In July this year, we have enjoyed some great football at the just-ended football world cup finals co-hosted by Canada and Mexico.
One thing I like about following the game of football is that in addition to enjoying watching and following the game, one can draw out a lot of good success lessons. Here we will share with you three of the biggest lessons we can draw from the 2026 Football World Cup.
Prepare like for war: The World Cup showed clearly that teams that prepared thoroughly with a great strategy won even games they were not expected to win. We saw underdogs winning against big teams. We saw big teams that were enjoying their comfort zones lose. A good case in point was the Spanish team. Many thought France was the favourite team to win the World Cup, but a big surprise was pulled by Spain who thoroughly defeated France in the semi-finals. In that game, it was clear that Spain was so prepared.
Even in the very final match against Argentina, many thought Argentina, especially on the account of the might of Messi who is arguably one of the best two footballers of his generation, would easily sail through against Spain.
But Messi and Argentina failed miserably. All key statistics were in favour of Spain. At one time, Spain had more than 20 shots on goal and more than 10 shots on target while Argentina had zero shots on target and zero shots on the goal. Such a contrast against a big team such as Argentina cannot come about by accident or sheer luck. It is a result of a robust and painful preparation that must have run months if not years.
This reminds me of my encounter with one person who was in the Oxford Board Race team. The boat race is a huge rowing competition between Oxford and Cambridge that is held around Easter of every year since almost 200 years ago.
This was in 2004 and we were having lunch together and he was narrating how they were preparing to beat Cambridge. They prepared like war. They had to do extremely hard and long exercises every morning at 5 am before they could practise the rowing. Each position had two best people competing for one spot on the final day.
During holidays, they even flew out to very cold countries such as Norway to expose themselves to training in punishing cold weather. They would exercise until they are really exhausted and start all over again to be extremely fit for the final match against Cambridge.
When I watched how Spain outclassed Argentina in every department and statistic of the game, I imagined that they trained and prepared like did or does the Oxford and perhaps the Cambridge Boat Race team(s).
Final moments of a competition are critical: We all saw some great African teams winning until the final 15 or 20 minutes of the crucial games when they would lose even after leading by such a comfortable score margin like two goals to zero.
I have seen this happen in politics too when leading member of Parliament or other category candidates lose it in the last five to 15 days of the campaign. I have learnt in politics that one has to spend up to 25 percent of their efforts and resources in the last 10 percent of the competition, something like that. Most African teams failed to do this and lost in the final moments.
If team can’t win focus on individual brilliance: We saw some brilliant players knocked out of the competition before they could reach the final match, but by the time they left the tournament, they had left a great personal record of individual brilliance. Case in point is the Cape Verde’s famous goalkeeper Vozinhar, real name Josimar José Évora Dias. The 40-year-old veteran made global headlines during the 2026 Fifa World Cup .
Another case is that of the Captain of France, Mbape. Kylian Mbappé used this year’s world cup tournament to push his personal statistics further and now holds the men’s all-time Fifa World Cup scoring record with 22 career goals across three tournaments (2018, 2022 and 2026).
