Built, not stumbled into

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I have been running a company long enough to be suspicious of overnight success stories. They almost never are.

So when two of them happened in the same sporting season this year, I went looking for what actually happened behind the scenes, and found something worth writing down properly.

In May, Arsenal won the English Premier League for the first time in twenty two years. A few weeks later, the New York Knicks won the NBA championship for the first time in fifty three years. Two long droughts, two clubs most people had written off, both ending within weeks of each other.

On the surface they look like unrelated upsets. Read into how each was built and they tell the same story, one I recognise from my own work.

Arsenal did not stumble into a title. They engineered one.

Before this season, Arsenal had finished second three years running. Second, second, second. The same joke got told every year, that they were always the bridesmaid and never the bride. They did not have the most expensive squad in the league. Manchester City did, and City had won most of the recent titles.

What Arsenal built instead was discipline. They conceded fewer goals than any team in the top five leagues in Europe, and when they wobbled in April and blew a nine point lead, they did not collapse. They won their next four games and held on.

The story is not that they were the most talented. It is that they were the most consistent over the longest period, and they recovered when it counted.

What I keep coming back to happened years before any of that. The people running the club studied their rivals in detail, the ages of their best players, the lengths of their contracts, how long their managers were likely to stay, and from that they identified a future window when the clubs that had dominated for a decade would begin to decline.

They built everything around being ready for it. That meant hard, unpopular decisions early. They moved on from expensive, well known players and were mocked for it. They signed younger players who could mature together rather than chasing the biggest names. And when the window opened, they were ready.

I have not seen a cleaner description of what it takes to build something.

At the company I am building, Seamfix, we are in the middle of our own version of this, doing work now that will not show up in results for some time because we believe a window is coming and we intend to be ready for it. The breakthrough that looks sudden to everyone else is the product of years of building that nobody claps for. The teams that win do the unglamorous work before the moment arrives. They do not scramble once it has.

One more detail. When Mikel Arteta took over, he had someone survey the staff and ask how they would describe working at the club. The word that came back most was "toxic." He spent years rebuilding the culture around three values, respect, commitment and passion.

Culture is not something that happens to an organisation. It is built on purpose, by people who decide what the standard is and then hold it.

The Knicks won because the team was greater than any single star.

Their best player, Jalen Brunson, is six foot two, which in basketball is small. In the Finals he was repeatedly scoring over a seven foot five opponent most people consider the future of the sport.

But Brunson was never playing alone. Years earlier he had won two college championships alongside two players who were now his teammates again, and the trust they built then carried into the biggest games of their lives. Through the playoffs the team kept falling behind and kept fighting back until they outlasted a more gifted opponent and won the title.

What makes it better is who these players were.

The league had discarded most of them at some point. Brunson was called too small. Karl-Anthony Towns was called too soft. Mikal Bridges was said not to be worth what the Knicks gave up for him. These were good players other teams had moved past, who came together, bought into a shared standard, and proved everyone wrong as a unit.

The decision that ties it together is Brunson's. In 2024 he signed for roughly a hundred and thirteen million dollars less than he could have earned if he had waited. That money is what gave the team room to build around him, and as the franchise's most important player, he had a say in who it brought in. He used it to reunite himself with teammates he had already won with, the ones he trusted.

Brunson has been honest that it was not pure selflessness, he made sure his family was secure first, but the most important player chose the team's ability to win over his own maximum reward.

The leader set the standard before he asked anyone else to meet it.

What I am taking from both.

Nobody arrives at the top in a single leap. Arsenal's title came from finishing second three times and learning from each one. The Knicks' title was built on relationships formed long before the trophy.

Both wins look sudden from the outside and were anything but.

If you are building anything that matters, a company, a team, a career, two questions are worth holding onto.

Get enough people answering yes to both, over a long enough period, and there is very little a team cannot achieve.

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