As I presented at Maintec 2025, I am someone who’s spent a lifetime obsessing over football and who follows the Dutch national team closely. The last eight years of that lifetime, I have found another passion: helping companies optimize asset management strategies. I’ve come to see striking similarities between the two worlds. Not just metaphorically, but structurally, strategically, and operationally.
Maintenance Doesn’t Win Alone
In football, even the best striker is only as good as the supply behind him. It’s the same in asset management. Maintenance teams don’t operate in a vacuum—they need early warnings from operations, and safe working conditions ensured by safety and compliance teams. Everyone has a role, and everyone needs to play it well.
At Ultimo, we talk about this as the Circle of Collaboration. Think of a Rondo drill in football training. Players form a circle, keeping the ball moving with purpose. Swap the ball for data, and that’s how great EAM works: operations, maintenance, and safety passing insights, instructions, and decisions in a smooth loop.
When it works, it’s effortless. But when one party breaks formation, when communication lags or silos form, the whole system stutters.
From Firefighting to Game Planning
Too many maintenance teams are stuck reacting: a machine fails, people scramble, and budgets get swallowed fixing the same recurring issues. This is different in football, where teams don't come up with their game plan during the match. They prepare, analyze, and adapt before kick-off.
The same applies in asset management. With the right data - clean, structured, and relevant - you shift from reactive chaos to proactive leadership. You stop firefighting and start coaching.
Which assets are your weak links? Where is downtime creeping in? What’s the fix, and how often does it repeat? Good data doesn’t just diagnose - it predicts and prevents. And that’s how you move from survival mode to performance mode.
Who Plays Where?
Here’s how I like to see the team:
Maintenance are your strikers. On the front line they keep your assets working and help you achieve goals
Operations are your defenders. As the first line of defense, they want to make sure they keep a clean sheet in their day-to-day.
Safety are your midfielders. They pick up the loose ends and make sure you are in control.
When all three play in harmony, you get Total Asset Management. Just like Total Football, the Dutch philosophy where every player can adapt, every role is dynamic, and the team flows as one.
Systems That Coach, Not Just Record
Behind every winning team is a great support system: coaches, analysts, medics. In asset management, your EAM system is that support staff.
Ultimo is built to be your tactical assistant. It connects seamlessly to your enterprise resource planning (ERP), IoT sensors, and digital tools like GIS, BIM, or digital twins. It supports every phase of work, from safety permitting, to work orders, to performance monitoring.
But most importantly, it keeps everyone aligned. Safety, maintenance, and operations work from the same system, with shared data and synchronized goals. That’s the difference between collaboration and chaos.
Learning from Liverpool: The Data Playbook
Still think data is just admin work? Think about William Spearman. He was a physicist at CERN helping discover the Higgs boson before becoming Liverpool FC’s data analyst. Now he uses analytics to study passing patterns, space control, and tactical decision-making.
Imagine bringing that level of insight to the factory floor.
What if you reviewed breakdowns like missed scoring opportunities? Planned inspection routes like match tactics? Used downtime reports the way coaches use match footage?
This is the next frontier of industrial maintenance. And with the right platform and mindset, it’s not only possible, it’s within reach.
Final Thoughts: Trust Is the Winning Formula
Whether we're in the stadium, on the pitch or on the shop floor, three principles hold, three principles hold:
Play as a team
Use your data wisely
Build trust
Trust in your tools. Trust in your teammates. Trust in the data that drives every decision.
Because if there’s one thing football taught me - and asset management confirmed - it’s this: Data changes the game. But teamwork wins it.
Get in touch to learn more about our EAM game.
