Same Pressure, Different Jerseys: Why Your Office is Basically AFCON
What AFCON Teaches Us About Leadership, Accountability, and Handling Pressure When the Whole World Is Watching
Leadership does not start with a corner office or a captain’s armband. It starts when we are toddlers learning to walk. Some kids fall, get back up, and go again. Others freeze and wait for a VAR review that is not coming.
As adults, we simply trade scraped knees for missed goals, failed projects, and those dreaded performance reviews that begin with: “So… let’s walk through what happened.”
We often pretend leadership is a boardroom science, but it is actually a high pressure performance art. If you want to see a masterclass in human behavior, look at how AFCON recently reminded us of this on a global stage. The drama on the pitch was a mirror held up to every corporate department in the world.
The Blame Tour vs. The Tactical Review At AFCON, we saw coaches who were doing more than managing tactics; they were representing entire nations. When a leader handles a loss with class and accountability, the team earns respect even in defeat. But we have all seen the alternative: the Public Blame Tour. This is when a leader turns a loss into a frantic search for a scapegoat.
Suddenly, the post game analysis feels less like a coaching session and more like a crisis communications meeting where the manager throws the goalkeeper under the bus to save their own seat.
In the office, we call this managing up at the expense of your team. In football, we call it losing the dressing room. In both cases, the result is the same: the squad stops playing for you.
Behavior is the Brand Managers represent their teams to executives and clients. When a leader stays composed and solution oriented, the whole team’s reputation benefits. In both football and business, leadership behavior becomes the brand. It is not about the org chart. It is not about the job titles. It is the behavior.
The Penalty Box Politics And then there are the penalties, those heart stopping moments that can flip a match or a career in seconds. You can dominate the pitch for ninety minutes, but in the corporate world, success sometimes comes down to one high stakes kick and a very nervous executive goalkeeper. Suddenly, months of tactical brilliance take a back seat to a single moment of timing while everyone stands around waiting for the referee to make a call.
Sometimes there is VAR and sometimes there is not. As we saw in the most dramatic AFCON moments, sometimes the call still feels like a total robbery even after the slow motion replay.
The office operates on this same chaotic penalty logic. Promotions and praise usually go to the person who made the last big impression rather than the one who did the heavy lifting in the group stages. Management remembers the flashy final slide instead of the late-night defensive work that kept the project alive. Because decisions are often made from the air conditioned silence of a quiet office, miles away from the actual chaos on the pitch, you end up with referees who miss the context, ignore the fouls, and occasionally show a clear bias for their favorite players. It feels unfair because it is.
However, a legacy is not built on one controversial whistle or a single missed kick. It is built on the consistency to stay in the game and the mental toughness to be ready when your next moment finally shows up in the spotlight.
From the Couch to the Cubicle It is easy to scream at the TV from the comfort of a sofa, but the psychological weight of the spotlight is immense. One heavy touch can make you a hero or a trending meme. AFCON showed us that rivalry can sometimes turn toxic, where fans spend more energy rooting for others to fail than for their own team to succeed.
If that sounds familiar, it is because the office has its own version of the ultra fans. Sometimes, colleagues form alliances based on a shared dislike of a high performer. It becomes a workplace subculture where it is easier to whisper “must be nice” in the breakroom than to say “maybe I need to level up.”
The Final Whistle The difference between a championship season and a relegation scrap is not the talent on the field. It is the response to the loss. Great teams review the tape and fix what went wrong, improve their performance, and come back stronger. Others spend their time blaming the referee, the budget, or that one meeting that could have been an email.
Those who take feedback and upskill come back stronger. The rest stay stuck replaying the same excuses, resulting in the same season on repeat, just with a new calendar year and a different tournament.
Leadership is not about avoiding failure; everyone loses sometimes. It is about what you do next. Pressure does not create or erase character. It reveals it.
Same game. Different field. Same leadership rules.
