The 7 Powers of Sports Teams

Sports teams are obsessed with competitive advantages.

They look for them everywhere, but real advantages are hard to come by. That’s why Hamilton Helmer’s book, 7 Powers, caught my attention.1 Helmer offers a different way to think about competitive advantages: through what he calls Power.

Power is an inherently strong word. It’s fitting here because Helmer isn’t interested in fleeting advantages. He focuses on conditions that allow companies to outperform their competition over long time frames in ways that aren’t easily replicated. It’s the combination of magnitude and duration that elevates an edge to Power.

The 7 Powers were designed to explain and direct business strategy, but I’ve been thinking about them in terms of modern front offices. Which Powers exist in sports? And what do lasting competitive advantages look like? Let’s dive in.

Companies become more efficient, and their per-unit costs drop, as they grow in size.

Amazon has massive fixed technology and fulfillment infrastructure costs. As they sell more items, their network of warehouses and delivery drivers lowers per-package costs to levels that other retailers can’t match.

Sports teams can’t claim that Power in the same way.

They can implement coaching philosophies and training techniques that scale across groups of players, but the effectiveness of those programs relies much more on strong content than increased efficiency. It’s also easy to over-index on scalability, when individualized development plans and coaching are often more successful.

Similarly, soccer clubs with youth academy programs can leverage their facilities to host more players and teams, but many of the costs to do so, such as meals and staffing, aren’t fixed.

The value to the user increases as more people use the product or join the platform.2

Network economies don’t really exist in sports. At least not in the way they do in other industries. Neither rosters nor front offices are all that large, and additions don’t generally provide separation from the competition.

Stretching the application a bit, there’s a small network effect with great players. Their presence makes it more enticing for other players to join a team.

LeBron James signed with Philadelphia this offseason. When asked about it, his agent, Rich Paul, said that James wasn’t considering the 76ers until they traded for Jaylen Brown.3

To the degree the effect exists, it’s small, and it doesn’t fit the definition of Power. But it’s enough to make teams think about the second-order effects of roster building.

Adopting a new and better business model that your competitors are unable to copy or respond to.4

This is the first Power that feels like it applies to sports teams.

We have countless examples of teams that found success with a new way of doing things. The 2025 Los Angeles Rams led the league in yards and points with an offense that used 13 personnel (three tight ends and one running back) more than twice as much as anyone else. The Phoenix Suns won the most regular season games from 2004-2007 using their “seven seconds or less” offense that emphasized quick, efficient shots and more three-point attempts. And maybe most famously, the Oakland A’s fueled a strong run in the American League in the early 2000s by leaning more heavily on statistical analysis and undervalued skills to identify players.

The thing about counter-positioning in sports is that an advantage, while real, doesn’t last long. If a team is successful doing something new, their competition can copy them, and they almost certainly will. Copying your opponents is one of the most common strategies in sports.

It was novel when the Suns started taking more shots from distance and the A’s prioritized players who got on base. But ten years later, the NBA had teams shooting more threes than twos and statistical models were in every MLB front office.

The other way that counter-positioning in sports falls short of Power is that there aren’t real barriers. Kodak’s business model relied heavily on selling film. When competitors came along with digital cameras, Kodak couldn’t respond without massively disrupting their company.

Teams can change their tactics, structures, or operating principles whenever they’d like. The only things stopping them are artificial constraints like inertia and fear. It generally only requires a little courage for another team to catch up and level the playing field.

Customers remain with a company because switching to an alternative would be challenging and/or create problems.5

There’s little to no cost for players or employees to move from one team to another.

Contracts limit movement, but they don’t meet the bar for Power. They’re not structural obstacles and they eventually expire. Plus, the most coveted players and staff members typically have enough leverage to negotiate short-term deals or force their way out of situations even when they’re under contract.

The ability to charge more for similar goods based on reputation and trust.6

There are teams that immediately evoke thoughts of success. There are also teams that inspire the exact opposite feeling. Those reputational differences amount to branding power, and they can have huge impacts on the ways that clubs operate.

Market and history undoubtedly play a role in branding, but there’s a lot more to it. Your brand depends on how much you win, as well as the ways you win. Do you spend money? Do you take care of people? Are you accountable and supportive?

Branding is trust-based, meaning it takes more time to build a reputation than it does to damage one. But teams with strong brands wield real power over their competition.

Players are more likely to sign in places where they have a chance to win or where there are tools and coaches who can make them better. When I was with the Angels, we didn’t have a track record of developing pitchers. That made it much harder to acquire arms. Free agents would favor other clubs that had more recent success, and in some cases, players in the draft would give us higher bonus demands than teams that they preferred to land with.

A strong brand also allows you to attract staff members, negotiate better pricing with vendors, generate more revenue, and execute with more buy-in and support.

