ABSTRACT
Most high-performance football clubs are professional organisations that function in a complex environment. Given such an unpredictable context, football clubs require deliberate learning strategies to perform and succeed over time. Nonetheless, Brazilian professional football clubs have a culture that favours sacking coaches rather than development. The average tenure of a professional Brazilian football coach is 16.5 out of 38 games, with success not being correlated to this practice. This chapter presents enhanced learning strategies that football clubs could use to cope more effectively with this challenging environment. To appreciate the potential of football clubs in becoming learning organisations, the main dimensions of Sessa and London's (2015) framework are presented: (1) the levels of learning (individual, group, and organisational), (2) the types of learning (adaptive, generative, and transformative), and (3) the leverage points for change (triggers for learning, readiness to learn, and mechanisms of feedback). The chapter concludes with practical strategies for sport organisations managers to lead the activation of a learning environment that equips its actors with the capacity to generate answers for unexpected challenges.
