#473 From the Attic to the Arena: Leadership, Focus and Timing in the Journey of Online Soccer Manager
From the Attic to the Arena: Leadership, Focus and Timing in the Journey of Online Soccer Manager
By Niels Brabandt
Few entrepreneurial stories illustrate the realities of leadership growth, strategic focus and personal transition as clearly as the journey of Jeroen Derwort, founder of Online Soccer Manager. What began as a teenage programming experiment in an attic evolved into a globally played game with more than one hundred million lifetime players. The path between those two points offers valuable lessons for decision-makers across industries.
Starting without a safety net
Online Soccer Manager was not created in a venture-backed ecosystem with accelerators, pitch decks and investor networks. It emerged in a period when online gaming was considered niche and commercially insignificant. Jeroen Derwort started early, without capital, without contacts and without a detailed plan. That lack of awareness of risk proved to be an advantage. Ignorance, in this case, enabled experimentation.
The initial idea was deceptively simple: a football management game that was genuinely online, socially competitive and playable in minutes per day rather than hours. This focus on accessibility and continuity differentiated the product from existing alternatives and laid the foundation for long-term engagement.
Growth through constraints and focus
The early success of Online Soccer Manager created new challenges. Infrastructure costs, technical limitations and operational demands forced difficult decisions, including temporarily shutting the game down. Rather than ending the project, this moment triggered an unexpected turning point. A local company offered support, not acquisition, enabling Derwort to formalise the business while retaining ownership and control.
One of the most consequential leadership decisions came years later. Faced with limited resources and multiple parallel projects, the team chose to stop everything except Online Soccer Manager. This decision to focus entirely on the product with the greatest potential marked the beginning of sustained international growth. For decision-makers, the lesson is clear: strategic subtraction is often more powerful than expansion.
Timing and strategic foresight
The long-term success of Online Soccer Manager cannot be explained by persistence alone. Strategic timing played a decisive role. When mobile platforms emerged, the team committed early to mobile development while competitors hesitated. This shift proved critical. Products that failed to adapt were overtaken rapidly, regardless of their prior market dominance.
This moment highlights a core leadership responsibility: recognising inflection points early and acting decisively, even when the return is uncertain.
Leadership evolution and personal limits
As the company grew from a handful of people to dozens, the leadership role changed fundamentally. Processes, structures and agile methods became necessary. What had once been an entrepreneurial playground turned into a complex organisation requiring coordination, delegation and formal management.
Derwort recognised a reality many founders struggle to accept. While capable, he no longer enjoyed the role required at that stage of growth. Rather than clinging to control, he chose to step aside fully, empowering a new management team. This decision was not driven by failure but by self-awareness.
For decision-makers, this illustrates a critical distinction between competence and motivation. Leading effectively also means knowing when not to lead.
Exiting without illusion
The eventual sale of the company followed years of uncertainty, failed negotiations and emotional strain. The experience challenges the myth of the exit as a definitive endpoint. Success did not arrive as a moment of closure but as a transition into a different phase, both professionally and personally.
Derwort’s reflections underscore that leadership journeys do not follow linear narratives. They are shaped by timing, resilience, focus and the willingness to let go.
What decision-makers can learn
From attic to global arena, the story of Online Soccer Manager offers enduring lessons. Start small, focus relentlessly, adapt early and recognise when your role must change. Leadership is not defined by permanence but by responsibility at each stage of growth.
Niels Brabandt
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More on this topic in this week's videocast and podcast with Niels Brabandt: Videocast / Apple Podcasts / Spotify
For the videocast’s and podcast’s transcript, read below this article.
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Podcast and Videocast Transcript
Niels Brabandt
How to build something great. I'm not sure if you are aware of that, but there was something called Online Soccer Manager, which I spent my whole youth with, and there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people out there who still play it or played it, millions of people who played it in their lives. And we today have the inventor of that with us. Hello and welcome, Jeroen Devord.
