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Gyokeres—a Game Changer? —Football is a continuous-time sport. That means it is not defined by one season, one year, one result or even one era. Relevance is generated over long periods of time and must be sustained, even if there are periods of rise and fall. For an example, Real Madrid have been one of the most dominant teams of the past 5 decades—but they don’t win every season. Or you can look at the stock of a company like Apple or Amazon over the last 10 years. It doesn’t rise every single day, but they are still a success story over a long period. Everything is defined by a good process. If you have good results by a bad process, it won’t sustainably repeat itself. This is what people call a fluke. Examples are Manchester United winning an Europa League or an FA Cup during some of the worst period of the club’s modern history. In fact, having good result from a bad process can be very bad in many ways. The first way is that it justifies keeping a bad process going, which further worsens the conditions of an organization. All processes are sustained by maximal realization. That is, a good process must constantly seek perfection to remain good. And a bad process must continue towards complete entropy or disarray to remain bad. The capacity for an entity to recognize the kind of process it has and respond accordingly in a short-frame is effectively the gold dust for sustained competitiveness on a long-term basis. A good process can be referred to as the internal condition of an entity—what you have control of. But there are external conditions too that you don’t have control over. For instance, Arsenal did not have control over Roman Abramovich taking over Chelsea or Abu Dhabi taking over Manchester City, which raised the competitiveness of the league for them. If the external conditions of an entity changes negatively and the internal conditions do not change, the formerly good process also changes in nature: it becomes bad. In other words, in a fluid environment, a good process is one that can recognize both internal and external change and adapts over time. It is normal from time to time to get it wrong, however, the important thing is the entity must contain the capacity to correct course. This is where leadership comes in: leadership have the responsibility & capacity to change a bad process before substantial damage can be inflicted. Leadership is, effectively, in charge of processes. In the best-run organizations, operational leadership is often shared between at least two men. This is a natural emergent structure due to the constraints of human nature and behavior (less is more, decision-making speed, competitive behavior increasing with each addition). Life is full of examples. Napoleon and Louis Alexandre-Berthier. Augustus and Agrippa. Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger. Steve Jobs and Jony Ive. We have them in football, too. Jurgen Klopp and Michael Edwards. Pep Guardiola and Txiki Bergiristain. Arsene Wenger and David Dein. Alex Ferguson and David Gill. The reason this model works is simple: two minds work as reinforcements for the other, with enough diversity such that bad ideas that escape the high-integrity filter of one mind does not escape the other. One other vital function of a two-man leadership system is that either side has an influence in appointing replacements for the other. This is especially true in football, as you can see with Jurgen Klopp appointing Jorg Schmadtke and Michael Edwards influencing the appointment of Arne Slot (Slot was a Michael Edward guest at Anfield in 2017). At Arsenal, we can reasonably expect that Andrea Berta would be influential in appointing a replacement for Mikel Arteta, just like Arteta was influential in Berta’s hire. How does this all tie into Gyokeres? (To be Continued Shortly)