The Scoreboard Is Lying to You: A World Cup Lesson in Measuring What Matters
Every four years, the World Cup hands the world a tidy story: a final score, a winner, a loser. And every four years, that tidy story obscures almost everything that actually mattered in getting there. On a recent episode of The Kirkpatrick Podcast, Vanessa Milara Alzate used this summer’s tournament to make an argument she returns to constantly in her work at Kirkpatrick Partners: the scoreboard is not the truth of what happened. It’s a lagging indicator, and if it’s the only thing you’re watching, it will mislead you every time.
This isn’t just a sports observation. It’s a direct challenge to how most organizations still evaluate learning and development.
The Trouble With One Number
Vanessa opens with Spain, whose national team plays a possession-heavy, patient style that can look, to the casual viewer, like nothing is happening. But Spain’s federation made a deliberate bet more than two decades ago: obsess over the conditions that produce a result — possession percentage, passing accuracy, territorial control — rather than the result itself. The championships that followed weren’t a hot streak. They were the output of a system.
That distinction — managing the conditions that produce an outcome instead of managing the outcome directly — is exactly the shift Kirkpatrick Partners asks learning leaders to make. A completion rate or a satisfaction score is a goal on the scoreboard: real, but already in the past by the time it appears on a slide. Leading indicators — manager reinforcement behavior, early adoption rates, the frequency of coaching conversations happening in the flow of work — are less satisfying to report. They don’t feel like a finish line. But they’re the only signals that tell you, while there’s still time to act, whether you’re actually heading toward the result you want.
You Can’t Evaluate a Single Event
Vanessa tells a story about her own family’s connection to Spain’s first World Cup win — a memory she’s hoping to relive with her own kids this year — before returning to a foundational Kirkpatrick principle: you cannot measure the impact of an isolated event. A single tournament doesn’t create a dynasty, and a single training session doesn’t create lasting behavior change. What creates both is a sustained system — reinforcement, consistency, and time, built well before and after the event itself. When a stakeholder asks why one great workshop didn’t move the needle, this is the answer: nothing sustainable ever comes from an isolated moment. It comes from what surrounds it.
Context Is Data, Not an Excuse
The US team’s tournament offers a second lesson. A record-breaking group stage made sports writers ask whether this was the best American team ever assembled — until a loss to Turkey in the final group match seemed to complicate that story. Look closer, though, and the loss came after the coach made nine changes to his starting lineup, having already secured qualification. That’s not a team in free fall. That’s a deliberate decision, stripped of context by a headline.
This happens constantly inside organizations. A cohort’s results dip for one quarter, and someone in a leadership meeting declares the program isn’t working — without ever asking whether that quarter also included a hiring freeze, a reorganization, or half the team out on leave. A single data point without its context will lie to you every time. Before reacting to any number, the real question is always: what actually produced it?
Return on Expectations, Not a Borrowed Bar
The tournament’s most instructive story, though, belongs to Cape Verde — an island nation of roughly 525,000 people making its first-ever World Cup appearance, and becoming the smallest nation by population to ever reach the knockout round. Nobody inside Cape Verde’s federation expected to lift the trophy. Their success was always going to be measured against a different, equally legitimate bar — one defined by their own reality, resources, and stakeholders.
This is Return on Expectations (ROE) in its purest form. A small nonprofit’s learning function and a Fortune 100 company’s learning function should not be judged against the same bar any more than Cape Verde and Spain should. Borrow someone else’s scorecard, and you’ll either fail against a standard that was never yours to begin with, or miss a genuine, remarkable win because it doesn’t look like someone else’s win.
What This Means for Your Next Report
Three teams, three lessons, one argument: the scoreboard is not the whole story. Spain shows that the process and the conditions you can actually influence matter more than the lagging number everyone is watching. The US shows that a strong-looking result isn’t proof of anything until it holds up under real pressure — and that a single distorted data point can send you to the wrong conclusion entirely. And Cape Verde shows that success was never a universal number to begin with; it’s whatever your actual stakeholders said mattered.
So before your next report goes out the door, ask one question: which scorecard are you actually being measured against — a benchmark someone handed you because it was easy to find, or the expectation your real stakeholders defined? Because a borrowed scorecard will always lie to you about how you’re really doing. This is why evaluation is the unlock for the future of organizational health and performance: the organizations that win long-term aren’t the ones obsessing over the final score. They’re the ones who know, long before the whistle blows, exactly what they’re measuring and why.
If you’re ready to find the right scorecard for your organization instead of borrowing someone else’s, that’s exactly the conversation we have at Kirkpatrick Partners. Visit kirkpatrickpartners.com to start it.
