Edge: Leadership Secrets from Footballs’s Top Thinkers. Ben Lyttleton
the player he was at his old club’ is remarkable.
4 Moving more than three times rings alarm bells. The more times a player changes clubs, the harder it becomes to settle in to the new club.
This final point is in contrast with some attitudes in football that associate players moving clubs with shows of ambition. Fans love a new signing because it sends a message that the club has the ambition to improve (a director once admitted to me that one player was signed for precisely that reason). I spoke to a coach about one player, a France international who had played for three huge clubs before he was 21, and the coach was worried that the youngster’s entourage were more interested in signing-on fees than the player’s development.
Darwin warns that highest-risk transfers involve a young player moving from a high-cohesion team to a low-cohesion team. The fact that a player might leave a high-cohesion team also tells its own story. ‘If I was a young athlete, I would find a cohesive organisation and take a 50 per cent pay cut, as the rewards would come later,’ says Darwin.
His findings are backed up by studies in individual sports, including basketball8 and football,9 which neatly summarises the challenge of recruitment. ‘Signing players of higher quality will increase team quality but will reduce team cohesion,’ wrote Dr Bill Gerrard, Professor of Business and Sports Analytics at Leeds University. ‘And the same goes for changing the head coach, which immediately wipes out all of the player–coach Team Shared Experience (TSE). The new head coach will start with zero shared experience with the existing squad.’
Gerrard concluded that the most significant impact on team performance was the interaction of player TSE combined with the length of time that the head coach has spent with the team. And the biggest cohesion impact can come when a new coach takes over a team with a low TWI.
I thought of Darwin when Arsenal coach Arsène Wenger bore the brunt of fan-base anger on the eve of the 2016–17 Premier League season. Arsenal’s title rivals had made many expensive new signings but Wenger, whose degree was in economics, had, at that stage, bought only Granit Xhaka.
‘There is always demand for new, but new is just new,’ Wenger told a baffled press corps at the training ground. ‘Football players have to meet their needs. When they meet their needs they express their quality. What a football club is to be built on is to make sure the players meet their needs and can develop afterwards. The fact that it’s new, after six months it’s not new any more. You come every day, you drive in here, the first day it’s new, after six months it’s not new any more. What is new makes news. But apart from that it makes noise. The noise is not necessarily always quality.’ Spoken like a true Darwin disciple – until, in the last week of the transfer window, Arsenal signed two more players, Shkodran Mustafi and Lucas Perez.
I ask Darwin about the England team and its performance at Euro 2016, where it lost in the Round of 16 to a far less talented, but more cohesive, Iceland team. Darwin was in no doubt where the problem lay. ‘It’s not about skill level but too much choice,’ he says. ‘If an English player has one bad game, he is dropped. But look at Iceland: if you have a bad game for them, you keep your place because there is no one around to come in.’ There may still be a clear skill deficit, but cohesion helps reduce that gap.
According to Darwin’s TeamWork Index, England was the worst team at Euro 2016. ‘Their numbers were diabolical,’ he says. ‘The skill is there and, from that point of view, the individuals are getting better, but the cohesion is not, and so the collective is getting worse.’
Darwin cited a 260 per cent difference in cohesion between Iceland and England. ‘It looked like the England players had an AVO [Apprehended Violence Order, like an ASBO] put out on them. They were not allowed to go near each other.’
So what’s the answer? ‘Patience with players. Not changing systems and line-ups all the time. How players handle pressure is related to cohesion and relationships within the team. England has done everything it could possibly do except for keeping the same people in the team. Patience!
‘The psychologist is on board, the beds are super-comfy, they even re-created the Wembley grass at St George’s Park. But what does the type of grass matter if it’s a different guy receiving the pass every time? This is also why low-cohesion teams struggle away from home; we call it complexity under duress but basically they fall apart under pressure. It’s not about developing skill. The thing to remember is that the talent you see is not the talent you get. They are different things.’
The TeamWork Index has a universal principle applicable to all businesses. ‘Not everyone can afford to bring in the best people, and if you do, you will have problems,’ Darwin continues. ‘You might be judging talent on the wrong standards if they are coming in from a different system to yours. New people may be indoctrinated into other systems. It’s more important to think about if your new hire is a good person – can they adapt to your system? – and remember that the younger they are, the more adaptable they are.’ We will look at the importance of adaptability in Chapter 2, where we will find out just what happened to Ousmane Dembélé after he appeared in the ‘Next Generation’ feature.
The question does not always have to be a ‘build versus buy’ one: some positions are more suited for buying in talent, and others for developing your own. One study looked at the portability of talent, by position, in the more measurable environment of American football.10 It took performance data from 75 star wide receivers – whose results are often linked to the relationship and understanding of set plays with their quarter-back – and 38 punters, whose job of kicking the ball is based more on individual skill. The data took into account the best season the player had and the two seasons that followed, dividing the groups into switchers (those who moved teams) and stayers.
The result: star wide receivers who switched teams suffered a decline in performance compared to those who stayed put. All wide receivers decline over time, but these declines were steeper than normal. Punters who switched teams did not experience a greater drop in performance than those who stayed. This suggests that punters have more portable skills than wide receivers – and in business terms, that wide receivers have what is known as company-specific human capital. David Moyes developed his company-specific human capital over ten years at Everton, so a short-term performance decline was inevitable after he moved jobs. Although, when he was appointed manager of Sunderland in summer 2016, Moyes had his own approach to talent portability. He went back to his former clubs to sign eight players: Steven Pienaar, Victor Anichebe, Joleon Lescott, Bryan Oviedo and Darron Gibson, whom he worked with at Everton; and Donald Love, Paddy McNair and Adnan Januzaj from his period at Manchester United. Sunderland finished bottom of the Premier League, and none of those signings improved on their previous performances. You could say that these players did not have the portability skills Moyes had hoped for.
‘Managers should consider minimising the portability of certain star positions in order to retain those individuals as a source of competitive advantage,’ the study concludes. In other words, if your star player wants a huge pay hike in his new contract, you pay it.
Darwin knows one cricket coach who has a tactic right out of the Athletic playbook: he makes training sessions voluntary attendance. ‘They all turn up of course, but that’s because he is empowering them and relying on their character to be professional. That leads to stronger relationships within the group.’
I ask Darwin if he could identify underlying reasons for Leicester City‘s surprising Premier League title-winning campaign in 2015–16. The team began with a relatively low TWI that had them down as a mid-table side. What helped is that they were playing in the Premier League, where cohesion has dropped by over 30 per cent since it was launched in 1992. The cohesion dynamic of the competition itself affects teams as much as their own cohesion does. The Premier League had four different winners in the years between 2012 and 2016 and the last team to successfully defend its title was Manchester United in 2008–09.
Leicester were able to jump up the table because so many other teams lacked cohesion: