European tech: it’s time to play Total Football

Europe has everything it needs to stand as an equal to the US and China on the global innovation stage. As ambitious initiatives, thoughtful pieces, reports, and other calls to action multiply across the continent, it’s clear that what we’re missing isn’t talent, ideas, or even capital, but an approach that plays to our history and our strengths and inspires action. How do we play together to make the most of our potential? Looking to our own rich cultural heritage and borrowing from the elegant choreography of Dutch Total Football, we might just find the collective method we need to orchestrate Europe’s next renaissance.

Total Football — a method in the madness

In the 1970s, the Dutch national football team transformed the game with “Total Football,” a style pioneered by coach Rinus Michels and brought to life by Johan Cruyff. This approach dismantled traditional positional rigidity, perfecting a style of play based on greater collaboration and fluidity. The system relied on creating more passing options for the players, with constant movement that required spatial awareness and collective intelligence rather than fixed roles. When in possession of the ball, the system would expand to create more options; when defending, the team would contract as a unit. The play was built from the back, beginning with the goalkeeper, advancing with short, quick passes. The field was divided into zones, and each player had a perfect understanding of the roles of each zone and how to use it.

This is an analogy we’ve been using internally at LocalGlobe to describe how we operate as an integrated investment team for ten years, but it’s also a mindset our founding partners Robin and Saul Klein have championed as leading voices of the European tech ecosystem for twenty years. It’s time to put it back on the pitch.

To play Total Football in European innovation, we need three core ingredients: first, a shared European vision that unites our ambitions and creates a common goal; second, a commitment to collaborative competition where each player and region knows their strengths and their role; and third, the infrastructure that enables us to move as a coordinated, positive force. We already have the first, we are growing the second, and we have begun to build the third.

A vision already being painted

Great achievements begin with visions, not rules, painting a picture of a world we all want to live in. The collective vision for European tech should be unapologetically bold and clear: to be the best possible place on the planet to live and build transformative companies. We have already proven this potential to be true. Skype emerged from Estonia back in 2003 and since then, we’ve witnessed the ascent of Adyen, Deepmind, Revolut, Spotify, UiPath, Wise and many others. We’ve shown we can bring Silicon Valley-style investing to European shores with the advent of funds such as Index Ventures. And we’ve established the foundations for a thriving ecosystem through new models of early-stage funding such as Entrepreneur First and Seedcamp.

Europe at the forefront of innovation is not a vision we need to invent. It’s already embedded in our history; we are the old masters at it. Looking across our continent’s rich past, Europe has been the birthplace of transformative movements that reshaped human civilization: from Renaissance humanism and Enlightenment philosophy, to the Industrial Revolution and modernist art. These were not isolated achievements but the fruits of a continent that thrived on shared knowledge and cross-pollination of ideas; what happens when “ideas have sex”, as Matt Ridley would say.

The Europa Regina, a 16th-century allegorical map depicting Europe as a queen, is one of the earliest examples of European self-identification as a unified cultural entity. It visualizes Europe not just as a geographical space but as a regal, powerful entity with an integrated “body politic.” It remains a powerful symbol of European identity and self-perception during what many consider the continent’s ascendancy to global prominence (with all the sobering complexities that this imperial prominence entailed).

At the beginning of the 20th century, Berlin, Paris and Vienna were the world’s most vibrant, creative cities. German was the language of science. Famous Parisian cafés like Café de Flore hosted Picasso, Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein, while Vienna’s Café Central became the living room where Freud, Klimt, and Wittgenstein exchanged ideas. As Stefan Zweig wrote in ‘The World of Yesterday,’ Vienna was where ‘ten thousand people bloomed,’ a cultural paradise where music, literature, and psychoanalysis flourished in remarkable density.

This vibrant intellectual culture produced breakthroughs, from Einstein’s relativity to Von Neumann’s work on quantum mechanics, forever changing how we understand both our universe and ourselves. (Today’s chips providing an abundance of intelligence are Von Neumann machines.) The advent of Nazism in the 1930s saw a brain drain from key university departments in many parts of Europe, with huge numbers of great thinkers, many of them Jewish, fleeing to the United States. As Ananyo Bhattacharya writes in his book ‘The Man of the Future’: “America was about to get an injection of talent that would transform its fortunes forever.” This influx of European intellectual talent to the US was the catalyst for post-war American scientific and technological development.

