The beautiful game of football is back on the grandest stage of all – the FIFA World Cup! Football is not just a sport, but life for millions around the world.

Quite often, amidst all the obvious enjoyment, there are some incredibly deep insights which the beautiful game can teach you – only if you look close enough. And these lessons hold good, especially, for budding entrepreneurs taking up a BBA or MBA course to understand the dynamics of management and entrepreneurship.

Source: cnet

Want to know what they are? Let’s get started:

Value of sacrifice

Football, like entrepreneurship requires a great deal of sacrifice. You often see the glamorous lives of your favourite football players, which is just the tip of the iceberg. But how often have you seen the sacrifices they had to make to reach the position?

Footballers have to train practice, exercise, and watch their diet to stay in good shape while honing their skills. Footballers also have to stay away from their family and friends for prolonged periods with frequent travelling for international/national games or moving to another club for better prospects.

Lesson to learn: Entrepreneurship is not a 9 to 5 office job. It requires several sacrifices as well. Entrepreneurs need to work for long hours, forgo sleep, let go of income stability, disrupt their work/life balance, step out of your comfort zone and take risks to achieve their goal.

Source: quora

There is no shortcut to success

There is no shortcut to success – be it football, entrepreneurship or life. Footballers need to give their best on the field for which they have to perform off the field as well as with regular practice sessions, diet, exercise and so on.

Football stars like Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Paul Pogba, and Eden Hazard are the first to reach the ground for practice and practice set-piece drills, offensive and defensive gameplay, tactical drills and so on religiously. This shows that even the best need to practice to stay on the top.

Lesson to learn: Budding entrepreneurs constantly need to practice and update their skills as well as knowledge by learning and acquiring new skills. An entrepreneur needs to be an all-rounder. If you’re pursuing a distance learning course in Mumbai related to management, do try to pick up as many skills as you can. You can consider taking internships as well, which can help you understand the dynamics of the professional world better.

Source: soccer.com

Teamwork

Lionel Messi cannot win the World Cup on his own, neither can Ronaldo. They need their team’s support where each individual player fulfils their role dedicatedly. Did you know? The Barcelona team, managed by Pep Guardiola in the early part of this decade, were widely considered to be the greatest team of all time – mostly because of their legendary passing game known as ‘tiki-taka’, in which all the players knew each other’s game inside out!

Lesson to learn: Being an entrepreneur doesn’t mean you are on your own. Successful companies and brands might be the vision of a great entrepreneur, but they were built, grown, and flourished by a team.

Go ahead and make history!

In football, it is difficult to score a goal playing solo without passing the ball to your teammates. Similarly, success in entrepreneurship is also difficult without a good team with each member having defined roles and responsibilities.