For more than a decade, Twenty First Group has been part of the fabric of global football, working shoulder-to-shoulder with club owners and leaders of every kind, across every major market. We’ve advised the ambitious challenger fighting for promotion as well as the established powerhouse competing for Europe’s biggest prizes.

Our story began humbly, in a basement in Shoreditch in London’s East End. Back then, one question drove us: if we were the 21st Club in the Premier League, how would we run it? Back then, data-led sporting intelligence was still new territory, but it gave our clients a crucial edge on the pitch. As the investment landscape in European football exploded, our work naturally evolved. More and more ownership groups turned to us for help understanding where opportunity truly lay, which markets offered the right conditions, which clubs had the potential to grow in value. 

In recent years, one truth has become unmistakably clear. The clubs that sustain success aren’t just the ones with a competitive edge on the pitch or sophisticated financial modelling. The clubs that deliver success year in and year out are the ones that operate brilliantly. They build systems that embed and, crucially, repeat good decision-making. The alignment between sporting, financial and operational intelligence is hard-wired into the club. 

At TFG, we call this Organisational Intelligence – the fusion of sporting, financial, and operational intelligence that underpins lasting success. But before an owner even constructs and implements their plan, they must start with a ‘North Star’.

Why, what and when: the importance of vision in club ownership

Owning a football club is one of the most romantic and high-profile undertakings in sport. But behind the randomness, the emotion, the noise and the weekly drama, lies a simple truth: successful ownership requires clarity. Clarity about why you own a club. And clarity about what you are trying to achieve with it. And, of course, by when.

Too often, owners arrive with ambition but not direction. They know, of course, that they want to win. But winning is not a vision, it’s an outcome. The real differentiator is understanding and being clear about what your broader objectives are: Financial return? Community impact? Sporting legacy? Or, the often quoted ‘love of the game’?

Without a clear and realistic sense of what you are trying to achieve, owners risk setting expectations that are unlikely to be met, overcommitting financially and making reactive decisions under the influence of fans. As a result, short-term decisions become the norm, the budget is blown and, come the end of the season, you’re no further ahead. So, equally important is knowing how long you want to be in this for and having a realistic sense of when your ambitions can be achieved. Knowing your horizon helps set realistic goals, allocate resources wisely, and avoid the trap of chasing outcomes that don’t fit your vision.

The consequences of lacking a vision are compounded in football. Football is random and clubs are complex organisations with high stakes, variable (sometimes cliff-edge) revenues and intense public scrutiny. This in turn emphasises the need for clubs to embed Financial Intelligence into their strategy and operations. 

Before any strategy is built, there are three questions every owner should be able to answer clearly and consistently at board level:

1. What does success look like for this club in five years in football terms and financial terms? 
2. What are we explicitly willing not to do in pursuit of that success? 
3. What decisions should become easier once this vision is clear?

In practice, this is where many ownership strategies falter. Ambition is stated, but trade-offs are not. Our work with owners focuses on making those trade-offs explicit, modelling how different sporting approaches, wage strategies, and risk tolerances impact financial sustainability and competitive outcomes over time.

Financial Intelligence: The Real Price of Ownership

When owners acquire a club, they fixate on the purchase price because it’s tangible, final, and knowable. However, the arithmetic that undoes even sophisticated owners is the working capital required to stay competitive. In football, losing money is “a feature, not a bug.” In League One, mid-table wages and operations lead to annual losses exceeding £4m; in the Championship, wages-to-turnover ratios routinely surpass 100%, with annual losses exceeding £10m. The strategic lesson is that the cost of ownership is not the price you pay to enter, but the price you pay to stay.

Boardrooms feel pressure to spend more, but the league-wide correlation between spend and points is often overstated and misunderstood. Within peer groups, this lever stops working; an extra £10m in wages often buys nothing except parity. Meanwhile, the best-run clubs extract 15 points more than their budget suggests, this is how Brentford can finish 10th with the 17th-ranked budget, spending 40% less than rivals like West Ham.

Understanding that overachievement is possible is critical for ownership sanity. Delivering this begins with having a sporting plan that centres on the development of a competitive edge.

Sporting Intelligence: A Plan That Cuts Through Noise

In the volatile environment of professional football, the greatest risk to a club is not a loss of form, but a lack of a coherent framework. Many clubs operate in a vacuum, making critical decisions, from on pitch factors like managerial appointments and contract renewals to off pitch expenditure such as academy investments, based on sacred but misleading indicators like the league table. To build a sustainable competitive advantage, clubs must replace guesswork with an evidence-based plan that distinguishes between statistical noise and genuine performance.

Consider for example how the evidence doesn’t support the types of ‘truths’ often uttered in boardrooms and dressing rooms as a means to justify decisions:

• “The league table never lies”: But the better-performing team fails to win 36% of matches, meaning the league table is almost always lying about the relative performance of teams
• “Buying young ensures players have resale value”: But 55% of players signed between the ages of 19 and 23 never sell for a higher price 
• “Playing the academy prospects is a risk”: But there is no correlation between performance and the number of additional opportunities given to young players

Clubs that can therefore cut through this and build a strategy that seeks to differentiate themselves can exploit the many inefficiencies that hold back their competitors. Using data to construct this strategy helps build decision-making frameworks that everyone in the club can trust – and increases the chance of it being operationalised.

Operational Intelligence: Systems over Personalities

Transformational decisions rarely transform anything because success is built on strategic glue rather than singular bets. Even the finest players add only 3 to 5 points to a total haul, and only 2% of coaches meaningfully improve a team’s underlying win probability. Real sustained success, as seen at Athletic Club or Brighton, requires a ten-year horizon, yet many clubs maintain three-year accountability while erecting tents rather than cathedrals.

Ownership must move away from the black book model. A sporting director’s primary responsibility is to design a repeatable system, not just execute transactions. If institutional knowledge lives only in the head of a director, the club has a dependency, not a strategy. This applies to data as well: Moneyball was a cultural revolution of organisational alignment, not just spreadsheets. Hiring an analyst is not a data strategy; without a focus on proprietary IP and Process, analysts become a help desk answering ad hoc questions rather than creating advantage.

Organisational Intelligence: Alignment Drives Value

Our conviction in these ideas comes from our own evolution. We began by helping clubs use data to make better sporting decisions – sharper recruitment, smarter tactics, stronger performance. As football investment accelerated, we expanded into financial intelligence, helping owners understand value, risk, and opportunity. And in recent years, we’ve seen that the clubs who truly separate themselves are those that combine these strengths with operational intelligence – clear systems, alignment, and decision-making discipline that turn strategy into consistent success.

This belief, that Organisational Intelligence is what separates the best from the rest, sits at the heart of how we now work with clubs, and is the competitive edge for the clubs that do not merely survive, but endure

To find out more about the Twenty First Group publication ROIFC: How to stay sane, win matches and grow value owning and operating a football club, please get in touch here