Main Image: Thomas Eisenhuth/Getty Images

By John Portch

Football academies tend to prize resilience, but few can agree on a definition.

“Even within the same football academy we’ve seen staff have different views of what resilience is,” Ben Ashdown, a Senior Lecturer in Sport and Exercise Psychology and Lead Researcher at Nottingham Trent University, tells the Leaders Performance Institute on Teams.

“They’ll say ‘resilience is a really important part of our philosophy but actually we don’t really know what it is, we don’t really know how to measure or assess it, we don’t really know how to track it’,” says Dr Mustafa Sarkar, who also joins the call. He is an Associate Professor of Sport and Performance Psychology at Nottingham Trent and Lead Supervisor of the research programme.

Together, alongside Dr Chris Saward, Dr Nathan Cobb, and Dr Julie Johnston at Nottingham Trent University, they are leading a research programme to identify behavioural indicators of resilience in English academy football and develop a resilience behaviours observational tool. As part of the research, they have worked with academy stakeholders including coaches, psychologists, scouts, and analysts. They are also conducting a season-long study at a Category One academy (Derby County Football Club).

Based on their research, they have found that resilience behaviours can be categorised under six themes:

At the end of this research programme, they hope to have developed a tool for sport psychologists and coaches primarily, with some benefit to analysts who might contribute to the tracking of these behaviours through video-based analysis.

Sarkar says: “We don’t necessarily see it as a tool for identifying talent. I think it would be more as a conversation-starter with a player for player development purposes.”

Resilience: a behavioural response

As the exploration, measurement, and assessment of resilience in sport has tended to rely on self-report alone, myths and misconceptions have emerged (such as resilience being related to endurance and the suppression of emotion), and there is a gap between what resilience truly entails and what practitioners witness on the pitch.

“Coaches and support staff are starting to recognise that both physical and mental rest are critical to sustained resilience over time,” says Sarkar who has spent time with academy stakeholders dispelling those myths and misconceptions. “Part of resilience is about helping individuals to develop their thought and emotional awareness. It is not about encouraging people to hide their emotions”.

Additionally, “resilience requires more nuanced (context-specific) language because a person’s resilience in relation to being injured might be quite different to their resilience in relation to a loss of form”.

The behavioural elements of resilience lay at the heart of their research programme.

“We see resilience as a behavioural response,” says Ashdown, “but, up till now, there hasn’t been any literature that has actually asked what do these behaviours ‘look like’? How do we observe them? I think our work, in a behavioural sense, gives us some directly observable, reliable and valid indicators of resilience in football.”

The appeal for coaches, psychologists, and analysts is clear. “They’ve really bought into this idea that we’ve got something to look for on the pitch, and if we can see it [resilience], then maybe we can then develop it and track it over time,” Ashdown continues.

Their initial 2025 study/paper identified 36 behaviours (across six themes mentioned above), which have since been refined to ten. “We retained at least one across the six themes, which is another indicator that they’re pretty reliable.”

These behaviours include: demonstrating supportive actions during pressure or adversity (support-focused behaviour); positive body language in response to stressors (emotion-focused behaviours); and regaining focus in the face of challenges (robust resilience behaviours).

How might coaches approach these behavioural themes in their resilience development work?

The Leaders Performance Institute asks Ashdown and Sarkar about each of the six themes and they give consideration to each in turn with the caveats that a) they should be viewed collectively in order to develop a holistic view of an athlete; and b) the data collection and analysis of their research programme remains ongoing.

1. Teammate support-focused resilience behaviours

When players support or encourage teammates in stressful moments, especially after mistakes.

Ashdown admits that the relational aspects of resilience are more significant than he initially thought. “At times I probably assumed resilience was an individual capacity that you developed almost by yourself without realising that social support (through your teammates) is really significant,” he says.

“Through the work of Ben and others we’re starting to find that resilience is very much relational,” says Sarkar. “The development of resilience is dependent on cultivating high quality relationships. The interesting bit about social support is that we’ve found that it’s not necessarily about getting social support, but it’s about the perception that that support is available to you. From a resilience perspective, the perception is more important than receiving the actual support itself.”

Ashdown then shares a story of academy training drills, at Derby County FC (work led by academy sport psychologist, Lyle Kirkham, and supported by Ashdown), where players had a “secret support partner”. “We tasked some players with, right, when your teammate experiences some adversity or stressor or when they’re under pressure, find ways of offering them support,” he says, adding that the process raised the players’ awareness of how they’re reacting, responding and interacting with their teammates.

2. Emotion-focused behaviours

When players attempt to regulate their own emotions when encountering pressure, errors or frustration.

While there isn’t yet the data to support a definitive conclusion that emotion-focused behaviours depend on age and phase, as Ashdown explains, “there’s so many points where the participants said ‘we would expect to see a different response from a 10-year-old than one of our under-18s’.”

Emotional maturity is sure to be a factor. He adds: “How these players react and respond to things, particularly at younger ages, it’s a lot more visible, whereas maybe the older players tend to try and disguise how they’re feeling.”

This is a behavioural theme where interdisciplinarity comes to the fore. “We’re working with performance analysts to try and identify these behaviours through video footage and I think we’ll end up with a bespoke set of behaviours based on the phase [foundation, U9-U11; youth development, U12-U16; professional development, U17-U23].”

3. Effort-focused behaviours

Displays of physical and psychological effort used to cope with setbacks, fatigue or demanding situations.

What does making an effort ‘look like’ in any sport? “There’s a danger of making assumptions because every player is different,” says Ashdown with reference to both physical and psychological indicators of effort. Their work has talked of pairing GPS data with observations but, as he admits, “this is where we need to be careful and cautious of not mislabelling players based on a perceived lack of effort and we must be aware of individual differences”.

For Sarkar, again, it is more about setting the terms for a player development conversation. He says: “You might come up with a resilience profile to say one player has got hypothetically high effort-focussed behaviours and lower teammate-focussed behaviours, but we see this observational tool more holistically across all six themes”.

