Between Two Classes: Leandro Petersen

“We all know that Messi will retire sooner than later, but he will be the ambassador of Argentinian football for his entire life.”

This edition of Between Two Classes brings us another leader from the football world: Leandro Petersen, Chief Commercial and Marketing Officer of the Argentine Football Association (AFA). Since stepping into his role in 2017, Petersen has helped turn AFA into one of the most commercially dynamic football federations in the world. We sat down with Leandro to explore how he helped rebuild AFA, why AFA bet big on markets like China and India, and what life looks like after Messi.

What key experience or skills from your background have you found most instrumental in fulfilling the global and leading the global expansion? 

Petersen: A key element was thinking of football not as a particular sports product, but as an entertainment product. I come from a business background. I started my career in the business world at Mercado Libre, currently the largest e-commerce company in Latin America and an Argentenian unicorn. Then I worked for IBM for five years and after that, I started working at my first football role. I started at Banfield, then for Vélez Sarsfield, and after that Rosario Central — three important clubs in the First Division of Argentina and each with a rich history. That background and experience allowed me to understand football as an industry. In 2017, I was called for the National Team at AFA and started thinking about AFA within the entertainment industry. I started watching how the NBA or Formula 1 managed their international expansions. And in 2017, AFA had done very little of that, especially in South America, where things are slower than in developed countries. This change in mentality on how to position ourselves helped us achieve success because everything we started doing with the AFA brand was innovative for the football market. We based our approach on the entertainment industry and incorporated this model into our brand.

I want to talk about the institutional shifts or the decisions that were made by AFA to make that global commercial success possible. What happened at the organizational level? Was there a discussion that was had to say we need to go global?

Petersen: When we took over the administration eight years ago, everything was different. It was 2017, and before the Executive Committee and President Tapia took over, there was one of the largest institutional crises in AFA’s history. FIFA had to intervene. AFA was bankrupt. Politically, they had no authority. The point at which we started was perhaps the worst in the history of AFA. That was our starting point. Given that, when the current president, Claudio Tapia, and the Executive Committee took office in 2017, they decided to rebuild the institution from scratch. This included the creation of a 10-year strategic plan called the National Team Project with César Luis Menotti as Sports Director of the national teams. At that time, in 2018, the strategic plan included all relevant sporting areas of AFA: the sports department, the commercial department, the communications department, and the financial department. AFA professionalized by hiring executives who were not previously working at AFA and who came from different industries. That’s when the 10-year strategic plan was built. Mr. Lionel Scaloni was named National Team Coach as part of the football department, and our department, Commercial and Marketing, developed a plan to expand the AFA brand worldwide. That was our starting point. After eight years of hard work, which is a very short time in football, we were able to grow both from a sporting and commercial perspective. 

Talking a bit there about strategy, can you talk about the strategy behind how you approach the various countries and cultures that AFA now interacts with? 

Petersen: The first thing we did was study where our strongest markets were located. Understanding the reasons behind them and focusing on the power of our rich history and legacy. We needed to be clever in understanding how to land and establish ourselves in different cultures [and] territories and [learn] how to adapt our story to the target audience. Our first step was the Chinese market. With the assistance of a dedicated marketing agency, we saw how Chinese consumption habits were different from those in Argentina and the U.S. So we went through a learning process, studying the entertainment brands, how they moved in the market, and partnered with local companies. Selecting the right partner is the fundamental first step when launching a new foreign market. In China, we selected All Star Partner, a company with more than 20 years of experience who had worked with brands like La Liga, the Premier League, and the NBA. That helped to quickly understand what kind of consumption habits there were and how to adapt our communication and digital strategy. Once established, our second step was to understand what do people and fans expect from the AFA brand? The digital content, the merchandising products, whether the national team can play in those markets or not, and everything that’s involved with the fans’ tastes. What strategy should we use to leverage that? To establish our brand, it’s not just about going to play a game […] because, after the game ends, we want to make the brand last as long as possible. Our strategy was to differentiate. In the U.S., we decided to work with Fanatics, the number one U.S. ecommerce sports company. Fanatics has vast experience with the U.S. sports consumer, and we don’t. We may know certain things from coming here often, but it’s not the same as being in the territory. Miami isn’t the same as Boston, New York, or another city, and every specific territory has its own cultural adaptations, so partnering with local experts is a shortcut for success. Even within a single country like the United States, being such a large, diverse, and multicultural country, local partners like Fanatics help us with our global expansion strategy. That’s the way we enter all markets: always with a local partner who knows the culture, understands the context, and helps us build a customized strategy for the specific market.

