ESADE Casebook: Every Case and How to Practice It

Author: Taylor Warfield, Former Bain Manager and interviewer

Last Updated: September 5, 2026

 

The ESADE casebook is a free set of consulting interview practice books written by the ESADE MBA Consulting Club in Barcelona, spanning three editions and roughly 50 full cases reviewed by McKinsey, BCG, Oliver Wyman, Strategy&, and Arthur D. Little. This guide breaks down every case inside each edition, tells you which ones are worth your time, and shows you how to practice them so your structuring and math actually improve.

 

Before reading on:

 

Most candidates struggle to land interviews and even fewer turn them into offers. Watch my free training to learn how to triple your chances of landing interviews and increase your chances of receiving an offer by 8x.

 

👉 Watch for free

 

Key Takeaways

 

The ESADE casebook is one of the better free European case resources, and the 2014 Case Collection Book is the edition you should practice first.

 

  • Three editions exist: a 2011 book built with BCG, a 2014 Case Collection Book, and a newer 2025 edition

 

  • The 2014 edition is the strongest, with 25 cases split evenly across five consulting firm sections

 

  • Cases are set in Spain, Germany, the UK, Brazil, Romania, and the Middle East, so the math runs in euros and pounds

 

  • Every section opens with recruiting tips written by the reviewing firm, which most casebooks do not include

 

  • Doing 8 to 12 cases out loud with feedback beats skimming all 50 silently

 

What Is the ESADE Casebook?

 

The ESADE casebook is a free consulting interview practice guide produced by the ESADE MBA Consulting Club in Barcelona. Three editions exist: a 2011 book built with BCG, a 2014 Case Collection Book reviewed by five consulting firms, and a newer 2025 edition. Together they hold roughly 50 full cases with worked solutions.


You can download the casebook here: ESADE 2025.pdf

 

Each edition was written by second year MBA students who had just been through recruiting, then reviewed by consultants at the partner firms. That review step matters. It is the reason the ESADE cases hold up better than most student written MBA consulting casebooks, where nobody outside the club ever checked the math.

 

Edition

Cases

Reviewing firms

Best for

Case Collection Book (2014)

25

Arthur D. Little, BCG, McKinsey, Oliver Wyman, Strategy&

Quantitative reps and firm specific tips

Consulting Case Book (2025)

8

Written in house by the club

Current industry overviews and fit prep

ESADE and BCG casebook (2011)

20

BCG

Extra volume and BCG consultant commentary

 

ESADE itself is a Barcelona business school founded in 1958, and its Full-Time MBA class runs around 180 participants averaging 30 years old with 6 years of work experience. That cohort size is small compared to American programs, which is partly why the casebooks are shorter and more curated than the sprawling 200 page books some schools publish.

 

What Cases Are in the ESADE Case Collection Book?

 

The 2014 Case Collection Book contains 25 cases organized into five sections of exactly five cases each, with one section per reviewing firm. Every section opens with a company profile and a short list of interview tips written by that firm. It runs about 104 pages.

 

Reviewing firm

Cases

Arthur D. Little

US Luxury Brand, European Airline, Middle East Telecom, Spain Consumer Packaged Goods, Brazil Football Stadium

BCG

Online Insurance Agent, Online Food Delivery, Spanish Gym Retailer, International Expansion, Bank Case

McKinsey

Video Game, Shag Carpet, Ice Cream Shop, Potato or Bust Buyout, MNO's Factory Funding

Oliver Wyman

Fertilizer Factory, Supermarket Discount, Electric Vehicle Charge Stations, Wooden Panels, Structuring a Call Center

Strategy&

Gas Stations, Concrete Manufacturer, Fast Food Chain, Industrial Packing, Life Insurance

 

The quantitative range here is wider than most casebooks. Brazil Football Stadium walks you through a five year NPV that lands at $713.3 million, Potato or Bust Buyout asks you to build a WACC and then a perpetuity DCF valuing the target at $625 million against a $650 million asking price, and Shag Carpet drops an economic order quantity formula on you mid case.