4. Rebound resilience behaviours

These reflect a player’s ability to bounce back quickly after a mistake or negative event.

These need to be channelled. It is no good if a player makes a mistake and runs around like a headless chicken for the next 10 minutes and is sent off.

“One of the participants in our research mentioned that exact point in relation to effort-focused behaviours,” says Ashdown, before echoing Sarkar’s earlier reflections. “The most value in this behavioural approach is the opportunities that it creates for player-coach or player-psychologist reflection.” This, Sarkar suggests, could be a joint review of game video clips where the coach and/or psychologist says to the player ‘talk us through your thought process. What were you thinking and feeling at the time? How might you react and respond differently?’ or it a series of ‘what-if’ questions and scenarios. ‘What if this were to happen in the future? How would you react and respond?’

Sarkar adds that any intervention should be context-specific. “If a player has done that once are we then making an assumption that they’re doing that all the time – is this a one-off occurrence versus a pattern of occurrences? If it’s a one-off, like Ben said, then it’s probing that player about what they were thinking at that particular point in time. But we have to be careful that we’re not intervening based on a one-off versus a pattern.”

5. Robust resilience behaviours

The ability to maintain stable performance while under sustained pressure or after setbacks.

Ashdown and Sarkar make the point that robust resilience behaviours risk being conflated with youthful inconsistency – and all its causes – at academy level.

“One of the participants in our research said it’s not about consistency of performance but the consistency of behavioural responses to things. So performance will fluctuate but is there some consistency in the way they’re behaving, reacting and responding?” says Ashdown. “What some of the coaches are after is a flattening of the curve emotionally and the way the players are managing things on the pitch.”

Sarkar believes coaches may be able to use the resulting observational tool as a means of evaluating the efficacy of pressure training scenarios. “What are you, the coach, actually seeing in terms of their reactions, responses, certainly from a behaviours point of view, and as a result of that pressure training, are you actually seeing an increase in some of the resilience behaviours in relation to these themes?”

6. Learning-focused resilience behaviours

When players learn from mistakes and adapt their actions rather than repeating ineffective responses.

Pressure training also presents an opportunity for self-reflection and learning through its video component – this is the ultimate purpose of this resilience behaviours work. “If we’re aware of that, can we support them in navigating those more effectively when they’re inevitably going to come up on the pitch?” says Ashdown.

“We don’t learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience,” says Sarkar, paraphrasing the American educational reformer John Dewey. “Pressure training shouldn’t just be about putting people under pressure in training and then automatically assuming somehow that they’re going to develop their resilience to future situations?”

At Derby County, led by Kirkham and supported by Ashdown, they have also introduced a series of gamification principles in delivering education and feedback at the academy through a resilience behaviours lens. This includes FIFA-style cards for players, and a football-specific version of snakes & ladders to mirror the ups and downs of the academy journey.

The future of resilience tracking

When it comes to resilience, coaches are acting on intuition, which is valuable but ultimately has its limitations.

“We’re trying to make that process more objective and systematic; hence this is where the interdisciplinary piece comes in,” says Ashdown. “We wouldn’t expect coaches in the moment in the game to be thinking about necessarily tagging or noting these behaviours. We might ask the analyst, with support from the psychologist, to do live coding or tagging of these behaviours or retrospective tagging based on the recording. That would then lead to conversations with the players. With this work, there’s a big opportunity to bring together coaching, performance analysis, and psychology.”

Sarkar explains that they are using the behavioural data to create a resilience profile for players across the noted behaviours. “That gives you a holistic viewpoint,” he says. “A player might have higher team-focused resilience behaviours and slightly lower effort-focused resilience behaviours and a medium level of learning-focused resilience behaviours. So, it gives you a nice overall resilience profile of an individual.”

The hope is that their work will eventually provide an evidence-informed and objective approach to tracking resilience on the pitch.

“It can also then become part of the everyday conversation with multiple staff. So rather than just a conversation in relation to psychology, it’s a broader conversation about player development.”

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By John Portch

“Some of you will laugh out loud when I ask this,” says Rick Cost, the Director of Performance at Olympique Lyonnais, “but how do we deal with what Mother Nature gives us?”

Cost was speaking at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London where he was invited to share his views on injury prevention and rehab.

He explained that while planning is important for a director of performance, the human element ensures there will always need to be a degree of flexibility when providing sports science services to athletes.

As he said, there is no “magic sauce” when it comes to reconciling coaching intent, the training required, the athlete’s experience of that training, and making tweaks as required.

Nevertheless, Cost and his peers have to be cognisant of the trends currently shaping athlete development, which we have divided into five themes.

1. The athlete as a member of your interdisciplinary team

Athlete-centric development is long been in vogue but athlete-involved approaches are starting to gain traction.

“Our goal is to put the athlete in the centre and then we fit the jigsaw pieces around them,” said Simon Rice, the Vice President of Athlete Care at the Philadelphia 76ers, in our Teamworks Special Report.

Those jigsaw pieces – the technical, tactical, physical and cognitive – will depend on the individual, which has inspired a trend towards athlete-involved development, as Jack Nayler explained in the context of his work at Premier League Everton.

“I believe that a player-involved as opposed to player-centred approach is vital in developing this knowledge,” wrote Nayler, the club’s Head of Sports Science. “Although the difference is subtle, it is an important distinction to make. In a player-centred model, the team of practitioners, ologists and experts discuss the player and develop a plan, drawing on all their expertise. A player-involved model brings the player into that process, involving them in the decision making and design of their training.”

For Nayler, the benefit is clear. “The player needs respecting as a key member of the interdisciplinary team. Not only will this help to develop the player’s understanding of their body and the training process, but also their investment and trust in the programme. This is key in a sport such as football where the link between doing physical work and performance isn’t always immediately obvious and the talent pool is global.”

