Column: Buying a professional football team? Ten lessons learned: #8 - The president needs to back off and respect the chain of command, otherwise only lame ducks will stay onboard

The bond between a football club's top management trio - the president, the CEO and the sporting director - needs to be extremely strong. Their relationship must be based on trust, and it needs to be crystal clear exactly who is responsible for what.

Alexander Janssen was involved on the ownership side of two clubs, one in Belgium and the other in Spain, where he learned that the football industry is not only extremely competitive but very, very different to the environment that he used to work in.

As a successful consultant with deep knowledge of turnarounds, he inexplicably experienced a sudden disregard of the discipline and long-term mindset that normally characterised his every move.

 Janssen has written ten columns about the insights he gained from being involved with those two clubs. This is the eighth.