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

edge. ‘We survive on tiny margins. In the player development aspect, in some sense we are like the Moneyball of football. We are using data to find as much as we can to gain an edge,’ he tells me. ‘The reason is because our model is like no other club; it is not about buying or selling. We don’t need to sell players and we rarely look to buy them either. It’s about developing. And our culture, this social model, it’s the biggest part of that.’

      HOW TO GET AN EDGE – by IGNACIO PALACIOS-HUERTA

      1 Understand better, and from a purely scientific perspective, the production function of talent during the period from 10 to 20 years old.

      2 Understand better players’ decision-making processes, and how these are formed.

      3 I like the definition of talent as the product of abilities × commitment. An edge is obtained by having greater commitment. Understanding and investing in the formation of commitment is key.

      GAIN LINE

      Measure team chemistry

      Defining a team / The TeamWork Index / Turnover and cohesion / Talent portability of stars / Leicester and the super-chickens

      Not everyone buys into Athletic’s brand of success, or at least the reasons behind it. ‘They think cultural input is the reason, but I would argue that it’s cohesion,’ says Ben Darwin, a former Australia rugby international whose career was ended abruptly after a horrific spinal injury suffered during the 2003 World Cup semi-final against New Zealand.

      Darwin’s injury came about when a scrum he was in collapsed. He was pushed up vertically and his head caught the inside shoulder of his direct opponent. He heard a crack in his neck and immediately lost all feeling in his body below his chin.

      As he collapsed onto the grass unable to move, he knew how serious the situation was. But his mind was in calm, problem-solving mode, as it was programmed to be while on the pitch. ‘Mate, I think I’ve broken my neck, I can’t feel anything,’ he told the team physio as soon as he ran over.

      In the next few seconds, three more thoughts came into his head. One: my coach will be annoyed that I stuffed up that scrum. Two: if I’m a quadriplegic, what will I do with myself? Three: maybe I’ll get into computers, I really like computers – okay, that’s what I’m going to do with myself.

      Darwin did not break his neck – he had suffered spinal shock, and had a prolapsed disc – and miraculously was able to walk out of hospital one week later. For that he owes a great deal to his direct opponent, New Zealand prop Kees Meuws, who heard Darwin whisper, ‘Neck, neck, neck.’ Meuws crouched over his body to protect Darwin, which saved him from paralysis. ‘I think someone just flipped a coin and it went my way.’

      Darwin was 26 at the time. He had played 28 Test matches, and was a few years from his peak. He never played again. His biggest loss was the friendships he forged on the pitch. As he put it: ‘When you finish a game of football and you’ve played together and you walk off with your team-mates … and you’ve overcome an opposition, you don’t have to say anything to each other, you can simply look your fellow player in the eye, and he knows you helped him, and you know how he helped you. And that’s enormously satisfying.’

      That memory stayed with him. Throughout his coaching career – at Norths in Sydney, Western Force in Perth, Melbourne Rebels in Melbourne, and Shining Arcs and Suntory Sungoliath in Tokyo – he felt that a coach’s impact was often negligible. Some seasons, he was part of an ineffective coaching group and the team was undefeated. At Western Force, he did what he felt was his best work and the team came last.

      He moved to Japan, coached there – working under England’s successful rugby coach Eddie Jones – and won everything, despite doing nothing different. ‘I did my worst coaching when I was in Japan, because I couldn’t even speak the language.’ The team went unbeaten because, Darwin thought, they had been together for so long and knew each other so well.

      Darwin returned to the thought that he’d had while lying stricken on the pitch. He ‘got into computers’. He set up an analytics company called Gain Line Analytics, based on his belief that there is a fundamental misunderstanding about how teams work. His view is that a team is a system of relationships, and those within it are either aligned or not. The better aligned the relationships, the more successful the team.

      The numbers backed him up. Sports teams made up of players who had existing and long-term relationships, those had played with each other for a long time, were a better indicator of performance than salary. In some cases, he saw that the levels of understanding between team-mates impacted on performance by between 30 and 40 per cent.

      This is known as the Juggler Effect. It confirms that skill develops in a cohesive environment. If two jugglers work together for five years, they will know each other well and improve as individuals, not just as a pair. If a juggler constantly changes his partner, he will spend more time working on developing new combinations than his own skill. In this respect, high cohesion also allows for greater skill development.

      We have seen that Athletic finds its edge by building a community, developing players through education and retaining its talent. Darwin takes this one step further and explains why cohesion offers significant added value for a business. Later in the chapter we will look at a club that did not have the geographical, historical or cultural advantages of Bilbao and still managed to develop its own identity in a cohesive environment.

      Darwin set himself the task to measure the intangible of team chemistry. He initially developed an algorithm to calculate team cohesion that had three measures:

       Internal experience (within current team, maybe the youth academy)

       External experience (outside of current team)

       Externally shared experience (for example, club-mates playing for a national team)7

      He called it the TeamWork Index (TWI). Based on research from nine different team sports, including football, across 30 seasons, it showed a clear correlation between the quantity and intensity of linkages within a team – to put it simply, cohesion – and team performance. He added more measures, among them playing system, combinations and skill-sets, and now has a more robust TWI that, he says, predicts outcomes with greater accuracy than bookmakers. The higher a side’s TWI, the more unified the team, the more likely the club is to enjoy sustained on-field success, off-field stability and heightened brand engagement.

      His first clients were rugby league teams in Australia. Gain Line Analytics now works in rugby union, Australian Rules football, cricket and football. Darwin offers a Performance Audit to help owners and stakeholders benchmark expectations; a Performance Capacity to calculate squad skill output multiplied by cohesion; a Cohesion Score to assess weak points in clients’ teams and opposition teams; and a Cohesion Predictor to assess possible outcomes with different line-ups in the short and long terms. One Premier League manager who uses Gain Line’s Cohesion Analytics said: ‘I’ve always felt this about sport, but no one has put it into data.’

      At the root of Darwin’s philosophy is the belief that high turnover of players reduces cohesion. He looked at data involving 10,000 players and came up with some key findings:

      1 A player’s output on the field at their previous club is not just solely because of that individual. Their output is a product of the knowledge and understanding that player has with the other players around them. This is something unique for each player at each club, and is not transferrable. So it should be expected that a player who has recently changed clubs would under-perform at the new club.

      2 On average, it takes three years for a player to hit their peak after moving clubs, and that is if they manage to hit their peak. Some players are never the same after moving clubs, through no fault of their own. Add in an overseas move, or a foreign language, and it’s even tougher.

      3 A player’s new club is expecting them to perform at the same standard as they did during the last game (or perhaps the best game) at their previous club.