2. The continued rise of external clinicians and coaches

As high profile athletes continue to work with their own personal trainers, the sports scientists of the major leagues are doing everything to bring them into the fold.

“It’s about role clarity,” Rice told the Leaders Performance Institute. “If a player has an external strength coach or external physical therapist, you try to sit down with them and work out what the player’s programme is going to look like. So what access do they have? Are they going to be working out in our facility? Are they going to do it separately?”

It is increasingly common for group chats including the athlete, their personal coach, and the key members of a team’s high performance staff. “We want all the information in one place so at least we know what everyone else is doing, and then it allows me in my role to make sure we’re not doubling up on things,” added Rice. “Can we agree on what the goals are for this player, understanding that we may be trying to get there in different ways with different philosophies, but what are the key points that we can agree on and can we get the data in one place so we can all access it and share it? We’re trying to work together, not fight against what the other people are doing.”

3. Better defined performance and clinical psychology

The highest-performing teams will understand psychology’s role in preparing their athletes.

This is a problem for many. As mental skills specialist Aaron Walsh wrote, “In other areas of performance, we give a clear mandate of what we want to happen in the programme, there are regular checkpoints to ensure we are on track, and we review the work after the season. With the mental stuff [skills] we tend to find a person and just let them loose, we don’t follow best practice.”

Walsh argues that is important to define the scope of the work, establish a clear framework, and provide the right content so that the delivery lands.

Whether it’s performance psychology, mental skills or a clinical issue, all staff members are called upon to play their part, as Dr Lyndell Bruce of Deakin University told a Leaders Virtual Roundtable.

“It’s not a once-off conversation because they flagged on the wellbeing this week and then two weeks later they’re back in their normal range – we continue that conversation and check-in,” she said of her work at Deakin.

“Where pathways are regularly communicated, [it’s about] checking for understanding of do you know when to use it, how to use it, what the process is, destigmatising it through education, through raising awareness so it becomes a normal part of life,” said Emily Downes, the General Manager of Leadership & Wellbeing at High Performance Sport New Zealand. “It’s not something that you go and necessarily do when you’re at your worst. So how can you use all of these services proactively to keep you actually performing?”

4. AI as a useful ‘sparring partner’

However AI is used in athlete development, there are some fundamentals that are likely to hold true, as Maximilian Lankheit explained to the Leaders Performance Institute.

“If you don’t know the question, if you don’t know what you’re asking for, you’ll never get a good answer,” said the Senior Medical and Performance Manager at European Football Clubs, which is the representative body for Europe’s football clubs.

“People don’t know what they’re actually looking for. They’re trying to find something in the data that either validates their bias or whatever, but you need to know what you’re looking for.”

With that first question answered, Lankheit believes AI could be “a useful sparring partner that can make you more efficient” when it comes to areas such as devising periodisation protocols.

However, he preaches caution. “When it comes down to everybody’s individual work, I think it will make us much better, but the human sense-making is important.” He cited Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak, who said: “I have AI myself: actual intelligence”.

“Without actual intelligence,” Lankheit added, “artificial intelligence doesn’t matter because we as the human users need to add the right context.”

By Jamie Taylor

Most people in sports coaching have little interest in research.

Additionally, one of the key challenges in coaching is that there is a world of evidence that can help practice, but most do not know about it.

At Dublin City University we are trying to subvert that attitude through our online doctorate and MSc programmes, which are aimed specifically at coaches and practitioners in high performance sport.

We have a community of around 100 coaches and practitioners who appreciate the capacity for research to enhance both theirs and their organisation’s practice in ways that have long been transformational in, say, S&C or medical.

In many respects, coaching is a discipline apart, yet sports performance has long-been reliant on other domains to pick up and apply research. More research can and should be done.

Below, I explore – drawing on insights from students across the doctorate and MSc programmes – the common barriers in coaching, before making the case for evidence-informed research that can meaningfully support practice. The programmes are delivered by a team of practitioner-researchers, including Áine MacNamara, Dean Clark, Robin Taylor, Rosie Collins, Stephen Behan and myself.

The common barriers

As a coach, you should be weaving research into your practice – it should not be additional.

“Last Friday, we protected two hours for some internal professional development with a group of practitioners,” says Ian Costello, the General Manager of Munster Rugby. “There’s 20 reasons not to do it, but if it’s important, it’s protecting the time in your diary, no matter how busy you are.”

Ian believes the programme has opened up new career options, potentially even beyond professional rugby union. He has now got into the habit of writing in his diary in three colours: black for operational matters; green for strategic issues; and blue for learning and personal development.

“Someone gave me one of those multicoloured pens – I hate them because of my bad handwriting and these don’t help – but it’s brilliant for my diary,” he continues. “Learning and personal development can be anything from podcasts to light reading or heavy reading. It can be writing too – that was a good life skill and practical skill that a mentor shared with me.”

Additionally, coaches have not often been shown how to critically organise their thinking, even when they thought they were doing so.

Ian has been coaching for more than two decades, but still wouldn’t describe himself as the finished article.

“The first year broke me down in terms of questioning everything I know around critical thinking and reflective practice,” he says. “What the doctorate does is give you more structure to that process. It provides you with a more robust and applicable skillset to be accurate in research terms and then to think critically about the information you’re absorbing. As time goes on, you’re able to transfer that to your practice more readily and with a lot more clarity.”

He is not the only one to find the first year challenging. “It was quite confronting and shocking,” says Jamilon Mülders, the Performance Manager at the Royal Dutch Hockey Association. “You try to present where you’re coming from, what you have achieved, what you have done and why you have done things, and the staff at DCU will pose little questions like ‘where’s the evidence?’”

Jamilon has won Olympic and world championship medals as a coach, and yet, as he says, “I have to acknowledge that nine out of ten things we did worked for whatever reason at that stage, but there was no underlying theory, no evidence. There was nothing you could fall back on where you can explain it or also just make sure that you detect possible mistakes, issues, challenges, hurdles which might have happened or occurred in other areas.”

