Spring Soccer Season
People Leadership Training
Context
Nike wanted to equip 600 managers with practical people leadership skills they could apply in the day-to-day reality of leading teams — from supporting growth and navigating difficult conversations to helping people operate at their best.
The challenge was to design and deliver a large-scale learning experience that felt fully relevant to Genk’s football stadium and brought real Nike coaching situations to life through a team-based, football-themed format.
We built a fully custom experience where cohorts worked together on realistic coaching cases in a competitive season-style game designed for scale, learning, and repeat use.
Objectives
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Build Practical People Leadership Skills: Help managers practise how to respond to the real situations that arise in teams every day.
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Support People Back to Their Best: Equip coaches to handle a wide range of people leadership situations — from growth and development to absence, reintegration, and handling difficult moments.
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Make Learning Active and Scalable: Design a format that could engage 150 participants at once, across 4 editions, without losing quality or depth.
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Bring the Venue into the Experience: Use the football stadium setting to create a learning format that felt relevant, memorable, and true to the spirit of Nike.
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Strengthen Learning Through Teams: Build the experience around cohort-based learning so managers could calibrate, solve cases, and learn together.
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Create a Format That Lives Beyond the Event: Develop an experience that could be reused in follow-up sessions, onboarding, and smaller-group training.
Format
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Two-hour, large-scale people leadership experience delivered at Genk’s football stadium.
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Designed for 150 Nike managers at a time, across four Coach Conference editions.
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Built around cohort-based team play, with managers working in groups throughout the session.
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Structured as a football-themed season game played on large physical league-table carpets.
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Combined realistic Nike coaching cases with expert evaluation.
Activity Description
Taking on the Role of a Coaching Team
Participants worked in teams and were told to imagine that they were the coaching staff of their own football club. Their job was to help their players perform well across a full season. This created a clear parallel with Nike’s reality, where these managers are responsible for helping their people perform at their best.
In the middle of the room was a giant game carpet, designed like a football league table inside a stadium. Each team was represented by a Nike football placed on that board.
As teams earned points during the session, they physically moved their football up the table, so everyone could see the competition unfold in real time.
Solving Real Nike People Challenges
To earn those points, teams had to work through realistic coaching cases based on situations Nike managers face in real life. Some cases focused on helping a coachee grow into a new opportunity. Others focused on difficult conversations, return-to-work situations, reintegration after absence, or deciding what support, process, or escalation was needed.
Teams discussed each case together, agreed on the best response, and presented their thinking to Nike People Solutions experts. Those experts reviewed the team’s response, gave immediate feedback, and decided how many scoring opportunities the team had earned.
Turning Strong Performance into Visible Progress
Once a team had been evaluated, it took part in a short scoring activity. The result determined how far their football could move up the giant league carpet. This created a clear link between learning and play: the better a team handled the coaching case, the more chances it had to progress in the season.
Because every team worked at its own pace, all 150 participants stayed active throughout the session — discussing real leadership situations, learning from expert feedback, and watching their team climb the standings.
The result was a large-scale people leadership experience that made serious coaching practice feel active, memorable, and directly relevant to Nike’s day-to-day reality.
With their feet?
