By Berend Booms, Associate Editor | Future of Assets
The 2026 FIFA World Cup came to an end this weekend, which gave me a bittersweet feeling. Like millions of others around the world, I spent the better part of the past month watching nations compete on football's biggest stage and, as always, I started to convince myself that this tournament would finally be the one where the Netherlands went all the way. As it so often does, reality had other ideas. While this disappointment has been a part of watching my national team play ever since I was little, my viewing experience this time was dominated by a realization I found hard to shake. The more I watched, the more convinced I became that football and asset management are pretty much the same thing.
One of the things football consistently gets wrong in the eyes of its spectators is that we tend to judge matches by their final moments rather than everything that made those moments possible. The player who scores the winning goal inevitably dominates the headlines the following morning, yet anyone who watched the match closely understands that the goal itself often began much earlier. And while individual moments of brilliance are what make this sport so enjoyable, perhaps it was a defender anticipating a pass that nobody else saw coming that allowed the goal to come to fruition. Or a midfielder that recognized space that only became obvious several seconds later. Perhaps a different player made a run that dragged two defenders away without ever touching the ball. What I’m trying to say is that by the time the striker places the ball into the back of the net, ten other players have already contributed to the move, even if most people will only remember one of them.
Most organizations I’ve seen work in a very similar way, in that we tend to focus on the outcomes of good asset management: higher reliability, increased availability, fewer failures, improved compliance, and better operational performance. These are the results organizations strive for, and understandably so. Yet, much like a winning goal in football, those outcomes rarely belong to a single individual department. They are almost always the product of different disciplines working together toward a common objective, each contributing something that may not always be immediately visible, but without which the end result would never have been possible in the first place.
Teamwork Makes the Dream Work
The more I explore this comparison, the more naturally the different disciplines start finding their place on the football pitch.
Operations would be my defenders. Defenders spend much of the match protecting what matters most, constantly observing the game unfolding in front of them, identifying danger before it develops into something more serious and intervening whenever circumstances demand it. They rarely dominate the highlights package when everything goes according to plan, yet the moment they stop doing their job well, everyone notices.
Operations fulfills much the same role. Operators are often the first to notice that an asset is behaving differently from yesterday, that a pump sounds slightly different, that a vibration feels unfamiliar or that production is no longer progressing quite as smoothly as it should. Their contribution often lies in preventing small deviations from becoming larger problems, which means their greatest successes frequently go unnoticed simply because nothing went wrong.
When I look at the maintenance team, they are my pick for stars of the show, most naturally leading the charge. When an asset fails, when performance deteriorates, or when improvements need to be implemented, maintenance is expected to deliver. In many ways, they are the goalscorers of the organization. Yet football has taught us time and time again that even the world's best strikers are only as effective as the team surrounding them. No matter how talented an individual player may be, goals rarely emerge in isolation. They require possession to be regained, opportunities to be created and teammates willing to put collective success ahead of individual recognition. The same is very much true for maintenance. The most capable technicians and engineers in the world cannot build reliability on their own if Operations, Safety and the wider organization are not moving in the same direction – or with the same “goal” in mind.
That leaves one position still to fill, and the safety team makes up my ideal midfield. One of the reasons I have always admired great midfielders is that they influence almost every aspect of the game without always drawing attention to themselves. They dictate the tempo, connect defense with attack and constantly position themselves where they are needed most. When they perform well, the entire team appears balanced. When they do not, the game has an uncanny tendency to descend into chaos remarkably quickly. Safety performs a remarkably similar function inside asset-intensive organizations. Every maintenance activity, operational decision and improvement initiative ultimately passes through the lens of working safely and responsibly. Rather than acting as a separate discipline operating alongside the rest of the organization, safety connects people, processes and priorities in much the same way a midfielder connects every phase of play.
Total Football, Total Asset Management
As an avid historian with an obsession with the game of football, it only makes sense to look at the history of some of football's greatest teams. Doing so will reveal that they have never simply consisted of the world's best players. They consisted of players who understood one another's roles, trusted one another completely and were willing to sacrifice individual recognition in pursuit of something larger than themselves.
This is why Johan Cruyff's philosophy of Total Football resonates so strongly with me. It’s a system where every player understood their own position, yet also understood the responsibilities carried by everyone else. The team adapted together, moved together and solved problems collectively rather than individually.
Applying that thinking to asset management means it’s only a small step to talk about Total Asset Management. This describes an environment where Operations, Maintenance and Safety no longer operate as separate departments pursuing separate objectives, but as one team working toward the shared goals of reliability, availability and operational excellence.
It Takes a Village
Of course, football teams rely on far more than the eleven players standing on the pitch. Behind every successful club sits an entire ecosystem of analysts, coaches, medical staff and performance specialists whose work often goes unnoticed but fundamentally shapes what happens during the ninety minutes that spectators actually see.
Enterprise Asset Management systems are not all that different. At their best, they are not simply systems for recording work orders or storing maintenance history. They are the support staff standing behind the team, bringing together information from across the organization, providing context where it is needed, identifying opportunities for improvement and helping people make better decisions long before problems begin to materialize. After all, football managers do not invent their tactics after kick-off. They prepare beforehand, study the opposition, analyze previous performances and continually look for opportunities to improve. Organizations with reliable data have the opportunity to do exactly the same.
My biggest takeaway from this year’s World Cup is this: football has always been described as the ultimate team sport; I would argue that asset management deserves exactly the same description. Reliability is rarely built through the efforts of a single department, just as championships are rarely won by a single player. Both emerge from trust, communication, preparation and the willingness of individuals to contribute toward something considerably bigger than themselves. The players lifting the trophy may ultimately be the image we remember, but the team behind that moment is the reason it happened.