The Manager Never Touches the Ball

You should know something about Mario. He’s over 65, and he referees soccer — high school games, advanced competition club teams, even a few adult games. That means he spends his weekends sprinting up and down a pitch keeping pace with extremely fit sixteen-year-olds. 

A few years ago, Peter and Mario and were hiking the pipeline trail outside Nathiagali, Pakistan — two hours of dust, switchbacks, and thin mountain air. Halfway down, we ran into a group of young men wearing international soccer jerseys. Mario lit up.

Within about ninety seconds of meeting these complete strangers on a trail in Pakistan, he was deep in conversation about the game. Within five minutes, they were insisting — insisting — on a group photograph with him. A total stranger, halfway down a mountain, and they treated him like a visiting dignitary.

That’s what a shared language does. Mario didn’t earn that trust over years. He walked into it, because he and those young men shared a framework — the game, its rules, its heartbreaks. The trust that normally takes years arrived in minutes.

Keep that in mind, because it’s half of what this article is about.

The best players in the world still have one

Right now, the best soccer players on the planet have competed in a World Cup being played in our own backyard — across Canada, the US, and Mexico. Every one of those squads is stacked with elite talent. Players who have spent their entire lives mastering this game.

And every single one of them plays under a manager who never touches the ball.

Think about how strange that is. These are the most skilled practitioners in the sport. What could a person standing on the sideline possibly add?

Perspective. That’s the whole answer, and it’s everything.

You cannot see the game from inside it

A player in the middle of a match sees the ball, the nearest opponents, maybe fifteen metres of grass. What they physically cannot see is the shape of the game — the fullback drifting out of position, the midfield gap slowly opening, the pattern in how the opposition attacks. The manager sees all of it, precisely because the manager isn’t playing.

This is why halftime changes matches. The adjustment that turns a game around almost never comes from the player on the pitch. It comes from the sideline, from the one person whose whole job is to watch.

Now look at your business.

The player-manager trap

If you own a small business, you are almost certainly trying to do both jobs at once. You’re on the pitch all day — serving customers, chasing invoices, fixing the thing that broke this morning. And somewhere in the back of your mind, you’re also supposed to be the manager: reading the shape of the whole business, spotting the slow leak, planning the next quarter.

Be honest about how that’s going. When you’re sprinting after every ball, the strategic view isn’t just hard to hold — it’s structurally unavailable to you. This isn’t a discipline problem or a character flaw. It’s geometry. You cannot see the field from inside the play. Nobody can. That’s not an insult; it’s the reason the best eleven players in the world still stand a manager on the touchline.

What a sideline looks like for a business

You may never hire a “manager” for your business, but you can build a sideline. It might be a business coach. A peer group of other owners. An advisor who meets you monthly and asks the questions you’ve been too busy to ask yourself. Even a structured monthly review — a standing hour where you deliberately climb into the stands and look at the whole pitch — is a version of it.

And here’s where Mario comes back in. The reason a coach or peer group works isn’t that they know things you don’t (though sometimes they do). It’s that a shared framework — a common language for talking about your numbers, your team, your plans — collapses the distance between strangers the way soccer collapsed it on that trail. The right advisor doesn’t need three years to understand your business. With a shared language, they’re useful in the first meeting.

Nobody lifts the trophy alone

Whoever wins this tournament, one thing is already certain: they won’t have done it without someone on the sideline who never kicked a ball.

You don’t get a coach because you’re not good enough. The best in the world are exactly the ones who refuse to play without one.

If you’d like someone on your sideline — someone who watches your whole game while you play it — that’s precisely what we do. Reach out and let’s talk.