the behaviour of the Chinese economy, the price of oil and the still slow recovery of the euro zone. In this regard, Vegara predicted that a British exit from the EU would be ‘a disaster’ for Europe.
ESADE Alumni is the association of ESADE alumni. It has more than 30 international chapters spread out amongst the world’s major cities. Particular attention should be called to the chapters in London, Milan, Munich and Frankfurt in Europe and in New York, San Francisco, Sao Paolo, Santiago, Bangalore, Shanghai and Singapore elsewhere in the world.