Yet Europe rebuilt and kept building, giving the world transformative inventions: the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, graphene (a Nobel Prize-winning material) at the University of Manchester, mRNA vaccine technology that brought us back together, and deep learning breakthroughs with DeepMind as the poster child.

We are technological pioneers, embedded in a rich cultural context, valuing breakthrough innovation and civilisational progress. Europe thrives not by imitating others but by harnessing our unique ability to merge science, art, and the humanities into something greater than the sum of its parts.

Perfecting Total Football together

Europe has proven we can play Total Football. Now, it is time to prove we can perfect it. As a recent report from Dealroom about the Deep Tech ecosystem noted, what is needed is not fragmented competition but coordinated ‘coopetition’ between European tech hubs. Too often, we hear statements that, for example, Zurich is a better AI hub than Paris, or Munich is catching up with London. But this mindset misses the point: Europe’s strength lies in its complementary diversity and cultural richness, not in pitting one city against another.

And rich we are: Munich’s engineering precision powers BMW’s innovations and is now emerging as a hub for defence and space; Zurich’s ETH fuels groundbreaking AI research attracting the main labs from all over the world; the Netherlands combines world-class infrastructure, like ASML’s EUV lithography machines, with sustainable systems that reclaim land from the sea. The Nordics excel at design thinking, from IKEA’s iconic furniture to Spotify’s audio revolution, while Estonia has transformed itself into one of the world’s most advanced digital societies. France is the global capital of luxury and engineering excellence, driving the success of Airbus, Dassault Systems, and AI breakthroughs.

Beyond regional specialisations, examples of cross-border European innovation clusters where industry, academia, and research institutions collaborate to create globally competitive technology hubs already exist. CERN, a pan-European endeavor, stands as one of the world’s most respected scientific centers, home to the Large Hadron Collider and the discovery of the Higgs boson. CERN even has a knowledge transfer department whose sole purpose is to encourage and support the creation of companies that seek to build on its technologies and make CERN’s technological research more widely available to society. (How very European.)

In Medicon Valley, Denmark and Sweden gather pharmaceutical giants like Novo Nordisk with universities, hospitals, and biotech startups, forming a thriving life sciences cluster that spans borders. Similarly, the Eindhoven-Leuven-Aachen triangle combines ASML’s semiconductor expertise with Belgian IMEC’s nanoelectronics innovation, driving advancements in chip manufacturing and materials science.

These examples demonstrate that when Europe plays Total Football, it competes globally, turning regional strengths into leadership on the world stage. To build on this success, we need a more fluid exchange of talent, skills, ideas, and capital across borders. Surely, this is not too much to ask for from the continent that unlocked the secrets of the ‘god particle’?

Build right, and they will come

Today, driven by breakthroughs in AI, in science, and by shifting geopolitical tides, Europe’s tech landscape is undergoing another cultural acceleration. This moment is being received both with enthusiasm about the opportunities it brings, and with scepticism about our continent’s ability to grasp the opportunity and rival the US and China.

If we have the vision and can play together, we need the right level playing field in this moment of acceleration. In October 2024, the ambitious EU Inc initiative emerged and gathered widespread support, aiming to create a pan-European entity to champion the continent’s startups. More recently, the landmark Project Europe was launched to support under-25 year old founders with funding and mentoring from some of the best tech founders and operators in Europe.

Some critics like to point out that while this wave of activity is energizing, it risks fragmentation. For us, this is precisely where the Total Football analogy proves powerful: in the Dutch-founded system, players constantly shift positions while playing as a team towards a greater goal; everyone is a playmaker. Similarly, this wave of activity will bring initiatives which should not be competing efforts, but instead, complementary moves in a unified playing method.

While fundamental cultural shifts tend to happen upstream of regulation, we also give credit to promising movements on the regulatory front as well. The Draghi report, presented in September 2024, pulls no punches in describing Europe’s productivity challenge as “existential” and calls for reigniting Europe’s innovation engine through AI initiatives and creating specialized habitats for startups. The European Commission’s “Competitiveness Compass” introduced in January 2025 sets concrete targets, like cutting administrative burden by at least 25% for large firms and 35% for SMEs. As a result of the incredible work done by the EU Inc team, the Commission has now proposed a “28th legal regime” that would allow innovative companies to benefit from one single set of rules wherever they operate in the Single Market.

