Brazil and the Isle of Man finally have something in common. And buried in the joke is one of the most important leadership lessons I know.
What does the Isle of Man have in common with Brazil?
On paper, nothing at all. One is a footballing superpower of 200 million people and five World Cups, the home of Pele, Ronaldo and the most beautiful version of the beautiful game the world has ever seen. The other is a small island of 85,000 people in the middle of the Irish Sea, whose main sporting export involves motorbikes, mountain roads, and a great deal of courage.
And yet, this week, we found common ground. Because the Isle of Man and Brazil now know exactly the same feeling. We both know what it is like to be dominated by Norway.
Brazil discovered it yesterday, courtesy of Erling Haaland and two late goals that knocked the five-time world champions out of the World Cup and sent Norway into the quarter-finals for the first time in their history. Ours was a slower business. Norway ran the show here for a few hundred years.
There is a chant that football supporters sing, usually dripping with irony, when their team suddenly manages to string three passes together and one of them accidentally goes where it was intended. “It’s just like watching Brazil.” It is one of the great self-deprecating jokes in sport, sung by fans who know full well their team plays nothing whatsoever like Brazil.
Well. After this week, perhaps the chant needs reversing. Perhaps Brazil, dumped out by a small Nordic nation against all the odds, have earned the right to sing it the other way round. It’s just like watching the Isle of Man.
I say all of this with a smile, because there is a serious and rather beautiful point underneath it.
When Norway beat Brazil, they took home a place in the quarter-finals. When Norway came for us, all those centuries ago, they stayed. And when they eventually left, they left us something that has outlasted every football result, every empire, and very nearly every other institution on earth.
They left us a parliament.
The oldest parliament in the world
I am writing this blog entry on Tynwald Day 2026.
It is the national day of the Isle of Man, and it is unlike anything else in the world. Today, our parliament, Tynwald, does not sit in a chamber in Douglas as it does for the rest of the year. Instead it gathers in the open air at St John’s, on and around Tynwald Hill, a stepped mound of earth that has been the ceremonial heart of Manx democracy for more than a thousand years.
The laws passed in the previous parliamentary year are read aloud from the hill, in full, in both English and Manx. This is not a quaint re-enactment. It is a legal requirement. An Act of Tynwald that is not promulgated on the hill within eighteen months of receiving Royal Assent ceases to have effect. The ceremony is the law working, in public, in the open air, exactly as it has for a millennium.
And any member of the public may approach the hill and present a Petition for Redress, raising a matter of concern directly with their parliament. Ordinary people, walking up a hill, to speak to power. It is one of the oldest and most direct forms of democracy anywhere on the planet.
Tynwald traces its origins to the Norse settlers who came to the Island around the tenth century, bringing with them the Thing, the open-air assembly where free people gathered to make decisions, settle disputes and proclaim the law. The very word Tynwald comes from the Old Norse thingvollr, the assembly field. It is Norse to its bones. Which means that the same people who knocked Brazil out of the World Cup yesterday are, a thousand years removed, the architects of the oldest continuously sitting parliament in the world.
So we can forgive Norway the football result. On balance, they have given us rather a lot.
This year the day carries a little extra weight, because 2026 is Blein ny Gaelgey, the official Year of the Manx Language. A language that was once, not so very long ago, declared dead, and which has been brought back to life by a community that refused to let it go. Children on this island are once again growing up speaking Manx. On Tynwald Day, it rings out across the hill.
The leadership lesson in a thousand years
I write a great deal about leadership, and I look for its lessons in unusual places. Football matches. Danger signs in Florida. Horse trams in Croydon. But I am not sure I have ever found a clearer example of one particular leadership truth than the one sitting on my own doorstep, a thousand years old and still going.
Here is the question I keep asking. How does anything survive for a thousand years?
Many institutions do not last a decade. Most do not survive the departure of their founder, or the first serious crisis, or the first significant change in the world around them. Companies collapse. Governments fall. Empires rise and crumble. And yet here, on a small island of 85,000 people, is an institution that has met continuously, without a break, for over a thousand years. Through Viking rule and Scottish rule and English rule. Through plague, war, revolution and reformation. Through the entire sweep of modern history.
How?
The answer, I think, is the most important lesson in leadership there is. Tynwald has survived for a thousand years because it has changed constantly, while holding tight to what makes it itself.
Almost everything about the Island has changed across those ten centuries. The language spoken in its streets, the technology, the economy, the population, the relationship with its neighbours, the very shape of daily life. Tynwald has adapted through all of it. It has reformed and modernised and evolved more times than anyone could count.
But the core has never moved. The hill. The open air. The promulgation of the law. The two languages. The petition that any ordinary person can bring. These things are exactly as they were. They are the fixed point around which everything else has been free to change.
That is not an accident of history. That is leadership, played out across a timescale most of us can barely comprehend. Because the deepest and hardest judgement any leader ever makes is precisely this one: what do we protect, and what do we allow to evolve? Get it wrong in one direction and you become a museum piece, clinging to tradition while the world moves on without you. Get it wrong in the other and you lose the thread of who you are, changing so completely that nothing of the original remains.
Tynwald has walked that line for a thousand years. It has never become a museum piece, because it never stopped being a living, working parliament. And it has never lost itself, because it never let go of the handful of things that make it Tynwald. It knew, across a hundred generations of leaders, exactly what to keep.
Identity is what endures
We live in a world that moves faster than any before it. A world of relentless technological change, of cultures flattening into one another, of identities blurring and dissolving under the sheer pace and scale of the modern age. It can feel, sometimes, as though nothing is built to last, and nothing is meant to.
And then there is this. A small island in the Irish Sea that has kept its own parliament, its own ceremony, its own language and its own distinct voice alive for a thousand years. Not by hiding from the world. Not by refusing to change – it has evolved and adapted over the years – but by knowing, with absolute clarity, exactly who it is.
That is identity. And identity, as I say again and again, is the thing that endures when everything else is up for grabs. It is true for institutions. It is true for nations. And it is true for every one of us who leads anything at all.
The Vikings took the football yesterday. Haaland can have it.
We will take the thousand years.
Laa Tinvaal Sonney Dhyt. Happy Tynwald Day.
Manx Maxim is the blog of Max Kelly – Executive Headteacher, Isle of Man. Built for leadership.
