From the press box to the boardroom: how FIMBA turned communications into a career across football's biggest stages
David Phillips · Class of 2014 · Communications Consultant, Freelance
"The MBA didn't just teach me the business of football - it gave me the language to lead through it, in real time, while I was still studying it"
I came to the Football Industries MBA with a background in communications, not football administration - and that combination turned out to be exactly the point. The programme didn't ask me to abandon what I already knew. It asked me to apply it properly, inside an industry that moves faster and cares more than almost any other.
What surprised me was how quickly the theory became practice. The Football and Finance module gave me the tools to write a detailed analysis of Liverpool FC's accounts and how the club could meet its Financial Fair Play requirements obligations - not as an academic exercise, but for a newspaper. Around the same time, Sports Operations Management gave structure to what I was doing as Player Liaison Officer for France's Under-17 Women's National Team, work that would have been far harder to do well without that grounding.
The MBA also taught me something less formal but just as important: that in sport, opportunity rarely arrives on schedule, and you're encouraged to go and find it. I was the first person in the world to break the story in English about the winner of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games stadium design competition. I was cited by multiple journalists after uncovering quotes from Fenway Sports Group principal owner John W. Henry about Luis Suárez. Neither of those happened by waiting for an assignment. Instead, FIMBA had quietly trained me to notice where the story was, and to put myself forward.
That instinct shaped everything that came after. I moved to the Netherlands to become employee number 40 at MyCujoo, a sports streaming and broadcasting start-up - a move that simply would not have happened without the MBA giving me the credibility and the confidence to make it. What followed was a five-year run through two acquisitions without ever changing desks: MyCujoo was acquired by ELEVEN Sports and Aser Ventures, and ELEVEN was then acquired by DAZN. Across both, 2,500 people across ten countries went through real anxiety about jobs and identity, and I was leading the communications function for ELEVEN and Aser for a complicated but ultimately successful merger.
From there I moved into architecture, building the internal communications function at MVRDV - no playbook, no precedent, just a clear sense of what an organisation needs to hear from itself to function well, while co-authoring a book which became its second ever most viewed project, and utilising my sports knowledge to help overhaul their stadium portfolio and add value to their business development approach.
I think about the programme differently now than I did as a student. At the time, it seemed almost niche- an MBA, but for football. Looking back, the specificity was the value. Generic business education teaches you frameworks. FIMBA taught me where those frameworks break down against the realities of fandom, broadcast rights, governance politics, and an industry where the product is also, somehow, everyone's emotional life.
That distinction matters most at ownership level. Advising the leadership of a football club, or a CEO whose decisions are scrutinised by supporters as much as shareholders, is genuinely different work from advising an ordinary corporate board. The stakeholders aren't just investors and employees - they're a fanbase with memory, loyalty, and very little patience for being managed like a customer segment. FIMBA is one of the only places that actually teaches you to operate in that environment, rather than assuming it behaves like any other business.
These days I work as an independent consultant - I'm currently advising the CEO of a Swiss sports technology company on a major product launch, and supporting a luxury jewellery brand on its own communications strategy. The variety is the point. FIMBA didn't train me for one job in football. It trained me to think clearly inside organisations under pressure, wherever that pressure shows up.
If there's one thing I'd tell someone considering the programme, it's this: the football makes it specific, but the thinking makes it transferable. That combination is rarer than it sounds, and it's the reason FIMBA alumni end up scattered across so many different corners of the industry, all speaking a slightly different professional language than everyone else in the room — and frequently, the better one.