Jeroen Derwort
Yeah, great to be here. Thank you.
Niels Brabandt
Thank you very much for making the time. That is truly something. Basically, my whole youth now is reappearing in front of me.
Niels Brabandt
So when you started that, and let's face it, it was a very different time in the IT industry back then. There was no vibe coding, no AI. It was basically all you had to type it, and you had to debug it with your own eyes, finding everything.
Niels Brabandt
How did you get the idea? How did you get the idea saying, "I'm going on this endeavor because the chances back then to survive, especially financially, were minimal back then"?
Jeroen Derwort
Yeah, I was lucky not to know that at the time. I think that is something that always helps. Ignorance is bliss in that case. And I was still at school, so I was lucky in that sense as well that I started early and I just tried something. And yeah, if you don't have family to support or something, you can just try. And that's what I did.
Jeroen Derwort
And yeah, back then there were some football management games, but they were not online. Or if they were online, then you didn't have the real player and club names in them. And I wanted the game to include that. And I couldn't find it. And yeah, I was programming already for a long time. I did that since I was 10. And in the beginning, of course, programming is maybe not a term to use for that, but just some scripting and trying some stuff out on the computer. And the computers in the '90s were still quite new, right, for a lot of people at least.
Niels Brabandt
I got my first computer in 1990. My first proper computer in 1993. I got my C64 in, I think, 1989.
Jeroen Derwort
Yeah, yeah. So that was a comparable computer. I owned the MSX computer, which was comparable to the C64. And yeah, it was just a lot of fun. You had colors, you had sound, you had a chip that you could program. And it was so slow and not that great, but it worked. And I managed to squeeze some games out of that, but I wasn't good enough at that time to really create something memorable.
Jeroen Derwort
But when the internet came and I got a PC, I tried also making websites. And I was quite that worked out sometimes. And when I thought about having a game online, I thought, "Okay, this is a good thing because you don't have to download anything. Everybody can play. We can do that as a social experience against each other and see who is the best football manager."
Jeroen Derwort
And I did play some of those football management games. And then you had to switch seats. So someone was playing, and then you had to wait. And then you went away and the other person came. And yeah, so it was really not a multiplayer experience that I liked. And I thought if everybody just makes their lineups, determines their tactics during the day, and then you have a match every day, you keep players engaged, then it's nice. And that doesn't have to be that complex, right? It's just setting your team and be done with it, basically. It takes you five or ten minutes per day. So it's not taking you hours.
Jeroen Derwort
And yeah, that worked out quite well. So when we started, I just started with my friends. But sooner than later, friends of their friends were joining in, and I kept expanding it. And that's basically how I started.
Niels Brabandt
So how, and that, of course, is the question which many people face. How do you make it big?
Niels Brabandt
Because people often say, "You want to go big, but then you need the money. And when you don't have the money, you can't go big. When you need the money, people are probably stealing your idea or they give you bad contracts."
Niels Brabandt
So how from this, "Okay, let's do this with friends," to what ended up being a multimillion player game, how did that happen?
Jeroen Derwort
It didn't happen overnight. So what happened was that I didn't have the money. I didn't have the contacts or whatever. And I started small in the Netherlands only. And when that, yeah, basically outgrew me, so it became too big to host it and there was a lot of money involved to pay for servers and bandwidth and all those things, I had to stop it even for a while. But when I stopped it, I did put a message on the website saying, "Okay."
Niels Brabandt
Did you ever think of stopping it completely, or was it clear to you?
Jeroen Derwort
Yeah, I just killed it. But I killed it, but I did post a sign on the URL, on SoccerManager.com, saying, "Okay, this is just above my head. I cannot continue it. But if you want to help me, this is my mail and this is my phone number." And actually, somebody called me. It was a company around the corner, basically, in The Hague. I'm living in Zoetermeer, which is, let's say, a 20-minute drive from The Hague. And they said, "Yeah, why don't you come by and we can show you how you can build this further. And we don't want to buy it from you or anything, but we can help you set up your own company." And so that's what I did.