He sensed that something was absent. “I felt that something was missing in my personal education and growth,” he continues, further reflecting on that induction period at DCU.

Some coaches may never have set foot in an academic setting but, whether it’s our doctorate or MSc programme, we don’t need to simplify course material for coaches. We just need to make sure we are providing the right provocation.

“When we’re asked better questions it causes us to say ‘actually, I took that situation for granted, but I need to peel that back a little bit more’,” says Rachael Mulligan, the Athlete Support Manager at the Federation of Irish Sport. “It forces you to go ‘what is the best question to ask in order to get to a better outcome?’”

The most recent cohort of students on DCU’s professional doctorate and MSc programmes lines up for a group shot at DCU in Dublin.

The case for evidence-informed – not evidence-based – research

I hear all the time that ‘we need to quantify this’. It leads us to measure things that don’t really matter simply because we can count them.

There are different ways of seeing this and my view is that evidence should inform coaching, working alongside professional experience, theory, and context, rather than being treated as something on which coaching can be straightforwardly evidence-based.

“For anybody to be genuinely comfortable about their view of the world or their view on practice, it should be research-informed,” says Scott McNeill, the Head of Coach Development at the Premier League. “The risk and challenge of research is that sometimes things can go out of date very quickly. A body of research can be nearly out of date the day that it’s printed. So to keep that as a consistent and live way of engaging in practice would make sense to me, that suggestion that knowledge isn’t fixed, that these things keep evolving.”

“The first thing I said was my issue with research is I sometimes think researchers are almost in an ivory tower and very much removed from what goes on in the day-to-day field of performance sport,” says Rachael of the topic.

“That perception was completely quashed after a couple of weeks in the programme because there’s so much emphasis in terms of, yes, this is fantastic in the academia space, but how do we move this into real-life practice?”

“I used to always say I was evidence-based and a lot of coaches will pride themselves on that,” says Christoph Wyss, the Lead Physical Performance Coach at Red Bull. “But I think evidence-informed makes more sense because if a research paper comes out, being evidence-informed is taking that research, reading it, critiquing it, seeing what’s good and what’s not, and then applying that to your setting, because every setting is different.”

As he says, “with evidence-based you’re just transplanting it, doing exactly what they did, but then evidence-informed is more translating it.”

“There’s not necessarily one solution,” says Eilish Ward, the Head of Player Development at the Ladies Gaelic Football Association. “There’s no one way to learn anything or to gain experience or expertise.” The key for Eilish in her work is to ensure she and her colleagues are “making as informed decisions as possible when we’re designing learning activities” because “not everything from research may be transferable into a practical environment and, equally, every practical environment is going to be hugely different.”

“Being evidence-informed is probably more aligned with what we do on a day-to-day basis,” says Niall O’Regan, the Head of Education & Development at the Football Association of Ireland (FAI). “It is something that has helped me to understand how to be authentic, how to be creative in adapting what the research is saying is to suit the needs and the context and the environment that you’re in.”

Plus, as Scott says, “people sniff you out pretty quickly whenever there’s a gap between what you’re saying and what might feel real to them. Our job as people that work in this space is to either translate the messaging in a more accessible way or to admit that there probably still is a gap.”

And therein lies the opportunity to ask better questions.

Research should never be far from practice

While the programmes can be intimidating for coaches, we’re here to help in any way we can because it is important that research is not too far from practice. When they are close, the research finds practical application.

“This was a part I enjoyed from day one because you could immediately see the practical implications and make an impact,” says Jamilon of his coaching in field hockey. “So if I were talking with S&Cs about load management around our training, my new way of approaching them and asking questions really helped me to have a clearer view on the team and the environment.”

In some cases, research can help to highlight the current inadequacies in a high performance programme.

Niall, for one, thinks differently these days about coach development structures at the FAI; and it feeds into his practice.

“There are some experienced coaches that have so much knowledge and so much expertise in their fields that they may not need to go systematically through a certain set of steps,” he says. “They may have the ability to effectively communicate, empower others or share knowledge in a way which doesn’t require them to go through a checklist. They can get to the end with the exact same learning and sometimes even more learning.”

Such an approach doesn’t necessarily sit right with the coach and it wouldn’t necessarily sit right with the coach developer. “There’s a grappling effect where those people probably feel like, ‘well, I’m being rigidly pushed into a checklist of things and being asked to do things that I naturally wouldn’t do myself’.”

It comes back to being research-informed. “The person in front of you is the actual start point, and then it’s up to us as the educators and developers to be able to link it into research. The practice comes first and then it’s a matter of layering in what research is out there that can inform the decisions that that person is making.”

If you would like to know more about the professional doctorate and MSc programmes at DCU please email Jamie Taylor at:

[email protected]

By Dr Benjamin Kelly

When Barcelona paid £107 million for Antoine Griezmann in 2019, the club acquired a cognitive anchor that would influence team selection for years, regardless of performance.

When managers delay substitutions despite trailing, they’re exhibiting loss aversion. When entire industries pursue the same talent, driving compensation packages to irrational levels, they’re succumbing to herding behaviour.

Professional football provides a vivid laboratory for understanding managerial decision-making. The biases visible on the pitch are identical to those undermining leadership across every industry. The consequences are measured in billions of pounds of misallocated resources and missed strategic pivots.

Behavioural biases cost organisations far more than technical incompetence. Yet most leadership development ignores the psychological patterns that systematically undermine even the most talented executives. Understanding these five critical biases – and building processes to counteract them – is essential for effective leadership.

1. The sunk cost trap

Once an organisation invests heavily in a strategy, acquisition, or hire, the psychological pressure to justify that investment becomes overwhelming. Leaders consistently double down on failing initiatives simply because of what was already invested.

In football, expensive signings receive playing time despite poor performance. Nicolas Pépé (£72m), Philippe Coutinho (£142m), and Antoine Griezmann (£107m) continued starting despite underwhelming contributions because admitting the transfer was a mistake felt too painful.

