![]() ![]() A club that had not won the league since 1968 has since become one of the richest in Europe. Two years later he joined Manchester City, just before its takeover by Sheikh Mansour of Abu Dhabi’s ruling family. At their insistence, he ignored offers from some of Europe’s biggest clubs and stayed with his home town team Anderlecht to complete his final school exams.Īfter an injury, some of those offers were withdrawn and he was bought by Hamburg, in Germany’s first division, in 2006. His late mother was a Belgian trade union official. His father is an activist from Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, who had fled from the dictator Mobutu. The footballer was born in Uccle in Brussels in 1986. He is focused as he talks, with an occasional smile when talking about his family or home city. Kompany lights up when he sees the old books on the Rylands’ shelves. But it was brief and good-natured, he says. “It was banter constantly and you knew whenever you opened a book you got hammered a little bit,” he recalls. Such environments inspired him to work - and put up with teammates’ jokes when he opted for a book rather than a film on flights to games. The University of Manchester-owned Gothic revival building, with a reading room reminiscent of a church nave, opened in 1900. Rather than City’s Etihad Stadium, where he has played since 2008, he picks the John Rylands Library for our interview. Did he ever think of giving up? “Yes, many times.” He began playing at the Anderlecht academy in Brussels at the age of six, so football comes easily - but study was hard. ![]() ![]() “That evolving is something that I will keep for myself for the rest of my life,” he says. “Actually doing something in front of a very small audience, but it’s out of your comfort zone . . . I find the second one a lot more challenging than the first.” That is what the MBA forced him to do. Video: Footballer Vincent Kompany scores an MBA “You know that you’re really good at something and you know that you’ve practised it all of your life, so you feel comfortable. His relaxed appearance playing in front of 50,000 fans and millions on TV is no illusion, he says. It can be an ugly position to play but his strength along with pace is his calmness, the way he reads a situation to intervene before it gets desperate. Kompany is a central defender and stands almost 1m 93cm tall. If you talk to a top accountant about his field of expertise, it’s mind-boggling. Grasping technical language was part of the battle. “It’s daunting when you have to look up the title of the book before you can open it.” But with the dedication of a professional athlete and help from his tutors he set about “learning how to learn”. “I had to research the name of the course before I could even start,” he says, smiling. He realised early on that he was “out of his depth” when the topic was corporate finance. “I started like someone going to war with just his bare fist,” Kompany says, raising it to emphasise how unprepared he was. He received his Global MBA in 2017 and has no doubt it has improved him as a businessman and as a person. Kompany, 31, studied part-time for five years at Alliance Manchester Business School. Vincent Kompany has won plenty of accolades in his football career but the Manchester City captain believes his latest achievement is among his greatest: an MBA. Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |