World: we celebrate the summit. For Basile Riboud, the lasting value – of a club as of a company – is built from the base: training, anchoring, long-term.
For a month, the whole world has its eyes fixed on the same summit: the World Cup, its stars, its trophy. We celebrate the moment there – the decisive goal, the coronation. We forget that each of these players was shaped ten years earlier, far from the spotlight, in a training center. And that the nations which lift the cup are almost always those which have invested, patiently, in the invisible: the base, the training, the young people. France, twice world champion, does not owe its titles to chance, but to a training system that the entire planet envies.
This is, in my eyes, the greatest management lesson that football gives – and it goes far beyond sport. In sport as in business, lasting value is never built from the top. I learned it first as a player trained in a training center, then as a investor ; I made it the principle of a project to which I devote a lot of energy today: rebuilding a football club, brick by brick.
When the metropolis of Tours saw its historic club disappear at the start of 2025, there were two ways to react. The first, spectacular: inject money, recruit, promise a rapid rise. The second, slower and less flattering: starting from the foundations. With the Touraine Football Unionwe chose the second. Not by lack of means or ambition, but by managerial conviction.
The base before the summit
I learned this lesson by closely following my father’s adventure with a professional club. It is commonly believed that the first team is the locomotive that drives everything else. I believe the opposite. A club is an iceberg: its visible part – the weekend’s results – only holds together thanks to the submerged mass that no one looks at, the football school, the educators, the young people, the local roots. This is where the soul of an organization is, and this is where long-term value is created. In business, we call this culture, training, human capital. Leaders who sacrifice quarterly performance always pay for it, sooner or later.
Unite rather than conquer
A territory is not a market to conquer: it is a community to unite. This is why, from the start, we entrusted the inhabitants with a decision that is usually reserved for the leaders: the choice of colors and logo of the club, submitted to the vote of the supporters. A detail, apparently. In reality, a management principle. Membership is not decreed; we create it by making people stakeholders. A branda club, a company never really belongs to those who run it — they belong to those who recognize themselves in it. Giving supporters real, even symbolic, power means transforming spectators into emotional owners. No communication campaign buys this link.
Long-term discipline
The hardest part remains: staying the course when everything pushes you to move quickly. In a reconstruction, the pressure of immediate results is permanent – finish first, go up straight away, reassure. However, if we move too quickly, the foundations will never be solid. This long-term discipline is undoubtedly the most valuable thing that high-level sport teaches managers. Lasting performance cannot be improvised: it is prepared, season after season, through work that is often invisible and thankless. L’entrepreneur who wants to build something lasting faces exactly the same trade-off – between the curve which flatters this quarter and the structure which will hold in ten years.
Territorial entrepreneurship
What we are trying in Touraine goes beyond football. It is a form of territorial entrepreneurship: creating value where we are, with and for the people of a place, over a long horizon. The principle that drives me as an investor — placing people before immediate returns, betting on education and training rather than success — applies to a club as well as a company. A rooted project, which grows a generation and revives common pride, ends up creating more value – economic included – than an above-ground project financed with promises.
In a few weeks, a nation will lift the World Cup. It too will have been built away from the spotlight, years earlier. People often ask me when our first team will win: I always answer with the foundations. A club, like a business, is first and foremost a human project — its strength is in its base, and the top always ends up following.
Basile Riboud grew up with the ball at his feet. Trained in a training center, he did not experience the career professional career he dreamed of, but never took his eyes off football. After several years at Danone, between the United States and Chinatoday he supports high-level athletes in their impact investments — and has made the rebirth of Touraine football, with the Union Foot de Touraine, the project of a lifetime.
