Why Athletes Run Up the Score and Companies Don’t

If Erling Haaland is on the pitch and sitting on a hat trick, he is never NOT going for a third goal, no matter how comfortable Norway’s lead or how secure their place in the next round. Cabo Verde just became the smallest nation ever to reach the World Cup knockout stage, and not one player in that squad is planning on yielding to Messi and Argentina in the round of 32 just because they’ve already exceeded every expectation anyone set for them. They want to win the match. England supporters would gladly accept zero additional goals from Harry Kane or Jude Bellingham if the supporting cast could guarantee the trophy was coming home to football’s birthplace.

Athletes and teams play to win. The bigger the margin, the better. True fans care about game outcomes, not the diversification of their teams’ player scoring distributions. Cinderella stories may be grateful for the positions they find themselves in, but that gratitude never stops them from aggressively wanting more.

As someone who grew up playing all sorts of team and individual sports, I find comparisons between them and the business world fascinating. So many of the concepts associated with teamwork and winning mentality on the field translate nicely to positive outcomes in the office. That said, I find areas where sports and business diverge just as fascinating.

Goals (not in the football sense)

In sports, a goal is a floor you’re thrilled to blow past. Messi has been considered (by rational people!) the greatest of all time for a while now. He hasn’t backed off because of it. Every next match is its own reason to play. No athlete treats a target as a ceiling. And the story a team is telling, the redemption arc, the dynasty, the Cinderella run, is contained to the season in front of them. Nobody on the pitch is managing this year’s performance to keep next year’s narrative tidy. They play the game in front of them as hard as they can and let next season be next season’s problem.

Players have personal goals, the scoring title (Golden Boot), best player (Golden Ball), but none of them come before the team’s goal. The structure makes the priority obvious, and when it slips, we notice, because the selfish player padding his own numbers at the team’s expense attracts negative attention. One could argue this is happening now with a mega star playing for a country attached to the western side of Spain.

In business, goals have more layers to them. I’m generalizing a bit, but outside of frontier growth companies defining new markets, a company’s value lives in a story of continuous, predictable, year-over-year growth. Every result you post becomes the baseline you’re measured against next time. Put up a monster Q4 and you’ve just made every future Q4 harder to clear, and you cannot afford to print a down year, because deceleration gets punished far more than a beat gets rewarded. So companies manage the comp. They pace their growth rates quarter over quarter to keep the year-over-year line climbing without ever setting a bar that next year can’t clear. The rational move the system rewards is to sandbag, to hold a little back this period and bank the surplus for a leaner one later. Why bend over backwards to close an inevitable deal in Q4 once your number is already hit, when that same deal could kickstart a notoriously slow Q1?

The whole industry has institutionalized the idea. Look no further than the Rule of 40 (although Rule of 50 increasingly seems to be the new Rule of 40), the goal every growth company chases. (Quick definition for the non-finance reader: a company clears the Rule of 40 when its revenue growth rate plus its profit margin add up to at least 40. Imagine you’re a breakeven business with 0 margin. Then you must grow revenue 40% year-over-year to hold the title.) It’s a useful heuristic. But by definition, you cannot hold the title without actively managing that growth rate. This is like Lamine Yamal dribbling past fewer defenders in this World Cup so that his 2030 performance is a guaranteed personal progression and success story. It’s beautiful when the growth happens organically, but the prize in the business world is so great that it incentivizes financial engineering.

Investors don’t just want a big number, they want a durable one, which means they reward a diversified revenue mix and a story about multiple paths to growth. Healthy on its face, but it quietly pressures planners to distribute the load evenly across products and segments for the sake of the narrative, so no single line carries too much of the story.

Planning Today

While this doesn’t apply to every established company and obviously not to hypergrowth startups, I would say most of the companies I hear from aren’t doing rigorous 0-based, bottoms-up budgeting, re-underwriting their entire approach each year. Instead, their processes more closely resemble Excel “models” with scalar multipliers applied to last year’s results, dialed to whatever figure feels in line with stakeholder and market expectations. The rigor is mostly costume. Strip it back and you find last cycle’s actuals times a growth factor, seasoned with some sales input and a healthy dose of vibes.

