Arsenal Football Club in England are dubbed the corner kick kings, and deservedly so. From the start of last season to the current season, the team has scored 22 goals from corner kicks, seven more than their nearest rival in the English Premier League and five more than their nearest rival across other European leagues. The corner kick prowess was underscored last Wednesday in the team’s game against Manchester United Football Club when they scored two goals from corner kicks and could even have scored more. It was a very cagy and tactical game that needed an X-factor from either of the teams to ensure victory, and Arsenal came up with its corner kick joker. What is your corner kick routine that will give you an edge over others? As individuals and business owners, there are key lessons we could learn from Arsenal.
**Arsenal’s struggles against external obstacles**
Arsenal is one of the traditional football powerhouses in English football with a rich history of on-field successes over decades that have won the club millions of fans and supporters worldwide. The richest man in Africa, Alhaji Aliko Dangote, is a well-known fan of Arsenal. But in recent years, the club seemed to have lost its way as its on-field fortunes have taken a nosedive due to heavy investments in top-quality players by other clubs compared to Arsenal’s paltry investment; except for the English FA Cup, the club has not won any trophy in over 20 years. This has left many wondering if the club’s glory is over.
**Contending with external obstacles**
Like Arsenal, many of us have probably not met our set goals or objectives over several months, starting from the beginning of this year, and for some even further back due to the harsh economic environment that has left many businesses dead in its wake, households falling into poverty, people unable to find jobs, and purchasing power crumbling. And you are left wondering if you have used up your last opportunity to turn the corner and become successful.
Arsenal understood so well that setbacks are only temporary and that it must keep putting in the necessary and smart shift to get back up, no matter the obstacles. The club started the rebound with smart recruitment, from its director of football, coaching crew, and down to the players, because it knew it couldn’t compete with the moneybag clubs financially. Today, the club is gradually emerging out of the shadows and showing great promise of greatness again.
**Unmet goals and objectives**
Yes, you may have set out this year to commence your master’s degree or PhD programme, build your own house, start your own business, send your children to Ivy League schools, home or abroad, change your car, travel the world and have fun, invest, get married, start a Foundation, give scholarships to indigent children, support your local church, school or old neighbourhood, or retire, but none of that seemed to materialise in the year or may even seem impossible in the coming year. Like Arsenal, you must have that positive attitude and assess your current situation to know where you are and what next steps to take to move forward. In other words, this is a time for retrospection, an assessment. The obstacles will not just be removed miraculously; the economic difficulties are unlikely to disappear next year. You need to understand this and be flexible in your thinking and actions to maneuver the obstacles and attain your goals.
**Overcoming harsh realities with smart strategies**
Teams in England and across the world are increasingly building highly resilient defences and scoring goals now against teams, small or big, is increasingly difficult. Wealthy clubs that can afford pricey strikers can find that extra space to score the goals needed to win games. But teams like Arsenal with average strikers need to devise smart ways to break down defences and get goals otherwise it will be difficult to challenge for titles.
**Arsenal’s clever corner kick routine**
Arsenal chose to develop other aspects of its game to get goals without relying too much on its strikers; it chose to work on its set pieces enabling every player on the team to become a real threat to the opposition in terms of goal scoring. The club invested in getting a set-piece coach and focused on developing a clever corner kick routine. You could see the reasoning behind this focus. During corner kicks almost all the players on the field are crowded in the goal area, with one set defending and the other attacking the goal. Arsenal has developed a consistent way to kick its corners directly to its players in the goal area thereby increasing the chances of one of them scoring. This has worked perfectly well so much so that an Arsenal corner is almost like a penalty now.
So, it was pretty difficult to achieve your goals and objectives for the year. Like Arsenal, what options are available to you to exploit to make you stronger in the coming year? How can you adjust to reality by fine-tuning an area of your life to enable you to achieve your goals? As an individual, what areas of your life can you tweak in line with current realities to make you stand out, to give you an edge over others in terms of your career, your education, your aspirations? As an entrepreneur, what areas of your business do you need to adjust to make the business more competitive? As a family, what adjustments are needed to enable your family to ride out this current difficult wave? You cannot afford to dwell on failures for too long. Your loved ones, your colleagues, your associations, your community, and society brook no excuses; they all expect you to succeed.
**My story**
Several years ago, young and impulsive, I fancied myself an entrepreneur, full of wonderful ideas that I considered the best things since sliced bread. Hotheaded and with little tutelage on how to set up and run a successful venture I jumped into the recharge card and other businesses. I even got a facility from a bank and felt I was cruising in business. Expectedly – though not so obvious to me then – the businesses failed and suddenly I was up to my neck in debt, millions of naira, including to a bank. I fled the country to Ghana to avoid my creditors. Of course, I eventually came back to my senses, returned to Nigeria, and started paying down my debts.
**Identify and develop your own corner kick routine**
The point is, you will encounter obstacles in life, as an individual and in business: those you created yourself and those created by others. It’s your ability to critically assess your current position, the realities that define that position, and the opportunities therein that you can explore to emerge better, stronger, or smarter that will determine your success or otherwise.
Arsenal may not have won any trophy yet, but on the balance of the evidence on the ground, it won’t be long before the club will start reeling in silverware again. The team is strong and may just have patented dangerous corner kicks, and the opposition is aware of this yet powerless to stop it. Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur will tell you how almost impossible it is to defend against Arsenal’s corner kicks. What is your own corner kick that you need to identify now and work on to give you an advantage? Start right now so that you will have a better story to tell and a better result to show in the coming year.
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