 

The market sizing questions are unusually good. Online Insurance Agent has you build the German car insurance market up to roughly 1.4 billion euros, Spanish Gym Retailer lands the UK gym market at about 2.6 billion pounds, and Gas Stations estimates roughly 6,945 UK stations from pump throughput.

 

What Is Inside the Newest ESADE Consulting Case Book?

 

The newest edition holds 8 cases and dedicates its first seven sections to preparation material rather than practice. You get company briefs, industry overviews, a fit interview section, a case interview section, a frameworks walkthrough, and a case math primer before the cases start on page 43.

 

Case

Case type

Industry

Medical Tourism

Market entry

Tourism

Tomato Tech

Investment decision

Agriculture

Cola Case in Peru

Organizational restructuring

Consumer goods

Yogurt Company in Ecuador

Pricing

Consumer goods

SkyConnect Airlines

Revenue diversification

Services

Stayfit

Profitability

Food and beverage

 

Two more cases follow those six. The Latin American slant is deliberate and reflects where a large share of ESADE MBA students recruit, which makes this edition a better fit for candidates targeting Madrid, Barcelona, Mexico City, or São Paulo than for someone chasing a New York office.

 

The frameworks section is the weakest part. It presents the standard profitability, market entry, and pricing structures as templates, and candidates who memorize them tend to force the same three buckets onto every case. Build your own structure from the objective instead, which is what my case interview course teaches in place of template memorization.

 

What Does the ESADE and BCG Casebook Cover?

 

The 2011 inaugural edition was built entirely with BCG and lists 20 cases across roughly 108 pages. It opens with an education section, an interview preparation section, and a block of commentary from named BCG consultants about life in consulting.

 

Its cases include Heathrow Airport, Mobile Usage in Spain, US Household Debt, Windows Supplier, Restaurant in Buenos Aires, Gracia Football Club, Pharma Sales, Rascal Beer, Private Highway, Italian Food Expansion, Car Manufacturer, Market Entry into China, Museum Opening, Green Airline, US Submarine Sale, and IT Cost-Cutting. The range is wider than the 2014 book, though the solutions are thinner.

 

One detail from its education section is worth knowing. It describes a typical interview as 15 to 20 minutes of behavioral questions, 20 to 25 minutes of case discussion, and 5 minutes of your questions, which is a useful reminder that roughly a third of your interview time is spent outside the case. Candidates who neglect the fit portion lose offers they had already won on the case.

 

Where Can You Find the ESADE Casebook PDF?

 

You can download the casebook here: ESADE 2025.pdf

 

If you are looking for a different edition, here is what works:

 

  1. Search the exact edition name: query "ESADE Case Collection Book 2014" rather than "ESADE casebook" to surface the specific file

  2. Check document hosting sites: all three editions circulate widely on free document platforms, though upload quality varies

  3. Ask an ESADE student or alum: the Esade Alumni network spans more than 72,000 members across 118 countries and 64 international chapters, so a polite outreach message often works

  4. Verify the page count before you commit: the 2014 book runs about 104 pages and the 2011 book about 108, so a much shorter file is an excerpt rather than the full book

 

Watch out for excerpt uploads labeled as the complete casebook. I have seen candidates practice from a 25 page fragment for weeks and never realize they were missing four of the five firm sections.

 

Is the ESADE Casebook Worth Practicing?

 

Yes, with one caveat: use it for quantitative reps and European context, not as your only source of cases. The firm review step gives it a credibility edge over most club produced books, and the recruiting tips sections are genuinely useful because they came from the firms rather than from students guessing.

 

Here is where it is strong:

 

  • Firm reviewed math: five firms checked the 2014 solutions, so the numbers actually reconcile

 

  • Non-US settings: you size markets in Spain, Germany, the UK, Romania, and Brazil instead of defaulting to 330 million Americans

 

  • Finance depth: NPV, WACC, DCF, and economic order quantity all appear, which is rare in student casebooks

 

  • Firm authored tips: each section carries interview advice from the reviewing firm rather than secondhand rumor

 

And here is where it falls short. The 2011 and 2014 editions are old enough that their industry framing has aged badly, with a mobile gaming case that treats Candy Crush as the reference point and an electric vehicle case built on Spanish adoption rates from over a decade ago. The case interview frameworks presented in the newest edition also lean template heavy.

