How one of India's leading grassroots football clubs discovered that systemic misalignment was quietly destroying their margins and jeopardising their future.
Visualising waste across Top-Line, OpEx, and CapEx
A leading grassroots football club in India had done everything right on paper. They'd built one of the most respected youth development environments in the country, assembled licensed coaches, invested in technology systems, and created structured fee plans. Leadership was working harder than ever.
When PRESURGE conducted a strategic audit of the club's operations, what emerged wasn't a story of broken systems or incompetent people. It was a story of a club where every department was working hard, but working in parallel rather than in sync. The vision at the top was solid, but as it cascaded downwards, it fragmented into competing priorities, unclear accountabilities, and devastating financial leakage.
The numbers told a sobering story. For context, the club's financial structure looked standard: of collected revenue, operating expenses (OpEx) consumed 91% (broken down into 70% rent and equipment, 20% salaries, and 1% software). What remained was a razor-thin 9% margin.
But the audit revealed severe leaks across this entire structure. It started at the top line: 25% of projected revenue was entirely uncollected, lost to administrative friction and lack of follow-up.
Within OpEx, the waste was staggering. Roughly 40% of the salaries paid were wasted—not because staff lacked competence, but because without clear role definitions, they weren't delivering proportional returns. Facilities were similarly mismanaged, with 15% of the rent and equipment OpEx lost due to underutilised centres and poor scheduling. Furthermore, 90% of their software investments sat idle, victims of poor onboarding.
"Overall, 25% of their OpEx was leaking, 20% of their CapEx was leaking, and when margins are as low as 9%, this is criminal."
Even when the club did manage to secure its 9% margin, the bleeding continued. 20% of that margin (CapEx) was reinvested wrongly into projects with no measurable commercial or developmental return. Meanwhile, the invisible opportunity cost compounded behind the scenes: 50% of leadership time was lost to daily firefighting rather than driving growth.
This wasn't six separate problems. It was one systemic dysfunction expressing itself in six different ways. Strategic vision existed, but it didn't cascade into operational reality. Coaches, administrative teams, and media staff each operated on their own interpretation of priorities. There were no shared KPIs, no common definition of success that cut across departments. Each unit optimised for its own metrics, often at the expense of the whole.
External pressures amplified the dysfunction. Tournament schedules, parent expectations, federation timelines, and infrastructure constraints all created urgency that overrode systematic coordination. When everything feels urgent, nothing gets aligned.
The audit identified five specific opportunities for creating what PRESURGE calls "connected strategies" across departments:
As one of the club's co-founders reflected: "We had a general idea of what was working and what wasn't. But this brought clarity and evidence to issues that had deeper, long-term consequences."
The specific percentages matter because they create urgency. When misalignment is vague, it gets deprioritised. When misalignment has a number attached, it demands a response. This club isn't unique. The pattern of working harder while results plateau, of investing in systems that never get adopted, of leadership getting pulled into execution—these are structural problems that emerge at scale.
The question isn't whether misalignment exists.
It's whether you can see it clearly enough to address it before compounding losses make recovery significantly harder.
Stop guessing where the leaks are. Schedule a strategic audit.
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