Look Past the Marquee Name
25 JUN, 2026
By Jean Maunoury from iM Global Partner
For those having any doubt, I am obviously backing France this summer, and I should declare the bias before I go any further. What strikes me about this French side, though, is that it no longer depends on one or even two big names only.
Watch the sides that actually lift trophies and you rarely find one built around a superstar playing for himself rather than for the others. Even the Ballon d'Or, in the modern era, has tended to reward players whose teams won the biggest trophies, with their club or their country, and that is something no individual can do alone. The sides that lift cups are the ones where the stars blend in and lift their teammates, where everyone moves as one, pressing together, covering for each other, and trusting whoever is best placed to take the shot. The same is true of investment teams.
It is tempting to back the star manager. A stock-picker on a hot streak feels as safe as a squad built around one brilliant forward. But a team that funnels every ball to its single talisman is fragile: when the star is marked out, injured or off form, no one else can step up. Worse, the pattern stifles creativity and breeds the frustration that drives other players away. In asset management, the equivalent is a fund or strategy that depends entirely on one portfolio manager’s conviction or one analyst’s ideas, with less experienced colleagues reduced to fetching data rather than challenging investment cases.
Collaborative teams play a different game. Ideas are debated openly, the best argument wins regardless of seniority, and risk is owned collectively. Analysts are encouraged to challenge the portfolio manager, not simply serve them. This spreads skill across the whole side, so performance does not hinge on one individual, and blind spots get caught because more than one person is looking. It also means deliberately preparing the next generation, like the young players sent on for the closing minutes and assembling complementary profiles: the patient compounder, the contrarian, the risk sceptic, much as a football side needs a playmaker, a dependable defender and a clinical finisher, all pulling towards the same goal rather than competing for the limelight.
Football has just delivered the perfect case study. For a decade until 2024, Paris Saint-Germain assembled galácticos, some of the best players in the world in their positions and never won the Champions League. The turnaround did not happen overnight. Luis Enrique arrived in 2023 to a dressing room still built around individuals, and it took him the better part of two seasons to reshape the squad, earn buy-in and instil a clear set of values: relentless pressing, collective responsibility and trust in the system over any one name. Only in 2025 did that work bear fruit. Freed from the one-star model, PSG became a cohesive unit of younger players who pressed and shared the ball as a group, letting a “second generation” thrive. The reward was the club's first European Cup in 2025, a record 5-0 rout of Inter Milan, followed by a second consecutive title this season. The team got better the moment it learnt to make its talent work together.
That habit may now serve France at this World Cup, since five of its players come from the PSG side. Their collective spirit and shared experience of winning and losing the biggest matches together can lift their teammates, much as a well-drilled investment team passes its approach on to the rest of the group.
The 2026 World Cup may offer the next test of these ideas. France arrives with one of the deepest benches in the tournament and a squad age at around 27 years, among the youngest of the favourites. Their strength is no longer a single name but a production line of experienced and young talent ready to step up when called upon.
For investors choosing a manager, the lesson is clear: look past the marquee name and ask how the team actually works. Are ideas contested or simply approved? Is talent deep or concentrated? The strongest long-term records belong not to the team with the best single player, but to the one that plays best together.
None of this means teamwork rules out individual brilliance. Winners will always need their match-winners, and Mbappé’s second goal against Sénégal was a case in point: not only superb, but struck at the very moment France needed its captain to step up.