I believe this approach hurts businesses more than most realize.

Once those plans are set, the whole organization spends the year reverse-engineering its way back to them. This leads to two massive issues.

Chasing a diversified mix can cost you optionality. The plan called for diversified revenue. Picture the simplest version. For round numbers’ sake, say your number for the quarter is $100,000 across three products, so the plan dutifully asks each to carry 1/3 of the load. Now suppose product A is the one catching fire, right market, right moment, and with a little more resourcing it could put up $60,000, or carry the whole $100,000 on its own, while the other two ease off and fill in behind it. Hitting the number and feeding your hottest opportunity should be the easiest call in the world. The fans never cared which striker scored, and your P&L doesn’t care which product carries the quarter. But the narrative wanted an even, durable-looking spread, so the plan said 1/3, 1/3, 1/3, and now the org is defending three equal thirds instead of pressing its one real advantage. You bought a tidier story and sold your optionality to pay for it.

Capping the goal leaves upside on the table. When the target is deliberately held a notch below what’s possible, and then gently throttled the moment you beat it, all to protect next year’s comp, teams get trapped in a zone of mediocrity. The high-upside bet, the maturation of AI-assisted product development, the adjacent market, the feature with no comp in last year’s data, is exactly what a backward-looking multiple can’t justify, so it gets underfunded precisely because it’s new. You don’t just leave money on the table this year. You starve the thing most likely to compound, in service of a ceiling you set on purpose.

A pragmatic solution

I’m certainly not arguing to abandon targets and forecasts. A few weeks ago I wrote about how a team that stands for nothing will fall for anything, and forecasts are part of how you stand for something. There will always be forecasts. The fix isn’t ideological, it’s infrastructural. It’s about changing what the forecast gets built on.

Picture the alternative. Instead of a target derived from history and then defended for a year, you keep a plan that’s always ready, planning units wired directly to the goals they serve, to the obligations and forecasts they’re meant to satisfy, to R&D budgets, to known risks. A backlog that isn’t a static list but a continuously re-rankable model of what you could build and what each thing is worth. When the board asks what next year looks like, you don’t reach for last year’s spreadsheet and a multiplier. You reach for a live plan that already knows what’s funded, what isn’t, which goals have committed work behind them and which are naked, and what it would cost to chase the upside instead of the safe thing.

This doesn’t happen today in most companies because it’s really, really hard.

In this approach, the number stops being a decree that leadership hands down and everyone else negotiates against in private, through the work they quietly slow-walk. It becomes the output of a negotiation everyone can see with executives, board, and sales all pushing and countering against a plan that actually exists, with the tradeoffs visible. You still set an ambitious number, the kind a real goal demands. You just set it informed by what the org can actually build and where the real opportunity sits, instead of by a multiple on last year that everyone then games.

Looking further out, I wonder whether AI models will eventually supplant the guidance companies issue themselves. Why trust a number from a company incentivized to sandbag when an outside model can cut through the noise? AI won’t have visibility into internal operations, R&D, and the like, but it’s not unreasonable to think those can be predicted too, with some level of certainty. In that strange world, companies would have their hands forced toward building genuinely honest and optimized plans.

Play to blow it out

The great competitor doesn’t set a soft target and grind toward it. They set an audacious one, then train and establish a way of playing that makes the score take care of itself. They have freedom to press when the opening appears because they were never managing to a ceiling in the first place.

The goal is sacred. What’s broken is the machinery we use to manufacture that number, a multiple on the past, a sandbag for safety, and a year spent reverse-engineering reality to match.

Stop reverse-engineering the season. Build the team that can read the game in real time, set a number worth chasing, and let the scoreboard catch up.