Jamie Vardy Proves Failure Can Be Good For Business

With the Premier League season officially in the books, there are plenty of stories to mull over this summer. There’s Nottingham Forest’s incredible run and Man City’s surprising stumble. There’s Manchester United crumbling and (in this hard-done-by United fan’s opinion at least) Liverpool’s tragically easy stroll to the title.

Today, though, I want to spare a thought for the fall from grace of one of soccer’s darlings, Leicester City. After winning the Championship and triumphantly returning to the Premier League last season, the former title winners have once again been relegated. And unlike when this happened two years ago, this season, it wasn’t even close. The Foxes knew they were for the drop with five games left to play.

Still, there’s reason to feel hopeful. The team should look at the career of their departing talisman, Jamie Vardy, and realize that, sometimes, failure is the best thing that can happen to you.

We Shouldn’t Fear Failure

Soccer is the world’s beautiful game, but soccer teams are businesses, and that means they face the same pressures and fears as any other business.

One of the strongest fears any business leader faces is failure. Nearly half of all entrepreneurs struggle with the fear of failure. This number is high by profession, but it makes sense in context. About 1 in 10 adults experience atychiphobia, a clinical phobia of failure, at some point in their lives. If 10% of all adults struggling with a crippling fear of falling short, it only makes sense that entrepreneurs and business leaders face this fear in higher numbers. The risks of massive failure are just so much higher—and so much more public.

Allowing this fear to take hold leads many leaders to play it safe and avoid taking the risks that can really help their company take off. As I recount in my book, The Soccer of Success, if you aren’t failing regularly, you aren’t really trying, and that definitely limits your potential.

Failure Is an Opportunity

We’ve all heard the stories of the great business leaders who tried and tried again until that one big success that etched their name in history. Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, and even Colonel Sanders faced major setbacks. But this isn’t just a fun detail that makes their biographies more interesting; failure was central to those individuals’ successes.

Failure has many advantages. It teaches us to be adaptable and increases our resilience when times are tough. And as many business leaders have discovered over the years, failure can often lead to unexpected opportunities. To see that, we need look no further than Jamie Vardy.

Vardy began his career with a failure. At 16, he was dropped by his team, Sheffield Wednesday. He went on to play for the non-league side Stocksbridge Park Steels, where he had to supplement his income by working in a factory. It’s hard to imagine a bigger failure as a soccer player. Yet Vardy took his early setbacks and used them to become one of the most resilient players in history.

According to StatmanJames over on Instagram, Vardy is the oldest Golden Boot winner. He holds the record for the most consecutive games with a goal. And he’ll finish his career fifteenth on the all-time Premier League goals list.

Good!

One mindset shift I recommend in my book is ending a statement about a setback or failure with the word “good!”

“We didn’t hit our sales goals…good!”

“I lost my job…good!”

“We’re getting relegated…good!”

This restatement reminds us that opportunity lurks within failure. A missed sales goal may refocus you on hiring a better sales team or retooling a key product, either of which may bring you far better results in the long term. Losing a job hurts temporarily, but it can also be the start of a process that leads to a better career where you can really thrive.

And relegation may be just what Leicester need to rebuild and return to the Premier League stronger, where hopefully they’ll stick around for a while.

So, for any Leicester fans—or business leaders—feeling low about their recent failure, they can just look to that old familiar figure for inspiration. Jamie Vardy is still leading the way.