Jeroen Derwort
And from there, yeah, in the Netherlands, it grew further. And it was just a matter of keeping it technically sound, right? So keep it going from a technical perspective. And that's something that I could do. But when I wanted to go bigger than that, so really to go to other countries, that was the difficult part. And I knew that I couldn't do that alone.
Jeroen Derwort
So at that point, we were talking around 2001, 2002. I was just still alone. And yeah, I wanted also to bring this to other countries because I thought it's not just the Netherlands that likes football, right? There's other countries that like it too, and much bigger countries even. So why not do that? And I found some people that wanted to work with me. I didn't have any contacts or whatever. So I found my neighbor and my brother, my brother Bowie, and my neighbor Frank. They said, "Yeah, we like your project. And why don't we help you?" And luckily, that worked out quite well because my brother is really good in making things beautiful. He's a graphic designer by trade. And my neighbor is actually a very outgoing person. So he wanted to go to do marketing and do business contacts and HR, things like that. And we still had to figure everything out, right? It was not that we had all the stuff prepared and knew what we were doing. So it took us years to actually build the thing that we wanted to build. And maybe we were, I think, with the timing, we were lucky that nobody else had just passed us by or something or did the same thing in a better way.
Niels Brabandt
I was thinking that some corporations show up and say, "Hey, let's just steal the idea, take our resource, and bring it to the market." That didn't happen.
Jeroen Derwort
No, I think at that time, the browser, it was a browser game originally, was really seen as a small market that wasn't really taken seriously. It still isn't really taken that much seriously, but a lot more than back then. And people were just, the bigger corporations were focused on console and PC, but not on browser and mobile later, of course. So yeah, we could take our time figuring everything out.
Jeroen Derwort
But then after a while, we created a lot of games also. And that was just not a good thing because we were too little people doing too many things, sorry, too few people doing too many things. And yeah, we had to focus back on the one game that we knew had the potential, which was Online Soccer Manager. So I think around 2009, so eight years later, so that's really a long time, we finally figured it out. And we stopped all the other games that we made. We made a National Team Manager and an entrepreneurial game and a couple of other games that were really fun. But we said, "Okay, we'll do only Online Soccer Manager. Focus all our efforts on that."
Jeroen Derwort
And when we got some collaboration requests because we did have the game, people were playing it. It was just not that big. We got some collaboration requests. And one was in the Arab world in Jordan. And they said, "Well, we want to work with you. So why don't you make an Arab version for us, right?" And that's quite difficult because it's a different language, also a different character set, and a lot of technical details needed to be adjusted. So it was a lot of work. But we could do it because we were just a team of five, but we worked all five on that project at that point. And of course, keeping the game alive, that was there. And that worked out really, really well. And from then on, we kept growing and kept investing back all the money that we made. So we basically did it bootstrapped.
Niels Brabandt
Okay. When you now tell me you grew and you grew and you grew, isn't one risk there? Because when you start out, there's a certain vibe to these kind of, "We are five people. Put all the effort in. This is our life and everything." And then you grow larger and larger and larger. And when you grow larger, there's always the risk of making things a bit corporate-like, where people say, "That's not the vibe where I started here." Did this happen with you?
Jeroen Derwort
Yeah, absolutely. That happened, yeah.
Niels Brabandt
How do you handle it?
Jeroen Derwort
Yeah, I think until 15 people, maybe 20, I was really happy also doing everything and bringing in some structure. So we created processes. We created guides. And if people came in, they were onboarded. And you have all kinds of things, the corporate things that you need to do.
Jeroen Derwort
If you grow bigger, you cannot just call out something and everybody knows it. You really need to have meetings and stuff. So we introduced Scrum, for example, at that point.
Niels Brabandt
Agile methods, yeah.