In organisations, executives defend failing projects and persist with underperforming business units for the same reason.

The antidote:

Establish clear criteria for evaluating ongoing investments independent of what was spent. Ask: ‘If we were making this decision today, would we proceed?’ If the answer is ‘no’, the sunk cost is irrelevant.

2. Loss aversion: the paralysis of admitting error

Losses hurt roughly twice as much as equivalent gains feel good. This asymmetry creates a bias towards inaction even when action is optimal.

Managers wait too long to make substitutions or tactical changes. Ole Gunnar Solskjær’s Manchester United, down 2-0 to Liverpool at Old Trafford in 2021, waited until the 46th minute to make their first change, and until the 60th minute for meaningful tactical shifts. By then, Liverpool had scored three more goals.

Making early changes feels like admitting the initial plan failed. Waiting preserves the illusion of control and delays psychological pain. Meanwhile, the opposition exploits the unchanged approach.

In organisations, leaders persist with failing strategies far longer than optimal because changing course mid-year feels like admitting error.

The antidote:

Build pre-commitment devices. Decide in advance what triggers will prompt strategic changes (e.g. ‘if we’re losing at half time, we make two changes immediately’). Remove emotional bias from in-the-moment decisions.

3. Herding behaviour: following the crowd

Every summer, multiple football clubs pursue the same handful of players, driving prices to astronomical levels whilst equally talented alternatives are ignored. The 2023 pursuit of Brighton’s Moises Caicedo saw his valuation jump from £80m to £115m in days, not because his ability changed, but because two clubs (Chelsea and Liverpool) were competing for his services.

In executive recruitment, the same pattern repeats. When a particular executive becomes ‘hot’, multiple organisations suddenly pursue them, driving compensation packages to irrational levels.

The antidote:

Implement rigorous, independent evaluation processes before considering what competitors are doing. Be willing to hire exceptional talent that others have overlooked – this is where competitive advantage lives.

4. Confirmation bias: seeing what we want to see

Once an organisation commits to a decision, confirmation bias takes over. Leaders see what they want to see; concerns are explained away or ignored.

Alexis Sánchez at Manchester United provides a textbook example. Signed in 2018 on a contract worth £560,000 per week, Sánchez continued to start matches despite consistently poor performances because the club needed to justify the astronomical wages. Every decent performance was highlighted; poor form was explained as “still settling in”. The confirmation bias persisted for nearly two years before he was loaned out.

The antidote:

Before major decisions, actively seek disconfirming evidence. Assign someone to make the case against the decision. Force these counterarguments to be addressed explicitly.

5. Anchoring: trapped by first impressions

Leaders anchor to preferred approaches – formations, business models, management styles – that become reference points for all subsequent thinking. Even when circumstances demand different approaches, the anchor holds firm.

The Chelsea Manager between 2019 and 2021, Frank Lampard, remained committed to the 4-3-3 formation even when results suggested alternative systems might work better. As opponents adapted and key players aged, the system became less effective, yet the anchor made adaptation psychologically difficult.

The antidote:

Regularly challenge foundational assumptions. Ask: ‘If we were designing this from scratch today, would we design it this way?’ If the answer is ‘no’, the anchor is costing you.

Lessons for football coaches: building better decision-making processes

The best-run clubs implement systematic approaches:

1. Pre-commitment devices: Decide substitution triggers before the match. This removes emotional bias from in-the-moment decisions.
2. Separate process from outcome: Evaluate in-game decision-making independently of the final score. Did you make the right call at the right time, even if it didn’t work out?
3. Active disconfirmation: Before committing to a tactical approach or signing a player, assign an assistant to argue against it. Force these counterarguments to be addressed explicitly.
4. Decision journals and bias checklists: After each match, document key decisions and outcomes. I have created a football manager/coach behavioural bias checklist – a series of yes/no questions that identify which biases may have influenced decisions.

Each question links to one of the five key biases:

• Did you delay substitutions despite trailing? (Loss aversion.)
• Did you continue with a failing tactical approach? (Anchoring.)
• Did you select a player primarily because of their transfer fee? (Sunk cost.)
• Did you dismiss evidence that contradicted your pre-match plan? (Confirmation bias.)
• Did you pursue a player because other clubs were interested? (Herding.)

A ‘yes’ response flags that decision for deeper review. Over time, this checklist makes invisible biases visible, allowing managers to identify personal patterns and build awareness of when they’re most vulnerable to specific biases.

5. Cooling-off periods: Don’t make major tactical or personnel decisions immediately after wins or losses when emotions are highest. Wait 24-48 hours. Decision quality improves dramatically.
6. Objective performance metrics: Separate player performance from transfer fee. Track how often expensive signings play regardless of form. Make invisible biases visible through data.

Conclusion

The margins in elite organisations are razor-thin. A single strategic decision can mean the difference between market leadership and irrelevance. Yet organisations routinely leave value on the table because of psychological biases that are well-documented, predictable, and preventable.

The invisible opponent – our own cognitive biases – may be the most formidable challenge in leadership. But unlike external competition, this opponent can be beaten with awareness, process and discipline. The organisations that master this mental game won’t just avoid costly mistakes. They’ll outcompete rivals who remain blind to their own biases.

For football coaches, every decision is analysed, every outcome is measured, every mistake is scrutinised. By implementing systematic processes that counteract bias, coaches can improve decision-making quality, reduce costly errors and build more resilient organisations.

The mental game is the game. Everything else is just preparation.

Dr Benjamin Kelly advises investors and professional athletes on decision making strategies in high stakes environments. If you would like to speak to Benjamin about his work, please contact a member of the Leaders Performance Institute team.

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By Jack Nayler

During the course of this series we have explored the hallmarks that define complex environments.

We also looked further at the implications for this in a sporting organisation, notably that complexity is fractal, exists at different levels, and that each person within the organisation will exert different levels of influence over the performance at any given moment.

