New book: Why Intelligent People Keep Making Stupid Decisions in Football
ByJon Morten Melhus
The Eight Deadly Sins On and Off the Pitch — and How to Avoid Them!
Join this entertaining, research-driven journey through the world of football, combining compelling stories, humour, psychology and practical tools. Authors Jon Morten Melhus and Morten Eriksen-Deinoff reveal the eight essential strategies for long-term success that football experts, supporters and even the world’s biggest clubs surprisingly often overlook.
Football is more than a game. It is a mirror held up to society. The same fears, biases, power struggles and leadership failures that shape businesses and boardrooms are played out in football — only faster, louder and under far brighter lights.
Filled with passion, ambition and extraordinary talent, the game should be a model of excellence. Yet clubs around the world continue to fall into the same traps. Coaches are hailed as geniuses in May and sacked by November. Boards panic. Short-term results override long-term thinking.
The book reveals the behavioural and cultural mechanisms that cause football clubs to sabotage themselves — and, more importantly, how to stop it — while providing a practical, evidence-based roadmap for building better-led clubs, stronger cultures and more successful teams.
Whether you are a chairman, CEO, sporting director, coach, player, supporter — or simply fascinated by leadership and human behaviour — this book will fundamentally change the way you look at football.
Not every lesson from football can be transferred directly to other organisations. But football is leadership under a microscope: nowhere else is it tested so publicly, so intensely and so often. Therefore, leaders in any industry will recognise the patterns — and find insights they are unlikely to encounter in traditional leadership books.
How to Avoid the Eight Deadly Sins of Football Leadership!
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Join us on a humorous, evidence-based journey to solve the problems caused by eight destructive habits in football — and discover practical ways to make wiser decisions, build stronger teams and win more matches:
Sin #1: Getting Caught in the Emotional Trap Sin #2: The Firing Frenzy Sin #3: Boardroom Blunders Sin #4: Recruitment Roulette Sin #5: The Joy of Scolding and Shouting Sin #6: Worshipping the Alpha Coach Sin #7: Hiring Gorillas Without Knowing Why Sin #8: The Club Culture Ignorance Disaster Chapter 9: The AMIGO Method Builds a Winning Culture Chapter 10: How to become a Great Leader and Coach
You may not agree that all eight are problems. But each chapter explores why they so often hold clubs back — and how to avoid or overcome them.
Not every lesson from football can be transferred directly to other organisations. But football is leadership under a microscope: nowhere else is it tested so publicly, so intensely and so often. Therefore, leaders in any industry will recognise the patterns — and find insights they are unlikely to encounter in traditional leadership books.
Combining compelling football stories, humour, psychology and practical tools, this entertaining yet professionally grounded book will fundamentally change the way you look at football.
If football is a business, why isn’t it run like one?
This is not a book about tactics. You won’t find formations, transfer analysis or match-day strategy here. Instead, this book explains why intelligent, well-resourced football clubs keep making the same irrational decisions — and introduces original leadership frameworks, several of them presented in a football book for the first time, to help clubs break the pattern.
Drawing on eleven years of research, behavioural science and real-life case studies from clubs around the world, MBAs Jon Morten Melhus and Morten Eriksen-Deinoff show that football’s biggest failures do not begin on the pitch. They begin in the boardroom.
Filled with passion, ambition, extraordinary talent and finances sometimes resembling those of a small country, the game should be a model of excellence. But when the authors compared football clubs with high-performing organisations outside sport, they found that football repeatedly ignores many of the leadership principles that create sustainable success everywhere else.
They discovered why — and how clubs can avoid:
Hiring the wrong coaches — and firing them just months later.
Rewarding a coaching style that most successful organisations abandoned years ago.
Inside, you’ll find four frameworks unique to this book:
The Gang of Four — a governance model that keeps a club’s key decision-makers aligned, so a run of bad results doesn’t trigger a panicked sacking.
Coach A vs Coach B — a practical way to identify, before you hire, which coaches are equipped to build high-performing teams over the long term rather than deliver a quick bounce.
The Gorilla Coach — drawing on Geert Hofstede’s research into national culture, it explains why authoritarian coaches are hired more readily in high-masculinity, high-power-distance countries — and why that instinct usually backfires.
The AMIGO Method — a structured approach to building the kind of positive, inclusive culture where employees and players actually perform.
You’ll also discover:
Why replacing coaches rarely solves a club’s real problems — and what successful clubs do differently.
Why supporters often push clubs towards decisions that undermine the very success they are trying to create.
Why Guardiola, Klopp, Wenger and Ancelotti have built enduring success — while many celebrated authoritarian coaches struggle to achieve the same in today’s football.
How the One Second Rule helps explain why teams require years — not months — to reach their full potential.
Why football’s biggest problems are rarely about football — and how understanding human behaviour changes everything.
A practical blueprint for developing Coach Bs — using modern, transformational approaches to build trust, unlock the potential of both Gen Z and more experienced players, and sustain high performance over the long term.
Combining compelling football stories, humour, psychology and practical leadership tools, this book provides an evidence-based roadmap for building better-led clubs, stronger cultures and more successful teams. Whether you are a chairman, CEO, sporting director, coach, player, supporter — or simply fascinated by what makes teams and organisations succeed — this book will fundamentally change the way you look at football.
And while rooted in football, its lessons extend far beyond sport. Football is simply the world’s most visible laboratory for leading under pressure. The same emotions, cognitive biases, power struggles and poor decision-making that shape football clubs also shape businesses, boardrooms and politics — only in football they unfold faster, louder and under the brightest lights.
Psykologisk trygghet betyr å føle seg trygg til å ta mellommenneskelige risikoer, å snakke ut, å være åpent uenig, å fremme bekymringer uten frykt for negative konsekvenser eller måtte pynte på dårlige nyheter.
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