EDITORIAL NOTE
This article was first published in The Human Capital Chronicles, the LinkedIn newsletter by Francesco De Biase,
Co-Founder & CEO of Xerendipity Corporation Ltd. Subscribe at LinkedIn Newsletter.
THE REAL COST OF THE WRONG C-SUITE IN FOOTBALL
The cost is not only tactical. It is cultural, financial, and cumulative.
The wrong signing is expensive. The wrong leadership architecture is catastrophic.
Football often speaks about executives as though they are administrators of outcomes already decided elsewhere. That is a mistake.
The C-Suite defines the conditions under which every other decision is made. It shapes what is rewarded, what is tolerated, how pressure is absorbed, how truth travels, and whether the organisation builds continuity or merely survives in bursts of activity.
At Juventus, the leadership structure is explicit in its corporate architecture: Chief Executive Officer, Chief People, Culture and ESG Officer, Technical Director, Sporting Director, Director of Football Strategy, and other senior functions.
That is not merely a formal chart. It is a reminder that football clubs are no longer run by football alone. They are managed systems, and managed systems rise or fall according to the quality of leadership alignment.
Milan has made similar structural choices at senior level, including the appointment of a Sporting Director reporting into the CEO chain. Yet even when roles are clearly named, the question remains the same: are these functions aligned around a coherent Human Capital model, or are they simply occupying titles while the organisation continues to drift?
This is the real cost of the wrong C-Suite.
It is not just one bad season. It is the repetition of incoherent hiring, unstable authority, poor succession logic, incompatible expectations, and fragmented accountability.
Over time, those failures erode trust internally, weaken talent retention, and narrow the margin for excellence.
In football, those effects are often disguised as tactical problems. But tactical instability is frequently the downstream result of leadership instability.
When executives do not define a clear operating culture, coaches inherit ambiguity.
When coaches inherit ambiguity, players experience inconsistency.
When players experience inconsistency, performance becomes episodic rather than durable.
A strong C-Suite does more than appoint people. It creates an architecture of clarity.
It defines decision rights, sets standards of behaviour, establishes how success is measured, and ensures that the organisation is not forcing individuals to succeed in spite of the system.
Where this is missing, every appointment becomes more fragile than it should be.
The club may still attract good names. It may still produce moments of quality.
But the organisation itself does not become stronger. It becomes more expensive.
This is where DIOGENE Recruiting Intelligence becomes relevant beyond its original operating domain.
Its logic is built on a simple truth: a person cannot be judged in abstraction from the environment they are entering.
A C-Suite candidate, like any high-value professional, must be assessed not only for competence, but for contextual fit, judgement, cultural intelligence, and the ability to create value under the pressure that already exists.
That is what the traditional hiring conversation misses.
It asks who looks qualified.
DIOGENE asks who can function well inside this exact system — with these power dynamics, these pressures, and these standards.
The cost of the wrong C-Suite is rarely visible on the day of appointment.
It emerges later, in the shape of misalignment, internal fatigue, repeated corrections, and a growing distance between the club's ambitions and its actual operating reality.
That is why the deepest reform is not tactical. It is architectural.
And architecture begins at the top.
T A G S
C-Suite | Human Capital Governance | Recruiting Intelligence Authority | DIOGENE Recruiting | Leadership Architecture | Organisational Design | Juventus | AC Milan
#CSuite #Leadership #HumanCapital #FootballGovernance #OrganisationalDesign #DIOGENE #Xerendipity
©Xerendipity Corporation Ltd.
©Xerendipity Corporation Ltd.