The Royal Spanish Football Federation achieves synergy, visibility and efficiency with Smartsheet

You may already be aware of the legendary Spanish national football team that has dominated the world football stage – but behind them stands the Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF). Founded in 1909, the governing body of Spanish football administers competitions and manages different tiers of the Spanish football league system. It is also in charge of appointing the management of the football and futsal national teams. As the governing body of Spanish football, RFEF currently has more than 1,000,000 registered players, represented within 30,000 registered football clubs. To manage that level of scale and complexity, Carlos Nadal, Coordinator of Strategy and International Relations at RFEF feels that ”Teamwork is essential. We see it every day on the playing fields, and we can say that we also implement it in the management of the Spanish Football Federation”. 

Reshaping a disconnected, complex network

With distributed football clubs across 23 territories encompassing 30,000 organisations, it can be difficult to create and align around a common, nationwide strategic plan. But execution of that strategic plan – and particularly execution at scale – can be just as hard of a challenge to overcome.

“One of the fundamental axes of the Spanish Strategic Action Plan was digital transformation. Initially, we used Excel sheets for tracking. But it was complicated to follow up and somehow control the whole development of the different territorial federations, and even to track and manage work within the Spanish federation itself,” says Francesc Solanellas, UEFA Consultant for the Strategic Plan of RFEF.

So with grand plans and ambitions to execute against, the RFEF started looking for a digital solution that would help the organisation work in a more structured way. “We needed to track our goals with more automation, and we needed to optimise our collaboration and communication,” Solanellas adds. The RFEF also required better access to relevant data, to ensure the organisation made data-informed decisions. 

Finding an agile, simple solution

The RFEF started assessing various platforms that would help support global collaboration on their strategic objectives.

“Smartsheet offered the flexibility and scalability we needed. It also enabled us to integrate it with some of the other solutions we were using on a day-to-day basis,” says Nadal.

For RFEF, it was also crucial to deploy a solution that was easy for its distributed user base to adopt and use. The organisation turned to Uniendo Nodos, an official Smartsheet partner, for help with implementation and employee training. 

Delegating roles, tasks and insights

With Smartsheet, the RFEF gave structure to work, delegating strategic objectives and sub-objectives to each territorial federation. The centralised platform brought together tasks, budgets, calendars, minutes and reports with specific health indicators for each objective. “We also use Dynamic View, WorkApps, Calendar App, Data Shuttle, to improve collaboration and visibility, and work in a more efficient way,” says Rafa Serrano, CTO at Uniendo Nodos. All responsible teams received specific roles within the platform, giving them various levels of access to different tools and data. For example, territorial managers can work on project sheets for their respective territories while tutors can only view sheets and scorecards related to their assigned territories. The RFEF also used Smartsheet’s Data Shuttle for integrating the platform with other solutions and it relied on DataMesh to help eliminate errors like typos, duplicative data entries, and unnecessary work. And while this architecture was important to discuss amidst implementation, it’s worth mentioning that end users never have to be cognizant of the specific components that make up the platform RFEF uses to drive strategic change – they’re able to simply focus on the work and data they’re responsible for. 

A united team

“Our challenge was to align the work of multiple territorial Federation's around four common strategic objectives. These involve different roles, from mentors to managers,” says Solanellas. With a centralised, actionable system, the RFEF and its complex network of territorial federations can now work like a well-oiled machine. The solution has also brought a bird’s-eye view of every project or strategic objective.

“Having complete visibility over each program, project or task has helped us make more informed decisions, making us faster, more efficient and focused across the organisation. Smartsheet is the company that is helping us to have this global vision which we can present to the board of directors,” adds Nadal. 

“Smartsheet makes us move from a more traditional work culture to a collaborative work culture, by projects, and focused on the same objectives,” concludes Nadal. Moving forward, the RFEF continues its digital transformation and modernisation, with the goal of empowering local athletes to unleash their full potential and perpetuate the legacy of Spanish football.