Jeroen Derwort
Yeah, around 2010, we introduced that, which was really helping us, making the most of people coming in. So at some point, we were with 50 people, right? So that's quite different from five. And at that point, I thought, "Okay, this is for me also a very different job."
Jeroen Derwort
I liked also to be in the code and thinking about game features and thinking about marketing, all the stuff, right? Like an entrepreneur, especially in the beginning, you can do everything. You need to do everything. And of course, there were some things I liked and others I didn't so much like. But I wanted to be involved in everything. And that became harder. And it was not the best thing to do.
Jeroen Derwort
So I recognized that also. There were programmers that were better than me. There were marketers that were better than me. There were testers that were better than me. So it was like you were walking there and making sure they could do their jobs. But yeah, you get all the meetings and all the overhead. And I didn't like that so much.
Jeroen Derwort
So we struggled with that quite a lot. But because we were still growing and we made some strategic, I think, very good choices. So for example, when the mobile devices came along, right, the iPhone was introduced. We developed a mobile app. And then you think that's super, yeah, everybody should have, but not everybody did that. So some companies, and it was another game called Hattrick, which was quite popular. Maybe you played it.
Niels Brabandt
Yes, yeah. Hattrick.
Jeroen Derwort
Yeah, it was a fun game.
Niels Brabandt
Online Soccer Manager, yeah.
Jeroen Derwort
Yeah, yeah, it was a fun game. But they decided not to make a mobile app. And that decimated them. So a long time, they were much bigger than Online Soccer Manager. But at some point, they were like 10 times smaller than Xem. So that made a huge difference that we were on time with that and pushed all our efforts to make a good Android app, make a good iPhone app. And that's where it still is today. So as you said, millions of people, I think that more than 100 million even played OSM. And at the moment, I think the monthly active users is around 3 to 4 million.
Niels Brabandt
Brilliant. When we now look at that, so you basically started this in your child's room and then became an international corporation. Do you think that it's possible? Because that's a question many people have.
Niels Brabandt
Do you think it's possible that the same person is running the business from the scratch to international corporation? Because the demands, when you're from scratch, it's basically debugging and getting people on board. When you're international, it's from tax compliance to investment bankers, investor relations, and a ton of international regulation. It's a completely different ballgame, literally, in this case. So do you think that the same people can lead the business no matter where you are in which stage, or is there a stage where you say it's better when you leave?
Jeroen Derwort
Yeah, I think, well, there are examples, of course. I think that show that people can do it, that they can grow with their business or maybe change with their business. I don't think it's necessarily always growth. But yeah, so it can be done.
Jeroen Derwort
But I think for me, I recognize that even though I don't think I was a bad leader at that point, I did make some mistakes. But I think that everybody makes mistakes. But I don't think I was doing a bad job or anything, but I wasn't liking it, right? So I thought, "Okay, I'm really eager to start something new, be back at that point where you don't know what's going to happen. You have something that you believe in. You're working super hard to achieve it with a small group of people." And that was something I wanted to do again.
Jeroen Derwort
And luckily, I did get the chance to do that again. But at that point, of course, I had to first take care of the business that I had. And it was doing so well that, and you see that with some founders also, and I have some friends that are in that position. They have such a great business, which is at a point where they just have to keep it going and maybe grow it a bit, that everything that you will do besides that seems insignificant. And that can also keep you back from doing other things.
Jeroen Derwort
So when I voiced also that I would want to step aside, someone said to me, "Yeah, then you have to do it all out, right? You have to go. You don't have to be like a chairman or a president or some role that you find for yourself that you can still step back in and take control again. Because if you do that, then the people that are there will know that you can do it and won't feel complete freedom. And also, you will be bound in your head still with the company and with what is happening there."
Jeroen Derwort
So at some point, I think that is after not only the growth of the company, but also trying to sell it. So I tried to sell it for seven years. And I think after four or five years, I thought, "Okay, this is taking me too long. And it's an emotionally stressed thing to do. So let's try the other way, which is more in control of myself." And stepping aside, you can point to new people, a new management team, which was hard to do and hard to find. But I could do it without external approval.