A culture change is also needed within the capital allocators. An area where the US undeniably excels over Europe is in capturing value and capitalising on opportunities when they arise. Whether it is OpenAI switching from a non-profit to one of the largest private tech companies, Google acquiring DeepMind to supercharge its growth with compute, or Nasdaq successfully attracting ARM for its IPO, the US smells opportunity and seizes it. In their recent annual letter, Stripe, the payment giant started by Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison, highlights this stark reality: while the US sources almost 80% of corporate lending from non-bank sources, this figure is just 32% in the EU. Similarly, while the US invests around 0.7% of GDP in high-growth firms, Europe invests less than 0.3%. As the Collinsons put it, “Large-scale capital market reform is not sexy, but we think it would be tremendously beneficial for the European economy.”

The good news is that we are seeing some progress on this front across Europe. The UK is pioneering pension reforms through the Mansion House Compact, which aims to allocate 5% of pension funds to unlisted equities by 2030 (currently, it is only 0.36%). This has potential to unlock billions for innovation and growth. Similarly, France’s Tibi Initiative aims to enhance the financing capacity of technology companies by mobilising savings from institutional investors, primarily insurance companies, corporates, and family offices. Both initiatives highlight the same crucial shift: unlocking institutional capital at scale (and, ideally, at pace) to fuel European innovation.

Europe is rich in financial terms as well as cultural ones; we can accelerate our trajectory by directing money in the right direction.

Más que un dream, it’s already happening

At LocalGlobe, we see it every day, in the companies we back and many of those we don’t. European founders are building, creating a new reality, and rewriting the script for a future narrative. Iconic figures like Daniel Ek (founder of Spotify) through Prima Materia, and the team at Plural (a venture fund founded by some of Europe’s most experienced founders including Wise), are taking bold swings backing ambitious endeavours. And there are plenty of them today in Europe. Some of the fastest-growing AI applications, like Lovable and ElevenLabs, are European-based. Proxima Fusion, a spinout of the Max Planck Institute, is emerging as a leader in the race toward sustainable fusion energy (just imagine if Europe is first to get to energy abundance). A high-school dropout is pioneering groundbreaking brain technology at CoMind, while at Sirona, a former Tesla engineer has returned from Silicon Valley to Brussels, attracting top talent to develop cutting-edge Direct Air Capture technology.

But for Europe to play Total Football on the innovation stage, it’s not just about founders or VCs: it’s about the entire ecosystem. It’s the limited partners, pension funds, and family offices investing in the innovation economy. It’s policymakers refining frameworks, service providers sourcing top talent (including from the US) or offering alternative financing, and emerging fund managers backing immigrant founders or critical industries. It’s graduates and dropouts choosing startups as their career of choice. It’s universities rethinking IP transfer and spinout policies. It’s the media and content creators leveraging the power of story-telling to amplify these efforts. It’s our collective responsibility.

It’s EU Inc, it’s a European Grand Tour, it’s Project Europe, it’s Station F, it’s student-led conferences like Slush or START Summit, it’s a “hacker hotel” in Helsinki or TNW in Amsterdam. It’s all the non-celebrated and overlooked initiatives that might not get the coverage they deserve but have their compounding impact. It’s about all of us championing one another while demanding excellence. We don’t need a single winner-takes-all effort; we need hundreds. And just as competition within a team drives players to improve, each new initiative seeks to fill gaps or build on what came before. If you see something you don’t like, it’s an opportunity to do better. This is how Europe’s innovation ecosystem grows stronger: not through singularity, but through a mosaic of ambition, collaboration, and healthy competition.

As a new world order takes shape, it’s time for Europe to execute its version of Cruyff’s famous turn — the ultimate Total Football move that changes direction unexpectedly. We don’t need to choose between our rich cultural heritage and our technological ambition; we must harness both. We don’t need to decide which initiative matters most; we need them all working in concert. And we don’t need to follow anyone else’s playbook; we need to rewrite our own.

The season of playing it safe has expired. It’s time to play Total Football