When we went on tour - Football and Competitiveness

Ive just returned from a busy week delivering the Tutor2u BUSS2 revision conferences (along with many others) and I am looking forward to next week when we visit Manchester, Newcastle and Leeds. However, I thought I would quickly blog about an amazing discussion I had with the students at the Bristol conference.

The last session in the BUSS2 revision conference is all about competitiveness and we look at how we can judge whether a firm has improved its competitiveness as well as strategies to improve a firm’s competitiveness.

As an opener to the session, I asked the audience if we had any football fans in. Luckily (or unluckily for them!!!) we had some Bristol Rovers and Bristol City fans in. I then asked the students how we could judge the competitiveness of a football team. What would we measure?

One student stated that the obvious measure would be league position and then to make a judgement as to whether or not the competitiveness of a football team has improved we could look at previous seasons. This then prompted a great discussion on other ways we could measure competitiveness which reminded me of an article (which can be found here) where Kenny Dalglish said that Liverpool should not be judged on league position alone. Fantastic stuff.

We then looked at how football teams could improve their competitiveness. I mentioned the fact that since the God that is Martin O’ Neill has taken over at perhaps the greatest and most loved football team in the world; results have improved considerably without any change in players. This prompted a student to say that better managers could improve the competitiveness of a business. Some other excellent suggestions of ways to improve a football teams competitiveness is investing in better plays, a better ground (which would attract more fans and therefore more revenue) and better coaches and medical staff.

What I loved about this discussion is the way the students really bought into it and it allowed them to understand quite a challenging buss2 concept.

I can’t wait to hear what the Manchester crowd come up with!!