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.
I catch up with Palacios-Huerta after the game. I ask him how Athletic continues to find its 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
