Edge: Leadership Secrets from Footballs’s Top Thinkers. Ben Lyttleton

Urquiaga says with a smile. ‘We always say that you have to have lived it to be able to understand. The whole city came out onto the streets for the celebration party. Schools and factories and offices were all closed for the day. These were my friends, my neighbours, the people I grew up with. I lived among them in Sestao. I still do. I’m still the guy that won the title.’

      Urquiaga was a Spanish international when he left Athletic and moved to Espanyol. He was successful there too, reaching a UEFA Cup final in 1986. But he says, with a tinge of sadness in his voice: ‘Even that was not the same.’ So, what is it about this culture? ‘When there are difficulties at Athletic, it is not like at other clubs,’ he says. ‘Nobody is looking to leave; you are playing with the friends you grew up with. That means you become more united when the going gets tough; you fight together, until the end.’

      Urquiaga points to the far corner of the first team’s training pitch. That’s where work will start soon on a new main building. ‘As we don’t buy players like other clubs, the money made by the club is invested back into the youth system and the facilities,’ he says. ‘We want this place to be like the best university here, to have the best facilities and give the kids the best chance to make it.’

      His choice of the word university is no coincidence. In February 2016, Athletic formalised a relationship with the Bilbao-based University of Deusto. Young players at Lezama can gain a university degree in physical education and sport science. The four-year course contains modules on anatomy, physiology, teaching PE, and theory and practice in sports including handball, volleyball and Basque pelota.

      Iker Saez teaches the course. He is a regular at San Mames and is working on a PhD that shows education between the ages of 14 and 18 improves sporting performance. ‘I believe the best players are often the best students,’ he says. ‘If I’m smart with my brain, I can analyse the game better. But don’t forget the Athletic way is also to develop good people. They want to develop role models for society, and education is at the forefront of that.’

      Amorrortu takes a similar view. ‘In the end, the kids need to perform in all that they do,’ he says. ‘Their grades are an expression of their personality. That is something to do with them as a person – it’s good to be able to play football well, but you must also be a person who knows how to value effort, who overcomes difficulties, and that is a question of personality. Education forms part of a rounded person, someone who knows about the world around them: politics, business, how things happen. Does it make them a better professional? I’m convinced it does. In the end, someone who knows how to express themselves, who knows how to reason, who has the ability to have relationships with people, that is very important. That is fundamental. That opens you up for everything, and it helps you deal with the pressure.’

      The players know that if they fall behind in their grades, there is a chance they may not get picked. What happens in school tells Athletic what is in the players’ heads; and the club believes what is in their heads between 14 and 18 can be a marker for future performance. There are four players in the first team with BA or BSc-level degrees, and another six with the high school Baccalaureate qualification. Compare this with England, where Duncan Watmore is the only top-flight player to earn a degree since John Wetherall in 1992. More often, the students come from Bilbao Athletic and Baskonia. Amorrortu says around 60 per cent of the players complete their university courses.

      There is one line in Amorrortu’s document that is in capital letters. It reads: ‘EL NOS ANTES QUE EL YO’ (The ‘us’ before ‘me’). Developing this sense of community, through education and belonging, can be powerful. The Athletic model reminds me of Next Jump, an American business that runs employee rewards programmes, allowing discounts from over 30,000 merchants. There are around 200 Next Jump employees based in four cities, and they benefit from a unique company structure. This includes subsidised holidays, free food (a healthy lunch if you attend a lunchtime fitness class), mentors for everyone and Code for a Cause, which offers out employees’ IT skills to charities that need it.

      The other reason staff turnover at Next Jump is almost zero, and 90 per cent of employees say they love working there, is not the company dance-off at the annual party, but the No Firing policy. Once Next Jump hires you, the contract is for life. ‘Hiring managers started treating hiring like adoption: once we take someone into our family, they’re here for life, [and] when things don’t work, they’re responsible for training them, helping them,’ explained CEO Charlie Kim. He noticed that training became much more comprehensive, focusing more on character and integrity. The biggest impact he saw was in the effectiveness of performance evaluations. Instead of scepticism from employees concerned about a future firing, there was an honesty and openness in these discussions. Employees spoke frankly about their problems and concerns and, as a result, never took those stresses home with them. With a focus on developing the individuals, employee turnover is down and overall happiness up.

      In the ongoing quest for improvement, Athletic can rely on one of their biggest fans: Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, famous in Spain for his outstanding work on the game theory of penalty-kicks. Palacios-Huerta is also on the board at Athletic, where his official title is Head of Talent Identification.

      ‘The wider lesson is that everyone at the club should understand the values of the club and their own importance to their club and community,’ Palacios-Huerta says. ‘I think that if players feel that the club they play for is their club, they’ll play with more commitment. They’ll be more committed to be better at what they do. They won’t feel like ordinary workers, they’ll feel and act as if they are owners. If the “workers” feel that they are the ones who give the club its identity and the club feels that they give the club its identity, then you create a family business which can be very efficient in a very tough market.’

      Palacios-Huerta describes talent as ‘the product of abilities × commitment’. The coaches develop the players’ abilities. He is interested in the commitment. He does not want to share too many of the secrets that give Athletic an edge, but a clue into the work he does can be found in his book Beautiful Game Theory: How Soccer Can Help Economics. In Chapter 4, he describes a computerised penalty-kick game between 20 pairs of healthy subjects, half of whom were playing while hooked up to a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) device. Each pair played between 100 and 120 matches; one of them as the striker choosing where to place the ball, the other the goalkeeper trying to stop it.

      Palacios-Huerta wanted to know what happens inside the brain during a penalty-kick game and whether neurological data can predict which individuals might be better at strategic decision-making. This is a subject we will look at more closely in Chapter 3. Palacios-Huerta found activity increases in various areas of the brain during the decision-making period, and that brain activity in another area related to better randomisation of choices.6 Using similar neuroeconomic techniques, he believes he can determine which players would react best in pressure environments.

      I remembered these findings during the match I watched. Of the five goals Aduriz scored, three were penalties. He used two different strategies: for the first kick, he picked his spot and smashed the ball into the net, which is known as the Goalkeeper-Independent method. For the other two, he was Goalkeeper-Dependent, waiting for the goalkeeper to move first and rolling the ball into the other corner. I am sure that One-Club Man winner Le Tissier, himself a penalty specialist, would have approved.

      Athletic has a triple strategy that businesses can learn from today. It has developed this culture of togetherness and collaboration, helped by its history and geography, that provides an edge. The club invests in its talent as humans first, not machines whose only purpose is to produce results. Their emphasis on education, behaviour and development is testament to that. (So is the players’ car park, where I spotted just one sports car and only one convertible; the rest were extremely ordinary. It turned out the convertible belonged to Ernesto Valverde, the coach.) And the club believes that retaining talent is more important than recruiting it. When companies don’t develop talent internally or promote from within, it sends a message to employees: we will find external solutions. That can then become self-fulfilling: without opportunities, talent will leave. Athletic retains talent and, in so doing, retains its community.