What the 2026 World Cup is teaching us about Leadership

The Ted Lasso spirit is visible, so is Nate Shelley's

For 40 years, Mexico had a curse with a name. El quinto partido — "the fifth game," the quarterfinal they could never reach. Seven straight knockout losses. A nation that qualified faithfully and then, just as faithfully, went home early. If you'd polled the pundits before this tournament, "El Tri lifts the trophy" was nowhere on the whiteboard.

And yet, here we are. As I write this on July 3rd, 2026, Mexico is unbeaten in 12 straight matches. They topped their group with a perfect record. On July 1st, at a rain-soaked Estadio Azteca, they beat Ecuador 2-0 and finally, finally broke the 40-year drought — becoming the first CONCACAF team ever to eliminate a South American side in the knockouts. Where before the statistics showed Mexico with a 0% chance of winning, they are now at 3%. Hey, it’s not 30%, but it’s something!

So what changed? Not the talent pool overnight. Not the budget. Something quieter, and far more transferable to the rest of us who lead teams that don't wear cleats. Leadership changed.

"¿Y si sí?" — or, the Spanish for BELIEVE

There's a phrase Mexican fans have adopted this summer, and it's given me chills more than once: "¿Y si sí? It roughly translates to "But… what if we actually do?" Not arrogant. Not guaranteed. Just a door cracked open where there used to be a wall. Everyone knows the history. Everyone knows the odds. And still — what if we do?

If you've watched Ted Lasso, you already know its twin. It's the yellow BELIEVE sign Ted tapes above the locker room door. Same posture exactly: belief isn't the delusion that success is certain; it's the refusal to pretend it's impossible. And here's the part I want every leader to sit with — belief on its own is just a nice poster. What makes it work is what comes after the believing: you name the potential out loud, then you methodically clear the obstacles in its way so your people can actually step into it and knock it out of the park.

When I was at a boarding school in Germany, we got a new music teacher to lead the student choir. We were mediocre at best. Some of us were there for the love of singing, others to get some credits added to their otherwise bad grades. Then Mr. Schmidtgall showed up - the new, young, enthusiastic teacher. As with Ted, we all thought he was naive. Especially when he announced that by December, we would be performing Händel's "Messiah." It was August. We didn't believe him, and more so, we didn't believe in ourselves. But then, he methodically cleared the obstacles, stepped up our practice (training), and, guess what? Not only did we sell out all our concerts, but we also recorded a CD and were invited to perform in other cities!

Ted believed and rebuilt the room around it, just like Mr. Schmidtgall. Mexico believes in building a camp where a teenager can play freely and be treated as an equal member of the team, not as a secondary player with less experience. That second half is good leadership. Anyone can hang a sign. Great leaders remove what's blocking the door.

Your fans are your clients. Your players are the experience. The whole team is your company.

Here's the frame I can't unsee as a leadership coach. Watch what happens in Mexico's stadiums, and you're watching a business model. The fans in the stands are the clients. The eleven on the pitch are the client experience — the living, sweating, breathing product people actually feel. And the entire operation, staff and subs and coaches included, is the company. When those three move as one, something almost surreal happens: the energy loops back on itself. Back on June 11th, after the opening win, the players didn't sprint down the tunnel — they stood in the rain and sang with the crowd. By the time Mexico clinched their spot, the whole of Mexico City was belting out "El Rey" together, plaza-watch parties and filled streets alike. That is not a coincidence adjacent to the results. That is a result. The result of a team that treats its supporters as part of the squad rather than as an audience to be tolerated.

Ask yourself the uncomfortable version of that question. When your clients experience your company, do they feel like they're in the huddle — or like they're watching from behind glass (worse, murky glass)? The teams that win, in football and in business, are the ones where the people in the stands would run through a wall for the people on the field. You don't buy that kind of loyalty with a discount code. You earn it the way Mexico is earning it: by being so visibly, joyfully for your people that they can't help but be there for you in return with all their heart.

The joy is the strategy, not the garnish

The clips coming out of Mexico's camp this June looked less like a boot camp and more like a family barbecue — players cracking up through goofy training drills, laughing between reps, visibly enjoying each other's company. And then, under the brightest lights of their careers, that same looseness showed up on the pitch. Watch Gilberto Mora, who at seventeen years old is the youngest player at this entire World Cup — a teenager who, on June 30th, became one of the youngest athletes ever to start a World Cup knockout match. He plays like he's having the time of his life, because he is. That's not immaturity. That's what psychological safety looks like at full sprint.

