03rd July 2026
Messi and Ronaldo were HiPo Once, Too
What the World Cup Exposes About Your Talent System | Part One
Somewhere in your organisation there’s a list.
On it are the names marked “high potential” (HiPo). It gets reviewed once a year, usually in a warm conference room, and everyone leaves feeling reassured.
Now picture a different list. A boy joins a football academy at thirteen. The club bets that he’s worth the investment and puts specialised conditioning, training, and coaching behind him.
That bet isn’t the achievement, it’s the starting gun for roughly a decade of relentless competition before anyone calls him the best in the world.
Both lists use the same word: potential. They don’t mean the same thing.
High potential is a forecast, not a result
It’s a bet that someone will become something they aren’t yet.
Most organisations treat the label itself as the finish line: they identify the potential, add the name to a program, and wait. The waiting is where these programs fail.
Football has a conversion engine. Most businesses don’t
Messi and Ronaldo were both spotted as children and made their World Cup debuts as young men in 2006.
The label didn’t turn forecast into fact, the system around it did: real competition every week, minutes on the pitch, visible performance, honest feedback, and immediate consequences for failure.
Potential met reality constantly, and reality kept score.
Most corporate HiPo programs skip all of that. They offer a list, a workshop, and a good feeling. Nobody puts the potential under the kind of pressure that would either convert it or expose it.
The conversion rate is brutal, and we hide from it
For every Messi or Ronaldo, an academy runs through hundreds of promising players who never make a World Cup squad. Football accepts that conversion rate openly.
Corporate talent systems rarely do, we behave as though nearly everyone on the list will make it, which is how a bench looks deep on paper and disappears the moment a critical role opens up.
The third stage of potential
Most talent frameworks stop at two stages: potential identified and potential realised. There’s a third stage that gets ignored almost everywhere: what happens after the peak.
Every high performer eventually passes the top of their individual output. The explosive athlete slows down. The rainmaker’s network ages. The technical expert is no longer the sharpest person in the room. That moment isn’t an ending, it’s a fork in the road, with two very different paths.
Evolution: The former star adapts. Instead of trying to be the player they once were, they become what the team needs next, the standard-setter, the mentor, the steady presence who still delivers when it counts. Their contribution changes shape rather than shrinking.
Entropy: The same person clings to a role they can no longer fill, resents the talent coming up behind them, and quietly blocks the pipeline. Nobody plans this outcome. It just happens, because entropy is the default state when nothing actively counters it.
We saw the evolution path recently. Cristiano Ronaldo, forty-one and past his physical peak, was substituted with the game against Croatia still undecided.
He’d already kept Portugal alive by scoring a leveling penalty, his first World Cup knockout goal in six attempts, before a younger substitute headed in the winner in stoppage time.
Fewer minutes, a sharper role, the decisive moment when it mattered, then the next generation closed it out. The next day, the only debate in Portugal was whether the young striker should start ahead of him.
That’s what a healthy leadership pipeline looks like: the veteran still delivers, and the successor is already pushing.
Why HiPo evolution isn’t automatic
Two things have to happen, and neither is guaranteed.
First, the individual has to adapt, which is harder than it sounds. Elite performers often build their identity around being the performer. Shifting toward making others better is a genuine identity transition, and capable people stall on it, usually not from ego but because nobody helped them navigate the change.
Second, the organisation has to do its part: design the role evolution requires, name the shift early and honestly, support people who make the transition well, and act, respectfully but decisively, on those who won’t or can’t. A past-peak star left without a plan isn’t a sign of loyalty. It’s an unmanaged risk sitting inside your pipeline and your culture.
Football manages this transition without sentiment; the next generation is already on the pitch, forcing the issue.
Organisations tend to be far more sentimental about it, and that sentimentality is exactly how entropy wins.
4 question test for your HiPo list
Run each name on your high-potential list through these four questions:
- What, specifically, are we betting this person will become?
- What designed experience this quarter is converting that potential into evidence?
- What would tell us the bet is paying off, and what would tell us it isn’t?
- What does it cost us if we’re wrong?
If you can’t answer all four for a given name, that person is being listed, not developed.
Potential is a hypothesis
Performance is the evidence. A HiPo program that never tests the hypothesis is an expensive way to feel good about your bench.
Justin Miles
Categories: Uncategorised
