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. Players who have changed teams will struggle to deliver on this. The number of times we have heard players being described as ‘not 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
