How Athletic Club reinvents Strategy Execution in European Football with the help of OKRs and Mooncamp
About Athletic Club
Athletic Club is a renowned Spanish professional football club, positioned as the third most successful club in La Liga, with an impressive record of 8 league titles, 24 cups, and 3 supercups. Esteemed in both Basque and Spanish football, Athletic Club has established itself as a key player in the sport's history.
Located in the vibrant city of Bilbao in the Basque Country of Spain, they are celebrated for their distinctive cantera policy of nurturing young Basque talent, contributing to their success in league and cup titles. The club operates from its iconic San Mamés Stadium, a testament to its rich history and cultural significance.
With a staff of dedicated professionals and a strong fan base, Athletic stands out as a club owned and operated by its members, differentiating itself from typical sports corporations.
Talking to Raúl Martínez, Chief Strategy Officer at Athletic Club
I’m Raúl Martínez, a senior Industrial Engineer with 20 years of experience, mainly as a business consultant, account manager, entrepreneur, freelancer, project manager. Now, I have the privilege of serving as the Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) at Athletic Club, a team that's very close to my heart. My role involves ensuring that our club continues to be a unique case in the world of football and taking our institution to the next level in this ultra-competitive environment of football. I am deeply passionate about change management and making things happen, bringing strategy to the playing field and achieving ambitious goals.
Challenge
Please explain how you came to introduce OKRs. What challenges did you face?
We are a football club with one hundred and twenty-five years always in the first division in La Liga, with 8 titles of the league and 24 titles of the cup. We only have players born or made in the Basque Country, a region with only 3 million people. I give you all this data to show you our challenge. To continue competing in the elite against the most powerful clubs in Europe, we have defined a very ambitious strategic plan, and we are using OKRs to implement it throughout the organization.
We are also still a club owned by supporters, not a sports limited company with investors. Our board is elected by the 45,000 owners of our club every 4 years. So every 4 years each new board brings its own ideas and every 4 years initiatives and priorities change.
Last season we defined our Strategic Plan for 2023-2026. As is often the case, we consumed thousands of hours describing our ambition, our strategic goals, and action plans. But once defined, then what? This is a very typical situation: you have a brilliantly designed PowerPoint, you send it to the whole organization, and even present it at a wonderful event. Then you follow up monthly or quarterly, spend lots of hours preparing reports, and after that, you realize you are accomplishing almost nothing that you planned because business as usual is consuming all your efforts.
To avoid this, we spent some time looking for methods to effectively execute our strategic plan. We realized that our action plan was structured in clear and qualitative Objectives, composed of quantitative metrics and, in addition, with goals per period and some tasks to accomplish with it.
Then we said "Wow!" this is OKR, we got it. We had it in front of our eyes. And at that point, we started looking for software to implement this throughout the organization.
Solution and implementation
How did you search for software solutions and why did you select Mooncamp?
When we need to perform market research for a tool, first we go to software comparison websites and select 3 to 5 candidates that best fit our requirements and with the best reviews. Our criteria in this case were:
- Functional requirements
- Ease of setup
- Ease of use
- Ease of administration
- Quality of the vendor in terms of support and management skills
- Roadmap of the software
Then we contact the vendors to complete an internal questionnaire and then, if it still fits, we request a free trial period; we need to test it on our own.
In this case, Mooncamp was the best option in the overall rating, particularly in the quality of support and the ease of use and administration.
How did the introduction of Mooncamp work?
As we already had our action plan structured in Objectives and Key Results, it was easy to adjust it in the Mooncamp structure of goals and cycles. We configured the structure of strategic actions and below that, our objectives and Key Results.
We configured a first group of 40 executives as responsible for the goals, and we trained them in the follow-up process. That was our first milestone: the use of Mooncamp to register the progress of each goal and check in the potential risks.
After that, our next purpose was to train people in the definition of good Objectives and Key Results.
Results
Which improvement did you experience by using Mooncamp?
Coherence and consistency: The same structure for the whole organization at every level of the hierarchy. Now every executive and manager speak in terms of Objectives and Key Results under a common structure. Recently we have hired a new director; he came with his ideas and strategic goals, and he really appreciated this methodology as a common language to translate these ideas into OKRs.
Transparency: Every employee can see all the goals and the progress. There are no excuses anymore to say nobody told me. Besides, now every executive and manager can see the level of ambition and progress of each goal in the rest of the areas.
Commitment: As everybody can see your goals and progress, it is like a social contract you do with the rest of the organization. Nobody wants to seem unambitious or show red lights to the rest, especially when the rest are in green or in yellow.
Communication: It is very visual, and we can aggregate at the level of detail we can communicate internally or externally. Now we manage a single source of truth; we do not have to share versions of Excel files. Everyone knows where the right information is.
OKR with Mooncamp has helped us to implement our new management model and relationship with our board. This also helps to have a more transparent, collaborative, and agile organization.
People have received OKRs with enthusiasm and our revenue has increased 36% from last year.
In light of these remarkable outcomes, we are developing our AC Football Advisory business unit. Our goal is to support other clubs across different leagues, providing expertise in Strategy Planning and OKR adoption, as well as in their talent generation models.
Conclusion
Athletic Club faces unique challenges, including strategic shifts every four years due to board changes and competing with Europe's top clubs while sourcing talent exclusively from the Basque region.
Implementing OKRs has been key to addressing these challenges. The club adopted Mooncamp as the overall best Strategy Execution software and for its extreme user-friendliness. It helped to streamline goal setting and tracking, improving coherence, transparency, and communication across the organization. The combination of OKRs and Mooncamp has enabled effective execution of their ambitious strategic plans, fostering a more collaborative and agile management model, significantly contributing to the club's success and even increased revenue.
