The Ultimate CRM Buyers Guide for Football Clubs
Reading time:
12 mins
After more than a decade in football, from Columbus Crew to Tigres and Catapult, Alan Belden traded performance reports for pen and paper.
Now, he’s writing The Basque Gene, a book exploring how one small region in Spain has quietly produced generations of world-class coaches, leaders, and thinkers.
What began as a letter to his newborn son became a search for meaning: a study of values, culture, and the forces that shape underdogs into giants.
In this interview, Alan shares:
After my first son was born in 2023, a darwinistic creative energy overtook me. It felt primal, like a modern echo of the instinct that once drove fathers to defend their kin from lions or freezing winters. Only now it surfaced through restless questions. I found through writing a release.
At first it took the form of a letter for my son, but it came out like a lifeless 15 page fact-driven Wikipedia article. After three or four attempts I realized the story was too profound for just a letter or article. It was worth a full book. After that the first chapter poured out like a trapped waterfall. Writing had never flowed so naturally.
I was able to trace the haunting force down to two questions:
How could Spain’s tiniest province, Gipuzkoa (Basque Country), produce more Premier League coaches (Arteta, Emery, Iraola, Lopetegui) than all of England?
What is this quiet, millenary force behind generations of greatness trying to reveal and what does it mean for an immigrant family absorbing its DNA?
And these questions became the spinal cord of my book.
Football, to me, is just a lens to explore something more profound and universal.
I believe we’re innately drawn to understanding the roots of success. In the case of basque coaches, it seems to rest on paradoxical virtues which evolved with Europe’s most ancient language and culture: humble ambition, collective accountability, honest perseverance… Virtues we have long understood as humans, yet often lose sight of as history tilts their balance.
Sustained over time, they form an equilibrium of Basque culture: ordinary greatness in local universality.
Our world’s leaders—in politics, business and media—have become increasingly egotistical, oppressive, and corrupt. Football coaches, even in this age of excess, have somehow transcended the “old school” ways. The new school of successful coaches, many of them basque, seem to have embraced a similar paradoxical equilibrium.
In that quiet contrast, I believe, lies the answer to my unrelenting questions and the legacy I hope to leave for my children, and perhaps even beyond.
For me culture is more like agriculture than architecture. The soil dictates the produce that will flourish. The biggest mistake in culture building is to plant desire rather than understanding. It is necessary to prepare the soil with patience and care and cultivate only what the land is ready to bear.
In football, one of the most powerful cultures I’ve seen is Real Madrid’s. From a seven-year-old in their basketball academy, to their gardeners on staff, to the president himself, the belief is the same: winning is the only alternative. Real Madrid’s greatness long predates Florentino, but his genius lies, much like in seed breeding, in reinvigorating that trait until it grew into a self-sustaining winning super-seed.
In the Basque Country, Real Sociedad and Athletic Club have stayed loyal to their soil: to the deeply rooted, resilient, and vigorous seeds nurtured by Basque family and community values. A taxi driver from Bilbao once told me, “No matter what happens in San Mamés, you’ll never hear fans boo a player. It would be like a father booing his own son.” The culture of Athletic lies in having forged a genuine family of millions. something that could never yield the same rich harvest in Madrid or anywhere else.
I believe the two biggest factors behind underdog success are love and strategy.
In team sports, love is the relationship that provides an intangible edge. Most underdogs that thrive share one thing in common: a sense that every teammate would die for the person next to them. One of my favorite examples is the so-called “miracle on ice” by the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team. In the beginning, they were anything but a team: rivals from feuding colleges, split by ego and regional pride. So coach Herb Brooks deliberately positioned himself as the enemy. By uniting their frustration against him, he united his players.
The second factor is strategy. Like the biblical David, underdogs must always meticulously plan their attacks. South Africa’s 2019 Rugby World Cup victory is one to learn from. Ranked fifth in the world and beaten early by New Zealand, they relied on their “Bomb Squad” strategy: a stacked bench of powerhouse forwards unleashed in the final stages of matches, turning fatigue and power into a weapon.
I’ve always thought football could learn from that, especially as substitutes were increased to 5 in 2020. But I am yet to see a team rethink the game that radically.
Alan’s interview stayed with me. It isn’t about tactics or trends, but about the quiet work that makes anything endure. He reminds us that culture, whether in football or business, is built the same way soil is tended. You prepare it, plant something with intent, and then keep showing up to care for it. That idea runs much deeper than it first appears.
In my own world of CRM and marketing automation, the same principle applies. You can invest in the most advanced tools, integrate the smartest data models, or automate every sequence imaginable, but if the system isn’t rooted in human purpose and shared understanding, it dries out. A tech stack, just like a youth academy or a dressing room, needs alignment and care. It’s not enough to wire it once and walk away. You need people who understand what they’re cultivating, who know why certain processes exist, and who keep the structure healthy as it grows.
When you design a CRM environment well, you’re planting something that can flourish on its own. Clean data becomes fertile ground. Automations are the irrigation lines that keep things moving. Every campaign or workflow is another season’s crop, shaped by how much attention you’ve given to the fundamentals. Ignore them long enough, and weeds of inconsistency and poor data quality creep in.
What Alan calls “ordinary greatness” in the Basque tradition has its parallel in this kind of work. Sustainable systems, whether human or digital, come from patience, intention, and the courage to keep refining what you’ve already built instead of chasing the next shiny tool. The result is the same in both fields: a structure that grows stronger over time because it’s alive, not just installed.
