The Vicious Cycle of
Emerging Football Markets

Emerging football markets don’t fail because of a lack of passion, talent, or participation. They fail because the ecosystem is unorganised. And once disorder becomes normal, the system quietly optimises for smallness.

This is not a story about effort. It’s a story about structure.

1. An Unorganised Football Ecosystem Is the Root Failure

In most emerging markets, football does not operate as an industry.

• Roles are blurred.
• Decision rights are unclear.
• Governance is informal.
• Revenue logic is weak.
• Accountability is personal, not structural.

Academies, clubs, leagues, schools, federations, private operators all exist, but they do not form a coordinated value chain. They function as disconnected units, each solving for survival instead of scale.

When an ecosystem is unorganised, it cannot compound. It can only repeat itself. This is the true starting point of the vicious cycle.

2. Structural Disorder Caps Top-Line Opportunity

An unorganised system cannot produce credible value propositions.

• Parents don’t see long-term pathways, so they hesitate to commit.
• Sponsors don’t see predictability, so budgets stay small.
• Partners don’t see scale, so collaboration remains transactional.
• Media doesn’t see continuity, so attention goes elsewhere.

Pricing stays low not because operators lack ambition, but because the market does not trust football enough to pay more. Revenue remains fragmented, seasonal, and fragile. This is the first economic consequence of disorder: the top line never stretches.

3. Limited Top-Line Opportunity Repels Skilled Business Talent

When revenue ceilings are low, capable professionals make rational decisions. Industries with:

• weak upside
• unclear career progression
• low prestige
• no performance-linked incentives

do not attract builders. They attract caretakers.

So football in emerging markets is run by people who love the game, but were never trained to build businesses. Ex-players managing budgets. Coaches handling HR. Owners acting as CFOs out of necessity. This is not a talent shortage. It’s a signalling problem. The ecosystem is telling skilled operators very clearly: your effort here will not compound.

4. Workforce Gaps Create Unsustainable and Misaligned Operations

Without skilled business leadership, operations don’t collapse. They drift.

• Budgets are reactive.
• Costs are shared emotionally, not analytically.
• No one can identify profitable versus loss-making units.
• Founder approval becomes the invisible control layer.

Processes exist, but depend on individuals. Data exists, but has no owner. Systems exist, but no governance. This is not chaos. It’s chronic fragility. The organisation survives, but only as long as key people hold it together.

5. Fragile Operations Restrict Football Growth and Player Development

When operations are fragile, investment becomes fear-driven.

• Coach education is postponed.
• Performance services stay part-time.
• Scouting becomes informal.
• Player care becomes reactive.

Anything that doesn’t show immediate cash return is labelled optional. Training still happens. Matches still get played. But development quietly degrades. You stop building players and start running sessions. This is where football quality erodes without anyone formally “failing”.

6. Football Gets Reclassified as a Hobby

Once development quality dips, the market responds quickly.

• Parents lose patience.
• Players hedge their futures.
• Sponsors disengage emotionally.
• Communities lower expectations.

Football shifts categories. Not a pathway. Not a profession. Just a pastime.

And when football is treated as a hobby, pricing power disappears. Churn rises. Commitment shortens. Margins compress.

7. Low Margins Lock the Ecosystem Into Permanent Disorder

Low margins remove all strategic oxygen.

• You can’t hire better people.
• You can’t redesign structure.
• You can’t invest in governance.
• You can’t absorb mistakes.

So the ecosystem stays unorganised. And the cycle closes exactly where it started. This is not a downward spiral. It’s a closed loop designed to keep football small.

8. Government Rationally Deprioritises Football as a Strategic Asset

At this point, government often gets blamed. Incorrectly.

Governments in emerging markets are triage-driven. They are managing employment, healthcare, education, infrastructure, inflation, and security. Against that reality, football arrives fragmented, informal, and unable to articulate measurable returns.

From a policymaker’s perspective, the signals are clear:

• no unified industry voice
• no standardisation
• no reliable employment engine
• no credible economic or social ROI

So football is classified appropriately: discretionary, not strategic. This is not neglect. It’s rational governance. Governments don’t organise industries. They amplify organised ones. Until football can demonstrate structure, scale, and outcomes, it will never be treated as a national asset. And waiting for government intervention before fixing the ecosystem is backwards.

How Presurge Breaks the Cycle

You don’t fix a broken football ecosystem by adding effort on top of chaos. You fix it by identifying where the organisation is stuck, what is actually hurting it, and which constraints matter most right now. That’s where Presurge starts.

Step 1: We Locate Where the Club Is Trapped Inside the Loop

Every academy or club is stuck at a different point in the same cycle. Some are losing money without knowing where. Some are overworking staff to compensate for missing structure. Some believe they have systems, but only have activity. Some are investing in football while the business underneath is quietly failing.

Presurge first creates operational visibility. We map how decisions flow, where value leaks, and which constraints are self-inflicted versus market-driven. This is not benchmarking against ideal clubs. It’s diagnosing reality. Only once the pain is made explicit do interventions make sense.

Step 2: We Attack the Highest-Impact Constraints, Not Everything at Once

Most football organisations try to fix ten things and fix none. Presurge deliberately intervenes at Points 3, 4, and 5 of the cycle, because that is where leverage exists.

At Point 3, we make it possible to attract and retain business competence by introducing structure before scale. Clear ownership, accountability, and economic logic turn football organisations into places where serious operators can actually function.

At Point 4, we replace personality-driven operations with system-driven ones. Decisions stop bottlenecking at founders. Budgets stop being guesses. Data stops being decorative. The organisation becomes resilient, not dependent.

At Point 5, we reconnect football decisions to operational reality. Development stops competing blindly with cash anxiety. Investments are staged, intentional, and visible. Football growth becomes planned instead of postponed.

Step 3: We Use Platform Thinking Borrowed From Other Industries

Presurge did not copy football software. That was the mistake the industry already made. We studied how other industries escaped chaos: logistics, healthcare, education, financial services. Not by adding tools, but by redesigning how information, accountability, and decisions move through the system.

Our platform is not there to digitise confusion. It is there to force clarity.

• It exposes misalignment.
• It makes trade-offs unavoidable.
• It removes false control.

This is what allows us to do the “unimaginable” in football: make structure precede growth, not follow it.

What Changes Downstream

Once Points 3, 4, and 5 stabilise, Point 6 starts to shift. Football stops feeling like a hobby. Parents see intent. Players see pathways. Sponsors see seriousness. Margins don’t spike overnight, but they stop collapsing. And once that happens, the loop weakens.

The Real Break in the Cycle

Presurge doesn’t try to fix the entire ecosystem at once. That’s fantasy. We break the loop from the inside, club by club, by turning fragile organisations into coherent systems. When enough clubs behave like businesses, the ecosystem finally has something governments, investors, and partners can take seriously. That’s how the cycle breaks.