Last week, I began to look at what this means for those in leadership positions.

Leadership in complexity requires you to have the humility to accept the ignorance of your position and the understanding that autocracy won’t work. It is impossible to micro-manage every decision in the fast pace and short turnaround of games in a professional sports season. You will not be present to control every interaction that occurs and you will not possess all of the information available to make every decision.

With the inherent fluctuations that occur in a complex environment, it is incumbent on the leaders to provide a framework within which everyone can operate, as effectively as possible, in a transdisciplinary manner.

I believe there are four pillars to this framework, that are characteristics of high-performing environments.

1. A clear direction of travel
2. Solid collective decision-making processes
3. Processes robust to pressure
4. A culture of curiosity and learning

Your role as a leader is to ensure that these are in place so your team operates as effectively as possible.

I explored the first two pillars here. Let’s now delve into the third and fourth pillars below.

3. Processes robust to pressure

 The complexity of the sporting season ensures that as results wax and wane so will pressure and external noise. The processes you have in place need protecting from this pressure and the associated emotion.

For some simpler tasks and processes you can have checklists or flight manuals where processes can be recorded, ratified and referred back to (1). However, these only go so far and will be less useful as the complexity dials up.

When you and your staff are committed to helping the team perform, it is easy (or just human nature) to become overly emotional about performances (both positively and negatively), and this can leach into your decision-making processes. Leaders need to be aware of the propensity for this as well as the influence of subconscious bias on any decision making (this is a wider topic than the scope of this series but a good place to start is Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, 2). Setting up your team/environment to reduce the effect of these factors is key to leading your team effectively.

As the leader, with your wider viewpoint and greater access to those higher up the organisational hierarchy, you should have a greater appreciation of the pressures you and your team face. As emotions tend to affect quality decision making, it is your job to be judicial over which pressures you allow to filter through to your team and which you will bear.

Objectivity must become a cornerstone of making decisions. We need to collect data on the subject (player or situation) over which we are trying to make a decision. This data then needs turning into information (tables, graphs and other visualisations) by adding context (use of appropriate statistics) to help the reader understand the magnitude of any effect. This information turns into knowledge when the reader reflects on the new information, with respect to what they already know and understand.

As we have discussed, each person will have their own unique take on a given set of information. Organisations that can successfully make the leap from individual to organisation level knowledge will be better prepared to perform in complexity.

The threat to an organisation if knowledge sits siloed with individuals is two-fold. Firstly, the quality of the decisions being made will fall and secondly the organisation is fragile to an individual leaving and removing the intellectual property (IP) from the building.

I believe the threat to the organisation is greater from the loss when IP walks out of your facility, than if that person was to be employed by a rival team. As each organisation is its own complex mix of culture, practitioners and athletes, it is difficult to transfer tacit knowledge from one environment directly into another.

Once you have objective information around which you can make decisions, you can begin to plan what you and your team will deliver. This planning process provides a framework for everyone involved to work within and should remain just that: a framework. Remember that in complexity the person closest to the action has the most information in a given moment. This framework provides a set of parameters that act as a fallback, against which new information can be assessed. In the moment, under pressure, this framework coupled with a clearly understood direction of travel from you as leader should help the practitioner on the ground make a better decision.

As the outcomes of the decisions we have made as a team become apparent our framework can become the basis against which we can reflect and review the decisions made, by providing a reminder of the conditions as they existed in that moment. This again helps to objectify the review process and fosters a culture of psychological safety (3).

Understanding the complex nature of this environment has helped me to appreciate that we cannot get everything right all of the time (remember there is never a perfect game) and my first thought when things fall down is: how could I,  as an intrinsic part of this complex system, have acted differently through the process to have affected a better outcome? This helps me to remain less emotional when analysing failures as and when they happen. I do this before turning my lens outwards to think how we could have done better as a team.

4. A culture of curiosity and learning

The fact that complex systems are never perfect and we cannot predict outcomes with 100% accuracy creates uncertainty. In their book Radical Uncertainty, John Kay and Mervyn King describe uncertainty as “the result of our incomplete knowledge of the world, or about the connection between our present actions and their future outcomes.” (P. 13, 4). We need all members of the team to understand that although this space is uncertain, performance will emerge from it.

There is then a gap that exists between our expectations and the outcomes. Acknowledging the inevitable existence of this gap allows the leader to be more sanguine and less frustrated by it, putting us in a better headspace to explore why the gap exists like it does and how we can narrow it in the future. I see little point in the wasted energy that would be spent railing against this gap’s existence. Rather I see this gap as the learning space, a space to be curious about. It is the space where the information mentioned in the previous section becomes knowledge.

When we reflect on information in the context of what we already know, we develop our knowledge base. This should then spark off further questions as to why we ended with the result we did, restarting the cycle back to collecting more data. This process is critical in the complex world. As the system shifts and changes, so do our levels of expertise (5). Further, knowledge developed in other environments and populations diminishes in power the further away from that population it moves. The most powerful learning will come from research done in our own group of athletes. This should be a mix of quick and dirty in-house enquiry and more formalised research carried out with partner universities and led by in-house research and development departments.

You also need to lead your team into this gap by putting in place structures that allow your team the time and space for reflection. We are really good in team sports at planning and doing, before all too soon the next fixture rears its head. You need to be intentional about reflecting and reviewing. Reflecting skills can be learnt and should be fostered amongst your team. Make reviews normal and model behaviour by openly reviewing the things you personally have done and seeking feedback. This normalises the feedback process and creates space for you to feedback to your team members more easily (6). Mix regular small hot reviews in the moment (7) with more analytical, larger reviews. In these, review a specific subject (e.g. grade 2b hamstring injury rehab) as opposed to generalised time periods (e.g. pre-season). Signpost your reviewing – create a structure or framework around how you want to reflect and share it with the team ahead of time. Your team should then turn up in the spirit of reflection, rather than having it sprung upon them. Most critical of all is to have concrete outcomes that everyone is aware of and can be held to.