Jeroen Derwort
So for example, the selling of the company, in three cases, it happened minutes even before the final signature, right? Maybe exaggerated, but in my head, at least, I thought we are there. Everything is arranged. We have an amount. Everybody's happy with what will happen. And then something happens, right? So some guy was fired. Another guy, another time, some lawyers came in and said, "Yeah, we still have some questions. So we cannot proceed." So it was like things totally out of our own control. And that made me think, "Okay, let's do it the other way. Let's bring in a management team. Let's step aside. And then the management team can sell the company." And that eventually worked out. Took a bit longer than I hoped, but it did work out.
Niels Brabandt
Excellent, excellent. Yeah, I think there are many solutions. I remember that when Minecraft was sold, that suddenly the owner simply went online and said, "Hey, does anyone want to buy it?" And then suddenly Microsoft turned up. So there are certain points. And now you wrote a book about that. So Skoll, Online Soccer Manager: From the Attic to the Arena. Tell us about your book.
Jeroen Derwort
Yeah, so what I noticed is that I tell the story of Online Soccer Manager, of course, more often. And I have a lot of small stories that I tell. And I thought it would be nice to have the whole story in a book, right? So what I did is I wrote a book that is, or a story that is a story. It's not like a set of lessons. I think if you read it, and I got a lot of feedback from people saying that they love to read it and that they read it in a day, even though it's 200 pages. But it's really a personal story. So what kind of mistakes were there? What happened? And then you can find the lessons in that story. And that is what it is.
Jeroen Derwort
So I think that also for a gaming studio, I don't know a lot of those stories. I really like reading about entrepreneurs and about what they experience and companies, right? So like Twitter and like Steve Jobs and Musk and others. Airbnb is a great story. Shoodog is a great story. So books like that I really like. And I thought if I can make something like that, but then for my studio and my experience building it, I think it will appeal to a lot of people.
Niels Brabandt
Yeah, excellent. So what can people expect when they read it? A story, a learning, both of it, so?
Jeroen Derwort
Yeah, so what they can expect is that they will be taken along with a person, which is me in this case, of course, being very introverted and building something from an attic room, which then things happen because it becomes popular. I have to switch gears, see what I can do to keep it going, to find people to help me and making deals. And you will learn about that.
Jeroen Derwort
So you will learn a lot about entrepreneurial stuff. But it's also written in such a way that you will learn a bit about the game and about how we think about creating a game. I think that a lot of people have some misconceptions around that, how a game is made. And if you ever played the game, I think it's really fun to read that stuff as well.
Jeroen Derwort
Because yeah, there's a lot of, from the outside, it's a football management game. But there's a lot of elements in that that if you look closer, you're thinking, "Why is it built that way? And why is it not built another way, right?" And also for what kind of processes were done in the company to come by a result like that. So I think that is also something that you will read about.
Jeroen Derwort
And then eventually, one of the more exciting chapters, not even in the book, but also in my life, was making deals with football teams. So I went to the Bundesliga in Germany. And I went to the Italian Serie A and to all kinds of countries and leagues and clubs to make deals and make sure that the logos and the photos of the players would be in the game. And this was also some strange stories that I think will be nice to read about.
Jeroen Derwort
And then eventually, of course, selling a company or stepping aside from a company. Yeah, we discussed it just now. And also selling a company, what is happening? So is it like a sale? Is that some kind of end goal that if you reach it, then everything will be well? I think without giving away too many spoilers, for me, it turned out really different than I expected.
Niels Brabandt
Excellent. And it all started with just programming a game when you were a child, basically. Skoll, Online Soccer Manager: From Attic to the Arena. Jerome Davoud, thank you very much for your time.
Jeroen Derwort
Yeah, thanks for having me.