Oscar Garcia had a useful but not spectacular career has a football player in the Spanish League.

Maccabi Tel Aviv is a typical football club that spends more time talking about past glories and future dreams rather than actuals on the pitch. Over the past decade, they have signed as many coaches in as many years……until they suddenly coasted to triumph and secured the Israeli football league last month.

And you have to ask the question: What happened? What made the difference? If by essentially using the same squad with little new talent, how did the players conquer their foes and what can others organisations learn from this turnaround?

Garcia entered the changing rooms of the Tel Aviv club in the summer of 2012. His managerial experience was limited, but he had come through the system of the great Barcelona outfit. In an interview last weekend, he explained that he set out for himself in Israel a two-year programme towards success.  I will ignore all the silly comments about club politics, fans and the press. I want to keep to three salient points.

One of the first things he did was to break down a wall between his office and the rest of the training outfit.  To summarise, as far as Garcia was concerned, ‘everyone was in it together’.

Garcia was also astute enough to learn about Israeli footballing culture. It is a well-known secret that training in the Holy Land is not always taken seriously and the major effort is held back for match days. For Garcia, this was unacceptable. I understood his comments to mean that if you want to give of your “very best’ on the big occasion, you have to learn how to do so, every day – day in and day out.  Garcia implied that fines were handed out until the message sunk through.

Third, on the same theme, Garcia insisted that the whole squad use the correct resources and only the best available – no compromises. An essential part of that regime was eating a proper diet. As he put it, in order to ensure that everyone was towing the line, the squads ate breakfast and lunch together. (By the way, at Garcia’s insistence, the club also attached a GPS system to each player so that they could measure how far they ran).

Take all of this, and now imagine you are a manager in an office – high-tech, non-profit, or finance company. Look what the mind of a Spanish footballer is telling you about how to create a management team and how to ensure that your staff is loyal, determined to give whatever it takes.

Oscar Garcia is now officially one of the world’s top football managers. For personal reasons, Garcia has left Maccabi Tel Aviv. His next team will be fortunate to work with him.