The idea that the business world can learn from sports is old and convenient. It means company away days can be filled with fun activities. It allows retired athletes to charge companies large sums for motivational talks, and it enables business people to meet their sporting heroes.
But which sports — traditional physical activities or mind-based games — can really claim a close link to working life? Here are some contenders that are regularly championed by executives and investors.
Poker
Adherents: Jeff Yass, co-founder, Susquehanna International Group; Chamath Palihapitiya, venture capitalist
Poker is the source of corporate phrases such as “above board” and “pass the buck”. The game itself has the clearest relevance to traders. Susquehanna, the quantitative trading firm, is one that embraces the link. “Before you become a trader at Susquehanna, you learn how to play poker,” says Jeff Yass, who co-founded the company with his poker friends. “We have a couple of months training in poker, because . . . being a poker player and a trader . . . is very similar.”
Success in poker derives not just from an understanding of probability, or from luck, but from a reading of other players’ intentions and an acceptance of uncertainty.
Jo Living runs Aces High London, a company that organises corporate poker workshops. She argues poker should be taken seriously — as a way of revealing and improving business skills. “How people show up in the real world is how they show up at the poker table,” she says.
The game rewards “deep listening” and punishes a lack of assertiveness, she adds. Investor Chamath Palihapitiya says it teaches you to “be unemotional but stubborn”.
The scenario of imperfect information echoes real-life negotiations. As such, poker could even be a tool for assessing recruits. (Gary Stevenson, the self-proclaimed best trader in the world, says he won his Citibank internship via a poker-related game.)
Poker’s addictiveness is a potential downside. “The worst possible outcome would be if everyone left here and started playing internet poker, gambling against eastern European bots,” an Aces High instructor warned participants at a recent workshop. Other card games are available, some of them involving teamwork: Warren Buffett spent at least eight hours a week playing bridge, claiming it was “the best exercise there is for the brain . . . You are learning from every word spoken and not spoken.”
Chess
Adherents: Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google DeepMind; Rachel Reeves, UK chancellor
Chess is synonymous with thinking ahead and encourages players to see the world from their adversaries’ point of view: UK chancellor Rachel Reeves said it had prepared her for politics. Demis Hassabis, co-founder of Google DeepMind, became a chess master aged 13. He attributes his early interest in AI to playing chess “and trying to improve my own thought processes”.
Billionaire investor Peter Thiel was also a chess master. But he has sometimes downplayed parallels between success on the board and in the boardroom: competitive chess could lead people to focus too much on beating a particular opponent, and not enough on doing things that are “important or valuable”. (Thiel himself was so competitive that, according to former PayPal executive David Sacks, when he lost, he would “smash all the pieces”.)
Chess is not a solved game: despite the computing advances, there is no known perfect way to play it. But for some, it is too controlled an environment to offer a window into the real world — too little emotion, too many pre-planned sequences. How much can you learn about life from a sport that machines play far better?
Tennis
Adherents: Jamie Dimon, chief executive, JPMorgan Chase; Andy Jassy, chief executive, Amazon
Tennis’s lessons for business stem from its ruthlessly individual nature. At least in its singles variety, it embodies self-reliance. “Tennis is very much a meritocracy,” Amazon’s chief executive, Andy Jassy, has said. “There’s no favouritism, there’s no politics. You either win or lose based on how you perform in the moment.”
Tennis fans see another useful parallel: that what seems like natural talent is in fact the result of practice. “No one is born with an amazing serve,” says Andre Sokol, managing partner at M&A advisers Akira Partners. Similarly, “the number of times you see a player move in the right direction to return a serve is not the result of superhuman reactions. It’s experience.” Ditto the skills of senior employees.
Football
Adherents: Sir Jim Ratcliffe, chair, Ineos; Florentino Pérez, chair, Grupo ACS, president, Real Madrid; Sheryl Sandberg, former chief operating officer, Meta
Football should have clear lessons for business, because it is a huge business. But it is also an unusual business, where many big investors seem resigned to losing money.
Perhaps the sport is most relevant regarding team management. “Football is a great laboratory, a great simulator, where we can see what makes humans reach their maximum competitiveness,” former Real Madrid coach Jorge Valdano has said.
Sir Alex Ferguson, José Mourinho and other managers were famed for how they handled different personalities. Mourinho has spoken of freezing out his strong-minded striker Samuel Eto’o until he upped his performance. Paris Saint-Germain’s victory in the 2024-25 Champions League came after they had moved from paying entitled megastars to focusing on building a team of exuberant, youthful talents.
Arguably football requires more focus on group dynamics than other team sports, such as cricket and baseball, where individual roles are more defined. If nothing else, the sport’s struggle with VAR and financial fair play can certainly remind business people of regulators’ limitations.
These insights are probably best gained from watching football. Does trotting around a five-a-side pitch on a Wednesday evening give the same effect? Debatable.
Golf
Adherents: Donald Trump; a lot of other executives who are not at their desk at 1pm on Friday
Like tennis, golf rewards individual resilience and intense practice. But its popularity among executives has been more about the networking it facilitates. “I come from a very small country,” said Finnish President Alexander Stubb after a golf game with Donald Trump in March. “To spend seven hours with the president of the United States, you don’t do that in a meeting room.” One business lesson from golf is that it is who you know — and how they may let you cheat.
Video gaming
Adherents: Elon Musk, chief executive, Tesla; Sam Bankman-Fried, co-founder of FTX
A few years ago Anna Malmhake, chief executive of Swedish beauty brand Oriflame Cosmetics, complained that businesses often hired sports people as motivational speakers, when many in the audience were likely to be more familiar with video games.
Strategy game series Civilization had taught her that: “If you only pay attention to what is urgent, the non-urgent things will cause trouble at the most inopportune moment.” Team-raiding games such as World of Warcraft showed “one negative, energy-draining person can single-handedly kill the performance of a team of 25 people”.
Gaming is, however, notoriously time demanding. Multitasking Elon Musk has been accused of exaggerating his performance at Diablo IV. Before cryptocurrency exchange FTX’s collapse, co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s ability to play League of Legends and Storybook Brawl while in business meetings was talked of as a sign of his genius. But perhaps a greater genius would have been to give his full attention to the lawyers.
