El Tri's Bookshelf: Leadership Lessons From a Historic World Cup

Like every person in Mexico, I spent the last month glued to a screen. I have always been a  massive football fan, and have had to deal through the heartbreaks and the near misses of our national team. So watching this squad play the way it did in our own World Cup was something I will not forget. The best group stage in our history: nine points, six goals scored, none conceded. A composed 2-0 win over Ecuador. And then the cruelest ending imaginable, a 3-2 loss to England at the Estadio Azteca, our first World Cup defeat in that stadium, in a match we fully controlled.

The country is still processing it. I want to propose a different way to do so: through books.

A necessary disclaimer first. I was not inside the locker room. I do not know what was said at halftime or how the coaching staff actually built this group. What follows is an analysis from the outside, based on the matches, the training clips, and the press conferences, filtered through the eyes of an avid reader. One of the quiet virtues of running the Business Book Fair is that you end up with hundreds of business books mapped in your head, so when you watch a team perform, you cannot help but imagine the literature behind it. This team, whether it knew it or not, was executing ideas that some of the best management thinkers have spent decades writing down.

The Vasco Method: Humor and Ownership

Javier Aguirre's press conferences were a masterclass that had nothing to do with tactics. He joked, he deflected, he teased reporters, and in doing so he absorbed the media pressure that would otherwise have landed on his players. It is tempting to read this as personality. I read it as technique. Jennifer Aaker and Naomi Bagdonas, who teach at Stanford, make exactly this case in “Humor, Seriously”: levity is not the opposite of gravity but a tool for it, one that builds trust, defuses tension, and makes hard messages land. Aguirre wielded it like a veteran executive managing a board through a crisis.

Then came the elimination, and the other half of his method appeared. “Players win games, coaches lose them,” he said. “If there is a blame for the defeat, it is mine.” Jocko Willink and Leif Babin built an entire leadership philosophy around that instinct in “Extreme Ownership”: the leader absorbs failure completely so the team can keep its confidence intact. Humor on the way in, ownership on the way out. Two books, one leader, and a standard any CEO should envy.

One Big Pot

This squad fit a 17-year-old Gilberto Mora, the youngest player in the whole tournament, and a 40-year-old Memo Ochoa, playing his sixth World Cup, into the same dressing room, and somehow it never looked like two generations sharing a jersey. It looked like one team. And making a team blend successfully, especially one that is so diverse, is a classic business question.

Two helpful references come to mind. On one hand, James Kerr's “Legacy,” on the All Blacks, shows culture as inheritance: rituals, humility, the famous rule that players sweep their own locker room, so that no individual is ever bigger than the institution. On the other hand, Daniel Coyle's “The Culture Code” shows culture as engineering: belonging is produced by small, repeated signals of safety, and any leader can learn to send them. Watch the clips of this Mexican squad training and celebrating, and you will find both mechanisms at work. Tradition gave the group its identity; deliberate signals gave the newcomers permission to belong to it.

Carrying a Nation

No corporate deadline compares to playing a home World Cup with +130 million people expecting a miracle. Yet this team looked mostly serene. Zero goals conceded across the group stage is not just a defensive statistic; it is what composure under expectation looks like. Timothy Gallwey explained the mechanism half a century ago in “The Inner Game of Tennis”: performance collapses when the judging voice in your head gets louder than the task in front of you, and excellence is the art of quieting it. Hendrie Weisinger and J.P. Pawliw-Fry updated the science for organizations in “Performing Under Pressure,” with a finding every executive should tattoo somewhere visible: nobody actually performs better under pressure, but the best performers degrade less.  Mexico showed it can perform under the highest of pressures.

The Uncomfortable Part

Passion took us further than it ever has. It did not take us past England. In the moments that decided the tournament, the difference was not spirit or cohesion but individual, world-class quality. This World Cup made the point brutally clear: one phenomenal player changes everything. Haaland changes everything. Bellingham changes everything. Messi, at his age, still changes everything. Mexico had the best team spirit in the tournament, but we missed that one world class player who could change things in a single moment. 

So the real question for the next four years is how we can keep the team spirit, while developing the capacity to systematically produce elite individual talent. Here, too, someone has written the book. Rasmus Ankersen spent years living inside the world's talent gold mines, from Brazilian football academies to Kenyan running camps, and distilled the findings in “The Gold Mine Effect”: elite performers are not found, they are produced, by ecosystems that combine hunger, density of competition, and deliberate development. Ankersen was serious enough about it to apply the model himself, running FC Midtjylland and Brentford into overachievers. Pair it with Anders Ericsson's “Peak,” the scientific foundation of deliberate practice, and you have a blueprint that Mexican football, and frankly Mexican business, has never fully implemented.

The Márquez Era

Aguirre left with a gift for his successor: “Rafa Márquez continues with this. He has four very good years ahead, with a solid base.” I believe him. The culture is built. The nation is behind the project. What remains is the harder, slower work of manufacturing greatness, player by player, and that work starts now.

Mexican companies may recognize something of themselves in this story. Not every organization faces all four of these challenges at once, but most leaders will recognize at least one: the balance between lightness and accountability, the difficulty of folding new talent into an established culture, the search for composure when the stakes are highest, or the challenge of nurturing extraordinary talent. But none of these questions are new. Each has been studied, tested, and written down by someone who wrestled with it before us. Whatever a leader is facing, there is a good book to find answers. That conviction is the entire reason the Business Book Fair exists, to help leaders connect with the content that solves the problems in front of them. If books can explain the greatest success of our national team, and its unfinished business ahead of 2030, imagine what they can do for your business.