 

The cases are also mostly candidate led, meaning you drive the analysis. That matches BCG and Bain interviews well and matches McKinsey poorly, since McKinsey runs interviewer led cases where the interviewer walks you through a fixed question sequence.

 

Which ESADE Cases Should You Practice First?

 

Start with six cases that cover the widest range of skills, all from the 2014 Case Collection Book. Doing these six teaches you sizing, profitability, valuation, operations, pricing, and qualitative structuring without repeating yourself.

 

  1. Online Insurance Agent: a clean German market sizing that ends around 1.4 billion euros, plus a pricing question on what to charge per search

  2. Brazil Football Stadium: a full five year NPV build with revenue growth rates, tax, and depreciation

  3. Spain Consumer Packaged Goods: an end to end value chain case where demand forecasting error drives 1.15 million kilograms of overproduction

  4. Structuring a Call Center: a layered capacity estimate that lands at 31 attendants, then reworks to 22 under different assumptions

  5. Supermarket Discount: a short promotion case where the math shows identical profit and the real answer is qualitative

  6. Fast Food Chain: an operations case with a memorable setup and a 7 cent per unit cost difference that turns out not to matter

 

Supermarket Discount is my favorite teaching case in the whole book. Both the discounted and undiscounted scenarios produce identical profit, so a candidate who only runs the numbers concludes nothing, and the interviewer is really testing whether you can reason about price elasticity, cannibalized future demand, and stolen competitor share. That is exactly the judgment a pricing case in a real interview is built to expose.

 

How Should You Practice ESADE Cases?

 

Practice them out loud with a partner, timed, with the interviewer holding the solution and releasing data only when asked. Reading a case silently and nodding along at the answer builds almost nothing, because the skill being tested is live reasoning under pressure, not comprehension.

 

  1. Split the roles properly: the ESADE books are explicit that you should run some cases as interviewer, since seeing where candidates fumble teaches you what interviewers notice

  2. Time each case at 30 minutes: most ESADE cases are multi question and will overrun if you let them

  3. Write your structure before you speak: take 60 to 90 seconds of silence, then walk your partner through it

  4. Say every calculation out loud: the 2014 solutions show the full arithmetic, so your partner can catch exactly where you went wrong

  5. Deliver a real recommendation: lead with the answer, give two or three supporting reasons, then name a risk and a next step

  6. Debrief for five minutes: write down the one thing you would do differently and check it on your next case

 

Finding a good case interview practice partner is the hard part for most candidates, especially those preparing outside an MBA program. If you cannot find someone who will give you honest feedback rather than reassurance, 1-on-1 coaching gets you the same signal faster.

 

What Tips Help You Get More Out of the ESADE Casebook?

 

Tip #1: Stop converting euros and pounds mid case

 

The ESADE cases run in euros and pounds, and candidates trained on dollar cases lose seconds converting mentally mid problem. Pick a currency at the start and stay in it for the whole case. Speed in case interview math comes from removing friction, not from calculating faster.

 

Tip #2: Read the firm tips sections before the cases

 

Each 2014 section opens with recruiting advice from the reviewing firm. Oliver Wyman tells you to spend one to two minutes structuring before calculating and to apply the 80/20 rule rather than boiling the ocean. BCG tells you not to defend your solution at all costs, which is a real failure mode I saw constantly when I interviewed candidates at Bain.

 

Tip #3: Rebuild the older cases with current numbers

 

When a case gives you a 2014 population or market figure, run it as written first, then redo the sizing with today's numbers. This forces you to hold the logic separately from the inputs, which is exactly what interviewers probe when they change an assumption halfway through.

 

Tip #4: Do not skip the qualitative questions

 

Several ESADE cases end on judgment rather than arithmetic. Wooden Panels asks what parts of a value chain can be offshored, Life Insurance asks you to generate hypotheses about customer churn, and Fertilizer Factory asks you to weigh building against acquiring. Skipping straight to the math on these teaches you the wrong habit.