The second space we need to be mindful of as leaders is the space from which the performance of our team emerges.

In 2012, Google embarked on a large study to try and discover what made a successful team within their organisation, they called it Project Aristotle (8). Google studied 180 teams from across the business and looked many combinations of factors (e.g. personality traits, emotional intelligence, demographics and skillsets of team members) that they hoped would indicate levels of learning and performance. Whichever way they crunched the data, they could find no pattern as to what would bring success. Some of the factors that did not influence team success intuitively sounds like items that would be important when trying to build a successful team:

• Location of teammates
• Consensus-driven decision making
• Extroversion of members
• Individual performance of team members
• Workload size
• Seniority
• Team size
• Amount of time spent working at Google

Eventually the researchers looked away from the hard skills and instead looked at interactions between team members, driven by the work of Amy Edmondson, Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School. Professor Edmondson’s research has also studied effective teams and the work at Google confirmed her theories. The number one factor that will describe team success is termed psychological safety, which she describes as “a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking… a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up” (P. 354, 3).

A psychologically safe environment is one which recognises that the space between the components of the complex system is where the magic happens and works to ensure that all members of the team can lean into said space.

In a complex world, we cannot see the connection between our decisions and their future impact, we only make sense of them with hindsight. As the author Robert Louis Stevenson said: “The worst historian has a clearer view of the period he studies than the best of us can hope to form of that in which we live. The obscurest epoch is to-day.”

However, there is evidence to suggest that better predictions and decision making come from cultures that “harness the power of collectives and encourage diverse opinions, perspectives and collaborative teamwork” (9).

The challenge we face when leading in an increasingly complex world is that it is constantly shifting in front of us, and we only see what is happening through our lens. There are a whole host of things we cannot see and second and third order effects that we cannot predict. Therefore, any time we take an immovable position or opinion, we are also opening ourselves up to being incorrect.

As leaders these positions, either polarised, immovable (or worse, both) are dangerous places to be. This is demonstrated by the work of Philip Tetlock, summarised in his book, Expert Political Judgement: How good is it, how can we know? Over a nearly 20 year period Tetlock ran forecasting tournaments with 284 experts from a variety of fields, leading to 28000 predictions (10).

Experts were only slightly more likely than chance to be correct, however the interesting part was in discovering that how the experts thought was more important than what they thought when it came to the accuracy of their predictions. Tetlock characterises these two styles as Foxes and Hedgehogs after the title of an essay by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, based on a quote by the Greek philosopher, Archilochus: “a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing”.

When the hedgehog is challenged, they curl up in a ball with their spikes out to deflect the world. It is the same with the experts, their position is immovable, and they deflect critique. Experts who were more fox like were less sure of their predictions and more willing to change them as events unfolded. Foxes were more likely to be accurate in their predictions than hedgehogs in the long-term. Hedgehogs had the potential to be more precise, but with a much greater chance of being wrong. When dealing in complex environments, when you are wrong, you have the potential to be spectacularly wrong.

By contrast, foxes will recognise that they do not have a complete perspective and therefore not all of the answers. They will lean into the space between themselves and others, inviting their perspective and collaboration, seeking to co-create solutions for the best possible outcome.

To develop a climate in which foxes can flourish, we must create psychologically safe environments that protect the space between the members of our teams as sacred and encourage them to lean into these spaces to collaborate and provide diverse perspectives. Edmondson (3) describes it as “a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.”

This process takes modelling from us as leaders. If we cannot show up, be true to ourselves and honestly lean into the space between us, those we lead, and our teammates, then we can never hope to engage others to do the same. If we fail to do this effectively, we may struggle to create a high performing environment.

Further thinking

• How are you able to cut through the noise to create clarity for your team in a complex environment?
• Are you able to remain consistent in your convictions?
• How able are you to let go of decisions and instead empower your team to make better ones?
• What information do you possess as a leader that you can share with your team to help inform their decision making?
• Can you insulate your team and their processes from unnecessary noise and pressure when needed?
• Where do you create space for reviewing and learning?
• Do you intentionally seek feedback? Where?

Bottom line

Throughout this series, I have endeavoured to explain the way that I have come to see the world and, because I work in performance sport, how this applies in that context.

In the spirit of this, I also see how it has emerged from my own upbringing, education and experience to form in this way, at this point, and that you may well see things differently. This is OK because we all encounter this world in different ways. As my own experience grows, I am sure these ideas will develop and adapt.

The biggest messages I would wish to convey is that as a leader, show up and be authentic to yourself and your beliefs, don’t be afraid to try things and fail (as long as you’re willing to do the work to understand why) and go looking for feedback.

Writing is a fantastic way to force you to critically confront your thoughts and assumptions, and writing for an audience, to distil your ideas down as succinctly as possible.  I would recommend it as an exercise for anyone leading or aspiring to lead as clear communication of your ideas helps bring people on a journey with you.

References

1. Gawande, A., 2010. The checklist manifesto: How to get things right. London: Profile Books.
2. Kahneman, D. (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow. London: Penguin Books.
3. Edmondson, Amy C. (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383
4. Kay, J. and King, M., 2020. Radical Uncertainty: Decision-making for an unknowable future. London: The Bridge Street Press
5. Cook, R.I., 2000. How Complex Systems Fail. [online] Available at: https://how.complexsystems.fail/ [Accessed 29 September 2025]
6. Scott, K., 2019. Radical Candor: How to Get What You Want by Saying What You Mean (Fully revised and updated edition). London: Pan Books.
7. Scott, M., 2019. ‘Thinking On Your Feet: How Coaches Can Use Reflection-in-Action to Develop their Coaching Craft’. Applied Coaching Research Journal, 4, pp. 10–15.
8. https://rework.withgoogle.com/intl/en/guides/understanding-team-effectiveness
9. Wilson, P.J. and Kiely, J., 2023. Developing decision-making expertise in professional sports staff: what we can learn from the Good Judgement Project. Sports Medicine – Open, 9(1), 100.
10. Tetlock, P.E., 2005. Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

By Jack Nayler

In part one of this series, we explored what complex environments are, and some of the hallmarks that define them.