And it deepens. On June 24th, Mora shared the same match as Guillermo "Memo" Ochoa — forty years old, six World Cups behind him, the oldest man ever to represent Mexico on this stage. Picture that: the living legend and the seventeen-year-old on the same field, the torch passing in real time. When a giant like Ochoa reaches down to touch a teenager's boot in something like reverence (happened during practice) — honoring not what the kid has done yet, but what he so plainly is — that's the whole philosophy of belief made physical. The best leaders don't gatekeep greatness or make the young ones wait their turn to matter. They kneel down, point at the potential, and say I see it in you — out loud, in front of everyone.

This is where the research catches up to the eye test. Google's now-famous Project Aristotle studied hundreds of its own teams to find the secret sauce of the high performers, and the number one predictor wasn't raw talent or IQ — it was psychological safety, the shared belief that you won't be humiliated for taking a risk or making a mistake. Gallup's data pushes it into the P&L (Profit & Loss): the most engaged teams outperform the least engaged by roughly 23% in profitability and 18% in productivity, with dramatically lower absenteeism and turnover. And BetterUp put a number on belonging specifically, linking a high sense of belonging to a 56% jump in job performance and a 50% drop in turnover risk. A team that laughs together in June and beyond is not wasting time. It's building the exact conditions that let a 17-year-old play free in a knockout match instead of freezing.

Aguirre and Rafa Márquez, or: the Nate that Ted got right

Now watch what Javier Aguirre does with his second-in-command. His assistant is Rafael Márquez — five-time World Cup captain, one of the most beloved players in the country's history, a genuine icon. And Aguirre, a 66-year-old on his third tour with the national team, has been openly building him up rather than protecting his own shadow. Márquez isn't just along for the ride; he's the confirmed successor set to take the whole program after this tournament. Aguirre could have treated that as a threat. Instead, he treats it as the plan, and says so out loud. That's what good leaders do: They always build a line of succession into their work, developing the next generation of leaders.

If you've watched Ted Lasso, you know this is the Nate arc — but the version where the leader gets it right. Ted's whole gift was lifting the overlooked kit man into a coach, championing him publicly, handing him the spotlight. The tragedy of that show is what happens when someone stops feeling seen. The triumph unfolding in Mexico's dugout is the opposite: a secure leader who understands that elevating your best people publicly isn't a risk to your authority — it's the clearest evidence of it. Insecure leaders hoard credit. Great ones, like great coaches, know their legacy is measured by whom they raise up.

Meanwhile, on the other benches…

Contrast is a cruel but excellent teacher. That very same opening match on June 11th, South Africa finished with nine men on the field, after a coach who sat unengaged for a big part of the match, two players sent off, and later exited to Canada, after which coach Hugo Broos stepped to the microphone and diagnosed the loss as "a lack of power and speed." Notice what's conspicuously absent from that sentence: himself. The responsibility his leadership plays in this whole loss. There's a version of leadership that treats the team as raw material that failed to be good enough, instead of asking, "What did I fail to build?" Discipline on the field is a downstream symptom of culture off it — and a leader who reaches for external excuses is telling you exactly where the culture is coming from.

Austria offered a different flavor of the same lesson. A genuinely gifted squad under a respected coach, out 3-0 to Spain on July 2nd. Talent was never their problem. What I watched, as a viewer, was body language — teammates turning on each other when the pressure spiked. And that's the whole thesis, isn't it? Talent gets you to the tournament. Trust is what survives contact with adversity. A team that points fingers inward under stress and plays without proper unity and engagement doesn't have a skill gap. It has a leadership vacuum.

The results on that field are a leadership audit. And, in case you didn't guess it: In your company, too.

What no one gives you a chance to do, leadership lets you do anyway

This is the part that keeps me in this work. Nobody predicted this version of Mexico. The odds, the history, the curse — all of it said "same as always." And a well-led group of humans rewrote the story anyway. Not with new legs. With new belief, real safety, a coach who lifts his successor instead of fearing him, a fanbase folded into the team, and a phrase — ¿y si sí? — that gave a whole country permission to imagine. To BELIEVE.

I've watched the same thing happen in executive meetings and teams that looked far more doomed than any football pitch — the department stuck at the bottom of the engagement survey, the "difficult" employee who turned out to be a brilliant person in the wrong seat, the VIP client who is secretly halfway out the door. Change the leadership, and you change what that team is capable of, often faster than anyone believes possible.

So here's my challenge, and I mean it warmly and a little cheekily: look at your results as your leadership report card. If there's finger-pointing under pressure, disengagement in the corner, or clients watching from behind glass instead of singing in the rain with you — that's not a talent problem to outsource. That's a mirror. And if you don't love the reflection? On this July 3rd, Mexico is proof that 40 years of "we always lose this one" can end in a single tournament — the moment someone hangs the sign, believes the ¿y si sí?, and then does the real work of clearing the path so their people can succeed.

I'm Kirsten Penaloza, and my passion and mission are to help leaders build teams and work cultures where people feel they belong. Let's connect if you want to build a thriving company.