You talked about Messi. How important is he to the story that you tell? And how do you think about that changing as he nears retirement?

Petersen: Obviously, he is very important. Messi started playing for the national team in 2004. He’s been playing for 21 years now — it’s a long time! But not until 2020, when we won the Copa América, was Messi recognized by Argentineans. At one point, he even resigned from the national team because he felt so questioned by the public, especially in Argentina. That was true even when Messi had good moments with the national team (for example, the 2014 World Cup when Argentina was runner-up). The AFA brand never took advantage of that moment because we lacked strategy and perspective. We had no operations in the U.S., Asia, Middle East, India, or anywhere else at the time. Messi was always there, but the decision of AFA to exploit the brand was not. Messi is important. He’s our ambassador. He’s the greatest footballer alongside Maradona, although I think Messi has now surpassed even him as the most important player in the history of Argentine football. On an international sporting level, he is the number one athlete possibly in the history of sports in terms of awareness in countries like India, Bangladesh, and China, where people love him so much that it’s hard to understand. He is important, but what AFA has done since 2017 was build a strategy that isn’t 100% tied to Messi. It’s a strategy where he, of course, strengthens it, helps it, maximizes it, but it doesn’t depend on his presence. It’s an institutional strategy, a decision, a view, and a daily challenge to become a global brand. We’re building a legacy, a plan beyond specific names, but with them involved as part of the whole. We all know that Messi will retire sooner than later, but with everything he achieved, he will be the ambassador of Argentinian football for his entire life. So we have to be smart about transforming that into a plan where he’s not playing on the pitch but adding brand value in a diverse way, capitalizing on his legacy in the next phase of the AFA brand expansion.

Along the same lines, how important was the most recent World Cup win for AFA? How much does that play into the success you've had expanding internationally? 

Petersen: Undoubtedly, it was very important. But as we say, AFA has 16 Copa América titles, and if we count the Copa América titles, plus all the youth and senior titles, we’re the Federation with the most titles in the world and with the longest history of success. Obviously, the World Cup in Qatar is a source of pride for Argentinians for Messi and for everyone that’s a fan of AFA, as it marked our third World Cup win, especially given the difficulty — not just the final against France, but because it was a World Cup where there were very tough matches. On a business level, winning a World Cup in a region like the Middle East was important since it’s so close to Asia, our strongest market and where we have our largest operation. For the business case and for the expansion of the AFA brand, that was tremendously important. We started planning for World Cup 2022 24 months in advance, way before the World Cup started. We had meetings in Qatar. We visited most of the federations and companies of the region to understand the capacity of our brand. By our first match in Qatar, we had more than 40 sponsors. Compare that to France, who had fewer than 20 despite having just won the World Cup and having Mbappé. Our global expansion strategy began long before we became world champions. We were already the leading institution in terms of audience, brands, partnerships, and commercials in key Asian markets. And of course, the World Cup win boosted everything. There was an unprecedented amount of content generated about the Argentinian National team. The number of people searching for insights, celebrations, unique moments — everyone wanted a taste of our AFA Team. The World Cup final gave us a boost, and we moved higher in terms of world recognition. And that’s worth a lot to us. If we didn’t win the World Cup, I believe, things would have taken longer. World Cup 2026 will have AFA with double the number of sponsors than we had in 2022, and when you compare us with top world federations, we are more than tripling them in terms of brand reach, fan base, and brand value.

Peter Sykes (MBA ‘26) is originally from Calgary, Canada. He graduated from Georgetown University with a degree in economics. Prior to HBS, Peter worked in strategic ops at Reservoir Media, an independent music company in New York, and for Morgan Stanley, where he held positions in capital markets and at the Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital.