Yesterday I didn't watch a football match.
I watched my mother get up from the sofa three times without anyone asking her to. I watched my two daughters go suddenly quiet and grab my hand. I watched my father, who has spent weeks in bed, sit up a little more each time Spain attacked, surrounded by his grandchildren.
I've spent more than 15 years working with companies that want to understand their real value — the kind that never shows up on a balance sheet but decides whether a business holds up, scales, or sells well. I've sat in boardrooms explaining why culture, reputation, or a team's accumulated knowledge weigh as much as any tangible asset. And still, until yesterday, I hadn't seen that principle play out so clearly, so fast, right in front of me.
Eleven people played. An entire country felt the same thing, at the same time, for 120 minutes. That doesn't happen by design. No marketing department can manufacture it. No budget can buy it. And yet that shared feeling — collective identity switched on all at once — is exactly the kind of phenomenon we've spent years trying to understand, measure, and manage when we talk about non-financial value inside organizations.
Here's the connection I want to make — not as a nice metaphor, but as a serious observation: the assets that most determine a company's fate — the trust its brand inspires, the cohesion of its leadership team, the reputation built over years of consistent decisions — behave exactly like what I watched in my living room yesterday. They're invisible until tested. They can't be manufactured with a press release. And when they fail, or when they're simply missing, no line on the balance sheet explains why the company fell.
In M&A processes, this isn't an abstract idea. It's a pattern that repeats often: technically flawless due diligence — debt reviewed, contracts audited, financial projections solid — that fails to anticipate the loss of key talent after closing, or the reputational damage that surfaces months into a poorly communicated integration. The problem is almost never in the numbers that get reviewed. It's in the ones nobody knows how to look at.
I'm not talking about intuition or motivational talk. I'm talking about methodology: frameworks exist — Integrated Reporting and its six capitals, among others — that let you identify, value, and track these intangible assets with the same rigor we apply to financial ones. The difference between a company that manages this deliberately and one that leaves it to chance isn't cosmetic. It's the difference between a defensible asset in front of a board and a promise nobody can back up when the market comes asking.
Yesterday, Spain had the purest, most visible version of that asset: belonging. The feeling that, for a few hours, we were part of something that truly represented us. The companies that manage to generate that same feeling — in their customers, their teams, the investors who back them — don't get there by accident. They get there because someone decided that value deserved the same discipline as any other line on the balance sheet.
That's the question I'm taking from yesterday, the one I bring to every boardroom I sit in: if the answer isn't clear, who in your company has the mandate to find it out?
Thank you, boys. For the match. But mostly, for reminding me why I've spent twenty years doing this.