What Founders Can Learn from Athletes and Coaches

What founders learn from athletes and coaches is a question that has moved from after-dinner speeches into venture-capital due diligence, executive-search criteria and the $5bn coaching industry. This article is part of the Sports Economy hub and sits alongside our pieces on the athlete as entrepreneur and athlete-led brands.

Why do investors and employers rate athletic backgrounds so highly?

Because sport selects for and trains traits that are hard to assess in an interview: tolerance of measured failure, persistence under a public scoreboard, and the habit of working to a coach’s plan. The surveys and studies that exist are correlational, but they point consistently in the same direction.

The most cited survey is EY’s with espnW, which polled 400 women executives across five regions. It found that 94% had played sport, and that among C-suite respondents 52% had competed at university level compared with 39% of women at other management levels. Three-quarters said a background in sport helped them assess a candidate’s suitability, which matters because the same executives were doing the hiring. The survey dates from 2014 and has not been reproduced with a comparable male sample.

The academic work is thinner but sharper. Kevin Kniffin’s team at Cornell compared people who had played high-school sport with those who had taken part in other extracurricular activities such as band or yearbook, using a sample of men whose activities were recorded decades earlier. Former athletes were rated higher on leadership and self-confidence by independent assessors, were more likely to volunteer and donate, and reported more prosocial behaviour, with the effects persisting into their sixties. Comparing athletes with other club-joiners rather than the inactive is what makes the design credible.

Employers act on this. The NCAA’s own messaging to its 500,000-plus student-athletes is that 98% will go pro in something other than sport. Firms including EY, JPMorgan, Deloitte and Allianz run dedicated athlete-hiring streams, and the dual-career programmes we describe in why companies hire athletes have become a recruiting channel in their own right.

What does periodisation teach founders about pacing?

That effort should be planned in cycles with deliberate recovery, not held at maximum until collapse. Athletes train in macro-, meso- and micro-cycles with a target date; most start-ups run at full intensity indefinitely, which is why founder burnout surveys report such high rates of mental-health strain.

Periodisation is the oldest structured idea in coaching, formalised by Soviet sports scientists in the 1960s and now universal. A season is divided into preparation, competition and transition phases; within each, load is increased, then reduced to let adaptation happen, then increased again. The underlying insight is that improvement occurs during recovery, not during the work itself. Football clubs now manage minutes across a 60-match season with GPS and heart-rate data for the same reason.

Start-ups have nothing equivalent. The default operating model is permanent sprint, reinforced by a culture that rewards visible hours. The consequences are measurable. Surveys of founders by firms such as Startup Snapshot and the Sifted European founder survey consistently find a majority reporting significant stress, with roughly seven in ten saying the job has affected their mental health and a large minority reporting that they tell no one, including investors. The samples are self-selected, so treat the figures as directional, but they are consistent across years.

The transferable practice is to build cycles into the operating calendar on purpose. A product launch or fundraising round is a competition phase and should be preceded by a taper, in which meetings are cut and the team’s load is reduced, and followed by a transition phase with real time off. Founders from sport tend to do this instinctively; their boards often misread it as a lack of urgency.

How does the coach model differ from the manager model?

A coach is responsible for the athlete’s improvement but does not pay their salary, hold their contract or sit above them in a hierarchy. A manager does all three. The separation of improvement from evaluation is the single structural feature most start-ups lack, and it is why executive coaching has grown into a $5bn industry.

The 2025 ICF Global Coaching Study, the profession’s benchmark, counts 122,974 coach practitioners worldwide, up about 15% on the 2023 study, with estimated annual revenue of roughly $5.34bn, nearly double the $2.85bn reported two years earlier. Executive and leadership coaching, the segment closest to sport, is the largest by revenue, and technology founders are among the heaviest buyers because venture investors increasingly fund a coach as a condition of a Series A.

The intellectual lineage is explicit. Bill Campbell, the subject of Trillion Dollar Coach, was a Columbia University football coach before he advised Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt and the founders of a generation of Silicon Valley companies; his method, as described by Schmidt and his co-authors, was borrowed from the sideline: watch the team work, give specific feedback in private, insist on the team over the individual, and never take a formal management role. Anita Elberse’s 2013 Harvard Business School case on Sir Alex Ferguson is taught for the same reason.

What founders should take from this is structural rather than inspirational. A coach works because they have no stake in the evaluation; the athlete can admit weakness without risking selection. A founder’s board, investors and co-founders all have stakes. The practical lesson is to put someone in the improvement role who has no vote on the founder’s future, whether a paid executive coach, a peer group such as YPO or an experienced operator with no equity.

Does the marginal-gains method work outside cycling?

Yes, with a condition that is usually left out of the retelling: it works once the fundamentals are already strong. British Cycling’s 1% improvements across dozens of variables produced eight Olympic gold medals at each of the 2008 and 2012 Games, but only because the riders, funding and facilities were already world-class.

The method is associated with Dave Brailsford, performance director of British Cycling from 2003 and later principal of Team Sky, which won the Tour de France in 2012 with Bradley Wiggins and six more times with Chris Froome and Geraint Thomas by 2019. The team searched for small improvements in everything that touched a rider, from pillow choice to the colour of the truck floor, and the phrase has since been applied to hospital hygiene, airline turnarounds and e-commerce funnels.

