Michael Sutherland is the Chief Transformation Officer at Real Madrid where he is driving the transformation strategy for one of the world’s most prestigious football clubs. Real Madrid is the most successful football club in the world, holding a record 26 trophies, including 13 Champions League trophies and was awarded the Club of the Century in 2000 by FIFA. The club has consistently ranked in the top 3 highest earning football teams for the past 17 years and in 2021 was recognized by both Brand Finance and KPMG as the most valuable football brand for the third consecutive year and valued by Forbes at $4.75B, firmly placing Real Madrid in the top 5 most valuable sports teams in history.
Michael’s leadership extends across brand, marketing, digital, data, technology and commercial. His transversal approach to change leadership is unlocking a digital revolution for the club to connect new generations of football fans to Real Madrid. He leads an ambitious commercial growth strategy for a modern digital Bernabeu stadium projected to generate an additional €200M annually. He brings data and technology to a refreshed lifestyle brand to more deeply engage and grow the 600M global fans, over 2000 fan clubs and more than 360M followers across social media platforms. In 2021, Real Madrid became one of only three brands in the world to break 100M followers on a single Instagram account.
Michael is an accomplished Silicon Valley executive who has held leadership roles at Fortune 50 and Venture backed startups. He has deep experience working at the leading edge of advanced technologies to deliver business innovation and cultural transformations. His past roles include Director of Virtual Reality and Director of Immersive Computing at HP where he played a key role in leading the development of a commercial mixed reality strategy and delivered award-winning products to market, including awards for Best New Desktop and Overall Innovation Winner at the Consumer Electronics Show. Michael is an active angel investor and participates on various boards and in advisory positions to early-stage startups, scale-ups and Venture Capital funds.