 

Tip #5: Pair ESADE cases with a second casebook

 

Roughly 50 cases sounds like plenty until you realize the 2011 and 2014 editions overlap in style. Rotate in cases from a different school so you face unfamiliar formats, particularly interviewer led ones. Having personally coached hundreds of candidates, the ones who plateau are almost always the ones who ran a single book end to end and mistook familiarity for skill.

 

How Does the ESADE Casebook Fit Into Consulting Recruiting?

 

ESADE runs a full recruiting machine around the casebook, and the book is one input rather than the program. Recruitment fairs run in October and February, and the school offers a Career Acceleration Program in consulting that covers case cracking and interview technique alongside a live case competition. The Esade Full-Time MBA ranks 7th worldwide and 5th in Europe in the Financial Times 2026 ranking.

 

The outcomes back it up. According to Esade's careers reporting, 90% of graduates found a job within three months, 96% of the Class of 2025 changed function, sector, or location, and 45% changed all three. Financial Times 2026 data puts the average weighted salary at $206,389 PPP three years out, a 155% increase.

 

Firms that have recruited at ESADE in recent years include McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Oliver Wyman, Roland Berger, Strategy&, Simon-Kucher, Accenture, and EY. If you are targeting those offices, note that European recruiting timelines and language expectations differ from American ones, and consulting recruiting in Europe often expects local language fluency for Madrid and Barcelona roles.

 

The ESADE casebook will not get you an offer on its own, and no casebook will. Use it for the firm reviewed math and the European context it does better than anyone, run 8 to 12 of its cases out loud with a partner who tells you the truth, and spend the rest of your prep on live practice against unfamiliar case formats.

 

Frequently Asked Questions

 

Is the ESADE casebook free?

 

Yes, all three ESADE casebook editions were published free by the ESADE MBA Consulting Club and its partner firms. Current ESADE MBA students get them through the consulting club and career services. Everyone else can find them circulating on document hosting sites, though quality and completeness vary by upload.

 

How many cases are in the ESADE casebook?

 

Across the three editions there are roughly 50 full cases. The 2014 Case Collection Book has 25 cases split evenly across five firm sections. The 2011 BCG edition lists 20 cases in its table of contents, and the newest edition contains 8 cases.

 

Which ESADE casebook edition should I use?

 

Start with the 2014 Case Collection Book. It has the most cases, the cleanest quantitative work, and each section carries recruiting tips from the reviewing firm. Use the newest edition second for its updated industry overviews, and treat the 2011 BCG edition as extra volume once you have exhausted the other two.

 

Is the ESADE casebook good for McKinsey and BCG interviews?

 

It is useful but not sufficient on its own. The cases are candidate led, which fits BCG and Bain style interviews well, while McKinsey runs interviewer led cases with tighter question sequencing. Use ESADE cases for structuring and math reps, then practice interviewer led cases separately before a McKinsey round.

 

How is the ESADE casebook different from American MBA casebooks?

 

The settings are more European and emerging market focused. You will size markets in Spain, Germany, the UK, Romania, and Brazil rather than the United States, and you will work in euros and pounds. That makes it strong preparation for consulting recruiting in Europe and Latin America.

 

How many ESADE cases should I do before an interview?

 

Doing 8 to 12 ESADE cases out loud with a partner, with honest feedback after each one, beats reading 40 of them silently. Volume without reflection is the most common way candidates waste a casebook. Aim for depth on a smaller number and rerun any case where your math or structure broke down.

 

Everything You Need to Land a Consulting Offer

 

Need help passing your interviews?

  • Case Interview Course: Become a top 10% case interview candidate in 7 days while saving yourself 100+ hours

  • Fit Interview Course: Master 98% of consulting fit interview questions in a few hours

  • Interview Coaching: Accelerate your prep with 1-on-1 coaching with Taylor Warfield, former Bain interviewer and best-selling author

 

Need help landing interviews?

 

Need help with everything?

 

Not sure where to start?