The condition is lottery-funded elite sport. British Cycling’s results coincided with a step change in public funding after 1997, when National Lottery money allowed full-time athletes and a purpose-built velodrome in Manchester. Marginal gains added percentage points to a programme that already had the fundamentals. Applied to a start-up that has not yet found product-market fit, the method is a distraction: optimising a checkout page by 1% when the product is wrong wastes the one resource a start-up cannot buy back, which is time.

Where the method does transfer is to companies past the fit stage, where unit economics are set and the task is execution. Here the sporting discipline of measuring everything, running controlled changes one at a time, and keeping a record of which changes worked is identical to good growth practice. The clubs that have applied it most rigorously to recruitment, Brentford and Brighton in the Premier League and Liverpool under its research department, have produced some of the best returns in the transfer market precisely because they treated player trading as an optimisation problem rather than a matter of taste.

What do coaches know about teams that founders usually miss?

That roles must be explicit, that the best eleven individuals rarely make the best team, and that substitution is a normal event rather than a failure. Sporting teams are rebuilt every season on purpose; start-ups tend to keep their founding line-up until the market forces a change.

Role clarity is the first difference. Every player on a football pitch knows their position, their defensive responsibilities, the set-piece routine and the trigger for pressing. The team-effectiveness research that Google published from its own internal study, and the wider literature it drew on, found that clarity of roles and goals was one of the strongest predictors of team performance, after psychological safety. Start-ups leave roles implicit on the theory that everyone does everything, which works until roughly 15 people.

The second is selection for complementarity. Ferguson’s rebuilding of Manchester United four times across 26 years, as Elberse documented, was about replacing players before they declined rather than after, and about balancing ages so that the team never aged together. Leicester City’s Premier League title in 2016, with a squad assembled for roughly £57m, and Brentford’s promotion in 2021 on a wage bill a fraction of its rivals’ were both recruitment stories: the clubs bought under-priced attributes that fit a system rather than the best available names. Founders usually do the opposite, hiring the most impressive CV in each function.

The third is the normality of substitution. A coach who replaces a striker at 60 minutes is not admitting a mistake; the change was planned. Start-ups treat the replacement of a co-founder or an early executive as a crisis, delay it, and pay for the delay. Sport institutionalises the decision; business personalises it.

What can founders learn from athletes about failure?

Athletes fail in public, often, with a scoreboard, and are trained to treat the result as information rather than identity. The transferable element is the structure around failure, not the temperament: scheduled review, a coach to interpret it, and a next event already in the calendar.

The psychology literature on athletes is large, and much of it is weak, but a few findings are robust. Elite athletes score higher on measures of resilience and on the ability to refocus after an error; they also report using specific routines, such as pre-performance rituals and fixed review windows, that bound the time spent on a result. Tennis players lose nearly half of all points in close matches and still win titles; a striker who scores one chance in four is elite. The sport trains the person to separate the single outcome from the process, because the next outcome arrives within seconds.

Start-ups fail less often but more terminally. CB Insights’ long-running analysis of post-mortems finds that the most common reasons cited are running out of cash and the absence of market need, each named by roughly a third of failed founders. Both are accumulations of unreviewed small failures, and the athlete’s habit of reviewing every event is the antidote founders most often drop when the runway is short.

The caution is that temperament does not transfer by reading about it. Athletes develop their relationship with failure through thousands of repetitions in a structured environment with a coach. What can be copied is the structure: fixed review slots, a reviewer who is not an evaluator, and a calendar that always contains the next event. Türkiye’s football culture offers a cautionary mirror here: Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe have historically changed head coaches at a rate that makes any review cycle impossible, and their European results over the same period reflect it, while clubs that have given coaches continuity have tended to build value.

What should founders not copy from sport?

Three things: the single-season horizon, the cult of the head coach, and the assumption that there is a fixed opponent. Companies do not have a league table, a transfer window or a final whistle, and management ideas built around those features travel badly.

The season is the biggest trap. Sport is organised around annual, zero-sum competition with a defined end; a club can be relegated but it cannot run out of money in the sense a start-up can, because the league, the broadcast contract and the fan base continue regardless. Companies that import the season model set annual targets as if they were trophies and restart from zero; the better analogy is a multi-year Olympic cycle.

The second is the head coach as hero. Sports media personalises success: Guardiola’s City, Klopp’s Liverpool, Ferguson’s United. The reality, which the clubs themselves understand, is a system of sporting directors, analysts, physiotherapists and recruitment staff in which the head coach is one, highly visible, component. The clubs that have been most consistently profitable, as our analysis of club valuations and multi-club ownership shows, are the ones whose model survives a change of coach.

The third is the opponent. Sport has a fixed adversary whose defeat is the goal; markets have customers whose problem is the goal, and competitors who are often not the ones the founder is watching. The competitive-intensity mindset that serves athletes can push founders into building against rivals rather than for users, which is how companies win feature wars and lose markets. Sport teaches a great deal about how to prepare and relatively little about what to prepare for.

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