When this piece says “football,” it refers to the game the rest of the world plays — round ball, mostly feet, occasionally heartbreaking. If you’re reading this in the US, think “soccer.”
Somewhere in a suburb this weekend, a volunteer coach will stand on a cold pitch with a bag of orange-slice cones and twenty children with about four minutes of collective attention span.
That image is easy to smile at. It’s also, if you look at it carefully, one of the clearest illustrations of how organizations develop maturity.
Or fail to.
The Framework Behind the Analogy
In IT service management, there’s a maturity model that describes how an organization’s practices evolve over time. It has five levels. Level 1 is chaotic, and Level 5 is self-improving. Everything in between captures the slow, difficult work of moving from one to the other.
Most organizations believe they’re at Level 3 or 4, but most are at Level 2. The gap between believing and being is where most organizational improvement initiatives quietly die.
The model isn’t unique to IT. It applies wherever a group of people is trying to deliver consistent, improving outcomes together (which is to say, it applies everywhere). Manufacturing, healthcare, education, financial services. But nowhere does it map more closely to that challenge than in developing a youth football team over ten or twelve years.
What follows is that map.
Level 1: Chaos That Feels Like Activity
Watch any group of five- and six-year-olds play football. Everyone runs to the ball. Everyone kicks it at the same time. Goals are either lucky or the result of one child who is simply bigger and faster than the others.
Nobody is failing. This is developmentally appropriate and genuinely joyful. But it is also Level 1: activities exist, effort is real, and outcomes occur; they cannot be predicted, explained, or repeated. When it works, you don’t know why. When it doesn’t, you don’t know that either.
Organizations at Level 1 operate the same way. Work gets done. Problems get solved. But everything depends on who happens to be available, what they happen to know, and how they happen to feel about it that day. The same problem recurs because no one has captured what solved it last time. Success is attributed to smart people. Failure is attributed to bad luck.
Both attributions are usually incorrect.
Level 2: Better Chaos
By ages 8 to 10, something has changed. There’s a coach with a session plan. There are positions. Players wear numbers. In some sense, there is a team.
But watch the defense. It only begins when the other team attacks. Watch the midfield. Players are in position at kickoff and nowhere near it ten seconds later. The structure exists on paper (in the lineup card, in the coach’s plan) but hasn’t yet become behavior.
This is Level 2. Organizations here have process documentation, job descriptions, and monitoring dashboards. They hold performance meetings. What they lack is genuine proactivity. They respond when something goes wrong. They don’t act to prevent it.
Level 2 is the most dangerous maturity level for one reason: it looks like it’s working. An outside observer sees a team with roles and a coach. An executive sees a department with documented procedures and SLA reports. Neither sees how reactive and fragile it actually is.
When a key person leaves, Level 2 tends to collapse back toward Level 1 very quickly.
Level 3: The Hard Jump
The transition from Level 2 to Level 3 is the hardest in the model. Organizations attempt it repeatedly, and football clubs do too. Most fall back.
In youth football, this typically happens between ages 11 and 13 (what development frameworks call the “learning to train” phase). The team stops being a collection of individuals reacting to events and begins to function as a coordinated system. A midfielder knows where to be before the ball arrives because they understand the pattern, not because they can see the play developing.
More importantly, the knowledge lives in the team, not merely in the coach.
That last part is the test for Level 3. Can the practice, the team, or the department survive the departure of the person who built it? At Level 2, no: everything depends on individual talent and institutional memory stored in someone’s head. At Level 3, yes: the approach has been made explicit, documented, and internalized by the group.
This is why the jump is hard. It requires moving from “our best people do great work” to “our organization does great work.” Those are not the same, and most organizations resist making the distinction.
So do most football clubs.
Level 4: Learning to Measure What Matters
Elite youth football programs, around ages 14 to 16, start to look different from recreational teams, not merely in skill level but in how they understand themselves.
GPS tracking shows how much ground players cover and at what intensity. Video analysis reveals patterns invisible in real time. A coach can say: we concede 70 percent of our goals from the right flank in the last fifteen minutes of the second half, and here’s exactly how each one began.
That’s Level 4. Not measuring outcomes: measuring the process that produces them. Understanding variation well enough to manage it, rather than merely observing it.
In organizational terms, Level 4 is when leadership stops asking “how are we doing?” and starts asking “why are we doing this this way, not another?” Dashboards stop reporting results and start reporting the causal factors behind them. Decisions become genuinely evidence-based, not merely evidence-decorated.
A caution: many organizations that believe they are at Level 4 are actually at Level 3, with dashboards. They measure a lot of things. They have not identified which factors drive the outcomes they care about, or how. Data isn’t maturity. Understanding is.
Level 5: The Coach Steps Back
A Level 5 football team has a distinct look, and it’s recognizable.
The coach doesn’t shout instructions from the sideline. Not because they don’t know what’s needed, but because the players already do. When something breaks down, players self-correct. When the team reviews a defeat, the conversation is diagnostic, not defensive. Players identify patterns, propose adjustments, and take ownership of the outcome.
The coach’s role has shifted from director to developer.
Level 5 in organizational terms is the same shift. The practice (whatever it is, in whatever organization) improves continuously because the people within it are equipped, motivated, and trusted to improve it. Innovation becomes systematic rather than occasional. The organization learns, not merely the individuals within it.
Here is the warning that isn’t said enough.
Some of the most celebrated coaches in youth football have built extraordinary teams entirely around their own vision, energy, and personality. These teams were extraordinary, but they were also completely dependent on that one person. When the coach moved on (to another club, another role, or retirement), the team reverted to Level 2 within a season or two.
The optimization had been personal. It had never been truly institutional.
Organizations do this constantly. A brilliant leader builds a high-functioning, self-improving team. Everyone around them believes the organization has matured. Then the leader leaves, and the maturity turns out to have been borrowed.
Real Level 5 outlasts any individual. That’s how you tell the difference.
What Level Are You Actually At?
It’s worth sitting with the question longer than is comfortable.
Most teams and departments, when asked, place themselves at Level 3 or 4. A few careful follow-up questions often shift that. Can your process survive the loss of your most important person? Do your metrics explain variation or merely report it? When something fails, do you improve the system or the individual?
Most groups quietly revise downward.
“Honestly? Probably Level 2 with some pockets of Level 3.”
That’s an honest answer. It’s also a useful one. Organizations that know where they are can improve. Organizations that believe they’re at Level 4 when they’re at Level 2 keep redesigning the dashboard instead of the practice.
The youth football analogy earns its place precisely because it strips away defensiveness. No one is embarrassed to admit that a group of seven-year-olds plays like a Level 1 organization. It’s obviously appropriate. It creates permission to locate yourself honestly, without the answer feeling like a verdict.
Where does your team play?
This article was first published on Substack on May 7, 2026.