By Berend Booms | Associate Editor | Future of Assets
Failure has a way of exposing what truly holds an organization together. In asset-intensive environments, this leads to organizations spending an enormous amount of time trying to prevent failure from happening at all. We design maintenance strategies, implement inspections, monitor condition data, and build layers of redundancy into our operations. Entire reliability frameworks exist to detect weak signals before they evolve into something more serious. The reality of the situation is that despite all of this effort, failure remains inevitable. Assets degrade, systems break down, mistakes happen, and unforeseen circumstances disrupt even the best-prepared operations.
What has always interested me most is not failure itself, but how people respond to it when it happens. It’s a lesson I was taught very early on by football. If I wasn’t playing football growing up, I was watching it. With the FIFA World Cup approaching, I find myself growing more excited by the day as a supporter of the Dutch national team. Supporting the Dutch national team has not always been easy. In my lifetime, I have been fortunate enough to watch one World Cup final, the 2010 final in South Africa against Spain. It also happened to be played on my birthday, which made the experience unforgettable for reasons both good and bad. Like many Dutch supporters, I went into that match believing we might finally see history repeat itself. Instead, I watched Iker Casillas’ incredible save against Arjen Robben’s must-score attempt, only for Andrés Iniesta to score deep into extra time, turning what should have been one of the greatest birthdays of my life into one of the strangest. Looking back on it now, I think that experience captures part of what football has always taught me. Talent alone is never enough. The strongest teams are not simply the ones with the best players, but the ones capable of functioning together under pressure, adapting when things go wrong, and responding collectively to failure. Over time, I started noticing how similar football and asset management actually are. Both revolve around coordination under pressure. Both depend on systems rather than individuals. And in both worlds, failure rarely belongs to or impacts one individual person.
From the Pitch to the Shop Floor
When something goes wrong on a football pitch, people often focus on the visible mistake: the blunder that conceded a goal, the missed chance that should have been converted, the defensive error, the misplaced pass. But failure usually begins much earlier. A defender gets exposed because the midfield loses control. A striker becomes isolated because the buildup breaks down. One imbalance affects the next until eventually the entire system gives way.
Industrial environments operate much the same way. When an asset fails, the breakdown itself is often only the final moment in a much longer chain of events. Operators may have noticed subtle warning signs weeks earlier. Maintenance teams may already have been stretched too thin to intervene proactively. Production pressure may have delayed planned work. What I’m saying is that failure is rarely isolated; it is systemic.
Asset Management is the Ultimate Team Sport
This is why I think asset management is the ultimate team sport, and in many ways it is extremely similar to football. Your operations teams are your defenders. They are the first line of defense, positioned closest to the assets every single day. They recognize abnormal sounds, unusual behavior, and the small deviations that often precede larger problems, and they would typically be the first to face challenges and have to respond to them proactively.
Your maintenance teams are your strikers. They are brought in to resolve issues, restore performance, and keep the operation moving forward. Much like forwards in football, they often receive the praise when things go right and the criticism when they do not.
Between those two sits safety, acting as the midfield that connects the entire system together. The best midfielders bring structure and balance to a football team. Safety fulfills a similar role inside industrial organizations, helping maintain control while ensuring work is carried out safely and responsibly. What we are seeing is that none of these functions succeed alone. Strong asset management depends on how well all functions operate together under pressure.
The Best Teams in the World Train for Failure
Modern football also offers an interesting perspective on failure prevention itself. Elite clubs invest heavily in avoiding injuries before they happen. Players are monitored constantly, not only from a performance perspective but also from a fatigue perspective. Training intensity is adjusted, with individualized training programs and physical therapy support helping manage fatigue and recovery. Recovery and rest are treated as strategic necessities rather than optional luxuries. Managers understand that pushing players beyond sustainable limits eventually creates risk for the entire team.
There is an important lesson in that mindset for asset management. Many industrial organizations still operate under constant pressure to maximize utilization. Assets are pushed harder, maintenance windows become smaller, teams are expected to absorb growing workloads for longer periods of time, and the overall mindset has shifted to doing more with less. In the short term, this can appear productive. Over time, however, fatigue accumulates within both systems and people.
Football highlights something asset management sometimes forgets: sustainable performance depends on recovery, preparation, training, and balance. The strongest teams are not necessarily the ones that avoid setbacks altogether. They are the ones capable of responding collectively when things do go wrong. In football, teams review failures together. They train and prepare as a team, study patterns, identify weaknesses, and adjust the system as a whole. The objective is continuous improvement through making mistakes, learning from them, and adjusting collectively – rather than avoiding failure altogether.
Asset management should approach failure in much the same way. When organizations respond to failure by focusing only on individual mistakes, they often miss the broader lesson. Most failures reveal something deeper about communication, priorities, workload, knowledge, preparation, or alignment between teams. Understanding those underlying dynamics requires openness and trust across functions that too often operate separately.
More Than a Game
That is ultimately why football continues to resonate with me so strongly as a metaphor for asset management. At their core, both are deeply human systems. Both depend on communication, positioning, adaptability, and shared responsibility. Both require people to think beyond their own role and contribute toward something larger than themselves. And in both worlds, failure is never the final whistle. Sometimes it is the moment that reveals whether the team around you is capable of moving forward together.