In 2023, Bordeaux-Bègles hired Noel McNamara, the man who spent years building Leinster's professional academy. The assumption was reasonable: if you want to understand how a system works, find the person who built it. Bordeaux are the defending European Champions Cup champions, the club equivalent of football's Champions League. On Saturday, at San Mamés in Bilbao, they face Leinster in their eighth final. The McNamara hire was their most deliberate act of preparation. It was also a category error.
FOUR CUPS. THREE OTHERS TRY.
Ireland's four professional provinces (Leinster, Munster, Ulster, and Connacht) share a funding structure and a national talent pool. The IRFU, Ireland's governing body, holds central contracts for the country's best players and allocates them across the provinces. Eleven of the current fourteen belong to Leinster players. Ulster hold none. This is treated as evidence of institutional unfairness. It is better understood as a symptom.
Private secondary schools produce 52% of all players across the four provincial squads and academies, despite representing a fraction of Ireland's total schools. Within Leinster, the concentration is sharper. Blackrock, Clongowes, St Michael's, Belvedere: these schools supply the province with something more useful than talent. They supply players who already know each other, already know what is expected under pressure, and already understand the standards they will be held to. According to analysis of Leinster's European finals squads, only around 5.5% of contributors came via a non-fee-paying pathway.
NOT SCOUTS. PRELOADERS.
Leinster's staff watch schools games at Blackrock, Clongowes, and Belvedere. They are not only looking for talent. They are tracking players already formed inside a specific competitive culture, already building the shared instincts that take other squads years to develop. By the time a Clongowes prop arrives at the academy, he has played alongside future teammates for three or four seasons. He knows what happens when the defensive line breaks. He knows before anyone tells him.
This is what cannot be transferred: not the ability, but the accumulated expectation.
THE PERSON, NOT THE COHORT.
What Bordeaux got when they hired McNamara was the explicit knowledge: the frameworks, the standards, the philosophy. What they could not get was the cohort he had spent years configuring. Saturday will test, among other things, whether the knowledge travels without the people it shaped.
WHAT MONEY CAN’T CLOSE
Most competitive moats are legible. A resource moat means someone has more money. A brand moat means they have more trust. A network moat means they have more connections. All three can, in principle, be eroded by sustained investment. A formation moat is different. It cannot be purchased because it is not an asset. It is a process, and the process takes decades, and it requires an institutional context that does not exist elsewhere. There is no transaction that opens that door.
This is why the standard diagnosis misses it. When a rival identifies the gap, they focus on the visible inputs: coaching, recruitment, resources. The actual source of the advantage sits upstream of all of them, in the formation of people before they arrive. By the time you are trying to solve the problem, it is already settled.
Formation moats compound. Each cohort raises the standard for the next. The gap does not stay constant. It widens. The organisations most confident they can close it through acquisition are often the furthest from understanding what they are actually competing against.
Bordeaux have Louis Bielle-Biarrey, arguably the best winger in the game right now. Matthieu Jalibert controls a match with a calm most fly-halves spend careers trying to manufacture. The assembled talent on their side is real.
On Saturday, Leinster will face all of it. As a team that was, in some meaningful sense, already built before the first training session.
TRY IT YOURSELF
🚩 Think about the strongest competitor in your space. Before their products, their team, their culture — ask:
🏗️ Where did their advantage actually originate? Before they were founded, before they were funded — in the institutions, networks, or processes that formed the people who built it.
🔍 What would closing the gap actually require? If the answer fits in a hiring plan or a budget line, it probably isn't the real moat. If the answer is "fifteen years of institutional context," it probably is.
🔄 Is the gap widening despite your investment? Formation moats compound. If rivals keep spending without closing the distance, you may be solving downstream while the advantage runs upstream.
The most durable things in any competitive landscape were assembled before the competition began.
FURTHER READING
📚 The Toyota Way by Jeffrey Liker (McGraw-Hill, 2004) In the 1980s and 90s, Western car manufacturers were given full access to Toyota's factories and methods — tours, explanations, documentation. They still could not replicate the advantage. Liker's book examines why: the Toyota Production System is not a set of explicit instructions but an embedded institutional practice built over decades of accumulated refinement. The knowledge was in the process, and the process had to be grown, not transferred. The parallel to Leinster's school pipeline is direct and precise.
📰 "Leinster's pipeline still pours private while outsiders struggle to stay afloat" by Brendan O'Brien, Irish Examiner The data behind the piece. The Irish Examiner's analysis of where Leinster's players actually come from — and what that concentration looks like against the other provinces — provides the empirical foundation that the article gestures at. The headline statistic (only 5.5% of Leinster's peak European players coming via non-fee-paying routes) is sourced here, and the surrounding analysis gives the structural picture more texture than the article has room for.
🎙️ "Hamilton Helmer — Power + Business" — Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Invest Like the Best, EP.174 (2020) Helmer's "7 Powers" framework identifies process power as one of the rarest forms of competitive advantage: an embedded institutional process that produces better results than rivals but that competitors cannot replicate without years of committed change. His anchor example is Toyota — a company whose methods were studied openly by Western manufacturers who still couldn't close the gap, because the advantage was in the accumulated institutional practice, not in the documented method. It is the clearest business-strategy articulation of the mechanism the article describes.
🦉 If this piece resonated, you might also like The Track Sprint — which examines how in certain competitive structures the decisive advantage is built in the preparation phase, not in the visible event itself.
SOME FINAL WISE WORDS
"Champions behave like champions before they're champions; they have a winning standard of performance before they are winners."
— Bill Walsh, The Score Takes Care of Itself (2009)
Until next time
The world's best business lessons, told through the stories of sport.
