How 11 Bainies and a Cup Turned Friendly Rivalries into a Competitive Advantage.
Twenty years ago, teams of young consultants from Bain & Company's London and Paris offices touched down in Munich on a Friday night. Eleven German colleagues greeted the visitors and whisked them to an Oktoberfest gathering.
The ensuing weekend marked the first-ever Bain World Cup, a soccer tournament hatched by junior-level consultants and managers for the sheer fun of it after a soccer game had broken out among players from the same offices at a meeting in London earlier that year.
The tone of the tournament, which continues to thrive in a much more expansive form two decades later, was established in Munich. "We stayed at the beer tent until the small hours and talked about the matches we would play the next day," recalls Paul Rogers, a midfielder as well as a London-based partner and head of Bain's global organization practice. "And then — guess what? The next day, 11 completely different Germans showed up to play."
The three squads, which were representing Bain's only European outposts at the time, squared off against each other several times on Saturday and Sunday. "It was just a fantastic weekend," Rogers says. The London office hosted the soccer tournament the following year, and the event's location has rotated among Bain's steadily growing European offices since then. "The way in which the location is determined remains totally mysterious," says Rogers. "Nobody is technically authorized to make a decision about that — it just happens. That's part of the charm of the event."
The tournament has grown from three teams and three dozen participants to the 29 offices and nearly 500 consultants from offices in Europe, North America, South America, Russia, and Asia who gathered in Brussels from Sept. 22–24 for the 20th annual Bain World Cup.
"It was almost like a real World Cup," reports Shinya Fujimura, a defender and a Tokyo-based consultant who served as Team Asia's captain this year. "S
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