That last one is something I’m not sure enough teams take advantage of. Branding reduces friction, and that applies not only to teams already succeeding but also those on a path to improve.

Look no further than Sam Hinkie and The Process with the 76ers. Whether you see The Process as a success or not, it’s fairly undeniable that Hinkie was able to go to extreme lengths in part because the organization and fans rallied around his messaging. Branding opened paths that weren’t available to his competition.

Individuals can hold branding power, too. Minnesota Vikings’ head coach and play caller, Kevin O’Connell, has generally been held in much higher esteem around the league than his team as a whole. O’Connell was dubbed the “quarterback whisperer” for his ability to produce quality offenses with Sam Darnold, Josh Dobbs, Carson Wentz, and Nick Mullens under center. His reputation has helped Minnesota recruit players and staff to join the Vikings.7

Branding is a real Power in sports. It’s not exclusive, meaning more than one team can hold a strong reputation at a time. But it’s one of the things that allows organizations to get to and stay at the top.

Something you have that your competitors can’t access, such as intellectual property, patents, or people.8

Cornered resources are probably the most straightforward example of the 7 Powers in sports. Star players offer an immediate and obvious advantage.

Interestingly, Helmer argues that movie stars, who share similarities with athletes, are not cornered resources.

“Consider movie stars. A turn by Brad Pitt would probably advance box office prospects, therefore proving “coveted,” but his compensation captures much or all of this additional value and so fails the Power test.”

I see it a little differently. It’s not that players can’t be cornered resources. It’s that the bar for what constitutes a cornered resource is extremely high.

While no one wants to rehash whether Joe Flacco is elite, that’s sort of the conversation necessary to determine whether a team has, or has a chance to acquire, a true difference-maker. We’re only talking about the handful of stars who create a meaningful edge for their teams. Players like Patrick Mahomes, Lionel Messi, and A’ja Wilson.

As far as cost, the research generally says that star players are significantly underpaid. In baseball, many of the best players make well below their market worth until they reach six years of service. And even then, stars like Shohei Ohtani generate huge amounts of surplus value relative to their contracts.

I’m less convinced coaches, executives, or anyone else besides players should be considered cornered resources.9 It’s nearly impossible to make the type of impact that top players can. Any organizational edge from great leaders can more accurately be attributed to branding or process power.

Cornered resources in sports are limited to the franchise players — the very best of them. These stars don’t guarantee success on their own, but they put teams at a huge advantage before considering any other factors.

Competitors can’t replicate your success even when you tell them, in real detail, how you do what you do.10

Process power is the rarest of the 7 Powers. That doesn’t make it better than the others. It’s just less common. With time and attention, most things successful organizations do can be replicated.

And yet, the best teams have process power in spades. In fact, I find process power to be the most durable form of power in sports.

The New England Patriots are the most successful NFL team of this century. Over twenty seasons, they posted 19 winning records and captured six Super Bowl titles.

Every team aspired to be the Pats. Many took it a step further, hiring one of Bill Belichick’s assistant coaches to try to capture some of the Patriots’ magic. But it never worked. The nine assistants won just 39% of their games as head coaches with other franchises. Despite working with Belichick and seeing how New England operated every day, they were unable to come anywhere near their former team’s success.

Meanwhile, the Patriots lost a top assistant every other year and never slowed down. Some of that is undoubtedly that New England had a cornered resource in Tom Brady, but it also suggests that they weren’t only winning because of specific tactics or strategies. There was something about the environment in New England that made the sum greater than the parts.

For as long as I can remember, teams have tried to recreate the success of others with fairly mixed results. NBA teams consistently hired coaches from Gregg Popovich’s staff with the Spurs, MLB teams have hired executives who worked for the Rays or spent time under Theo Epstein, and the NFL is full of head coaches who learned under Kyle Shanahan or Sean McVay.

Even when those individuals have found success, it’s rarely been because they were able to replicate the past. There are too many moving parts and too many variables. I worked for the Rays for three years and while I can tell you plenty about what makes the organization special, it would be a fool’s errand to try to copy that somewhere else.

Teams that sustain success do so because of countless people, decisions, and behaviors that work in unison. Process power is essentially culture. Your competitors can take most things from you, but they can’t really take your culture. No matter how much they wish they could.

Helmer says that a successful strategy framework must be “simple but not simplistic.” I like the 7 Powers because they’re easy to understand and apply in any setting.

In sports, they show us not only what teams are capable of, but in some ways, where their time and attention are best spent. Teams can almost always get better, but there is surprisingly little they can do to keep their competition from improving in similar ways. And many advantages don’t reflect Power.

The ones that do take real time and energy to produce. But when your team name becomes synonymous with success, you’re able to pencil a star into your starting lineup, or you build a culture that’s fully your own, the investment is well worth it.