Football and business only work when they’re aligned. In emerging markets, that alignment isn't just missing—it's structurally broken.
How structural flaws compound into failure
Football is treated as a "nice-to-have," limiting revenue potential.
Talent brain drain creates a skills gap in key roles.
Software creates data without fixing the underlying process.
Chronic fragility makes daily operations unsustainable.
Development budgets are eaten by operational inefficiency.
The cycle closes, reinforcing the market's low value.
When I wrote my thesis on building sustainable and scalable football academies in emerging markets, one thing became obvious: football and business only work when they’re aligned.
That alignment isn’t a luxury; it’s the foundation. If the business side is unstable, the football side never reaches its potential. Europe still has misalignments, but decades of football culture give it a cushion that hides a lot of structural flaws. Emerging markets don’t have that cushion. There, any real footballing progress starts with sustainability, grows through scalability, and only then produces long-term football development.
In the beginning, I focused on the usual levers: technical knowledge, coaching frameworks, sports science, psychology, international partnerships. All valuable, but none of them moved the needle. Not because they weren’t good ideas, but because academies simply couldn’t afford to act on them.
Thin margins force impossible choices: listen to the market, run the business, or invest in football. When survival is the priority, football investment dies first.
So I pivoted. I started working with a small academy of about 100 kids. Instead of pushing development add-ons, I focused on structure. No fancy reinforcements; just a stable operational base.
Within a year, they grew to 400+ kids. The coaches did the heavy lifting, but the structure made that growth possible at that speed. After seeing one end of the spectrum, I needed to test the other: a larger, more established academy.
That led to the Alignment and Sustainability Visibility Analysis. The results were harsh. A top-10 accredited academy in the country was losing seven figures annually without realising it. When I showed the owner the numbers, it changed their entire direction.
Almost 40% of their annual expenses were leaking. Not stolen, not mismanaged even—just invisible because the organisation was too chaotic to track anything properly. The owner understood the urgency instantly. The employees didn’t. Not because they were incompetent, but because they couldn’t grasp the scale of the problem in an environment that changed every week.
At this point something clicked. The volatility wasn’t unique to them. Every academy in emerging markets fights the same battle: limited football awareness, a developing association that changes rules and expectations at the last moment, and a talent pool where business professionals rarely choose football as a career.
These conditions aren’t conducive to building stable operations or attracting long-term thinkers. Owners burn out trying to fix a system that gives them very little clarity.
I spoke with investment bankers, lawyers, doctors, analysts, architects, designers—people from industries far more organised. That’s when the real insight landed. The core issue wasn’t sustainability or scalability. Those were symptoms.
The root problem was that the sector itself was completely unorganised. When no one has clarity about what is happening, decision quality collapses. And if you can’t see where you are, talking about where you want to go is pointless.
That also explained why advisors and apps can’t create meaningful change. You can’t advise without data, and you can’t collect meaningful data in an environment with no structure. People appreciated my ideas, but what they actually needed was help with everyday operations—the boring, unglamorous side of football nobody wants to talk about. That’s where everything breaks.
I could have gone to Europe and taken the easy route into established systems, but I grew up in a place where football was survival. I wasn’t interested in leaving the next generation of kids in environments that limit their potential before they even begin. If the system is the bottleneck, then fix the system.
So I took it on. A market where apps and tools existed, but none provided true clarity. A sector where problems weren’t technical or football-specific—they were structural.
That’s how Presurge was built. Not as a typical startup chasing trends, but as a system built from the top down with one goal: organise the most unorganised sector in football.
Most companies follow demand. I didn’t. I built the system first, even if the market wasn’t ready for it yet. It was a harder path, but it meant the foundation was unshakeable.
Today, Presurge gives academies a clear path for years to come because we’ve built a foundation strong enough to support long-term growth. Most never attempt to build that kind of base; we did.
And once those pieces are locked in, academies are finally able to invest in football development at a scale they’ve never experienced before. This is what emerging markets needed all along. Not another tactic. Not another technical shortcut. A structural solution to a structural problem.
Stop fixing symptoms. Let's start with your club's structure.
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