The second part looked further at the implications for this in a sporting organisation, notably that complexity is fractal, exists at different levels, and that each person within the organisation will exert different levels of influence over the performance at any given moment.

This brings us onto this third instalment, where I begin to look at what this means for those in leadership positions.

Leadership in complexity requires you to have the humility to accept the ignorance of your position and the understanding that autocracy won’t work. It is impossible to micro-manage every decision in the fast pace and short turnaround of games in a professional sports season. You will not be present to control every interaction that occurs and you will not possess all of the information available to make every decision.

With the inherent fluctuations that occur in a complex environment, it is incumbent on the leaders to provide a framework within which everyone can operate as effectively as possible, in a transdisciplinary manner.

I believe there are four pillars to this framework, that are characteristics of high-performing environments.

1. A clear direction of travel
2. Solid collective decision-making processes
3. Processes robust to pressure
4. A culture of curiosity and learning

Your role as a leader is to ensure that these are in place so your team operates as effectively as possible.

Below, I will run through the first two on that list. I will tackle the third and fourth pillars in another piece.

1. A clear direction of travel

Previously we spoke about how in a game, the influence over performance grows or diminishes in relation a player’s proximity to the ball, peaking whilst they are in possession. At the complexity scale of the wider organisation, this becomes the person (practitioner) stood in front of the player.

As a leader, whilst you may previously have had boots on the ground, chances are when stepping into a leadership role, your player-facing time has diminished. You are now generally removed by at least one, if not several degrees, from working directly with players.

The challenge you face is that the responsibility for the decisions taken around the athlete(s) is still ultimately yours and, as you rise higher, the difficulty factor of the decisions increases.

As your time with athletes diminishes, so does the amount of knowledge and information you have about them. There should be no way that a head of performance in an organisation has more ready information on an athlete than the therapist who has hands on that athlete daily. The paradox is that the closer you get to the centre of the complex system (the athlete), the more difficult it is to see the whole.

There is an Indian proverb about five blind men who are presented with a different part of an elephant, each perceives that they are touching a different object (e.g. the tail is a rope, the trunk a snake etc) because they have not been presented with the whole. The more reductionist we become in complexity, the narrower our focus, the more we are reducing our bandwidth and leaving ourselves open to larger errors.

Thus, your ability as a leader to frame the nature of the problem, provide an understanding of what the wider landscape looks like and cut through noise with your team is essential. This creates your direction of travel, a clear understanding around what you expect as a leader that frames the decisions made by your team on a daily basis. You may need to do this at larger scales (philosophy setting, season planning, game model development) as well as smaller scales (planning end stage rehab and return to performance, or where to place team meetings in the training week). Whatever the scale, you need to be able to provide a consistent thread of behaviour and values that will underpin how decisions are taken, and you need to do this regularly.

You also need to ensure that the vision you are setting fits the wider organisational goals. If necessary, this can be accompanied by some relevant key performance indicators (KPIs), but caution is advised. The aim of KPIs should be more of an outcome measure than a target in and of themselves. They should be the resultant of good practice, not become the embodiment of it. When numbers become targets, they can become a form of control placed on the complex system and, as per Goodhart’s law (1), can be gamed. A case in point is player availability. If the target is above a certain percentage availability for the team, it can lead to under-reporting by practitioners who do not want to negatively affect the standard by which performance is being assessed.

If the behaviours and values that underpin your vision can be co-created with your team, then the understanding and buy-in from the members of the team will be much greater. This will provide the basis for how your team will operate. This is less about the tacit knowledge in your team or the operational decisions that are being made (as these will be constantly adapting to the changing situation or player) but should include the values and behaviours the team want to exhibit and hold each other to. These are akin to the ‘why’ in Simon Sinek’s famed Golden Circle (2).

A clear vision with underpinning values set by the leader (with their team) creates a north star that will guide the decisions made by the team.

2. Solid collective decision-making processes

Even though cause-and-effect aren’t obvious in complexity and there is a degree of uncertainty in every decision made, we should not become fatalistic about making decisions and leave them to chance. We can absolutely increase the quality of the decisions that we are making.

As a part of the complex system, you are inherent in the decision-making process, but as mentioned above, you often have less information than those you lead.

In a hierarchical command structure, it takes too long to gather all of the relevant information and pass it up the chain of command to make a decision that is then passed back down again. Remember that the more you try to control a complex system, the more you leave yourself open to bigger failures.

David Marquet is a retired US naval captain who illustrates this problem well in his book Turn the Ship Around (3). He describes how he was trained to command one class of submarine and, at the last minute, was switched to another ship of a different class (at the time, the worst-performing ship in the Navy). He decided what the crew needed was licking into shape with training.

On their first voyage, Captain Marquet gave an order that was passed down the chain of command to the sailor whose job it was to enact that order. When the action didn’t happen, Marquet thought he had to gotten to the bottom of the problems that beset the boat. He marched over to the sailor demanding an explanation, and the sailor calmly informed him that what he had ordered wasn’t possible on this class of submarine. Marquet didn’t know what he didn’t know.

His experience speaks to another truism of complex environments: there is always a gap between expectation and reality, it will never play out exactly as you think. Crucially, Marquet stepped into this gap; he learned from the experience and changed the command structure from top-down order to bottom-up intention. Sailors had to declare to their superior that they intended to carry out an action, and this was then either approved or denied. The boat went from worst to best-performing ship in the US Navy the following year.

General Stanley McChrystal recognised a similar challenge whilst commanding US forces during the Iraq War in 2003 (4). US forces were picking up suspected insurgents off the streets and taking them back to base for interrogation. The information gathered was assessed by analysts before leaders made decisions and then issued orders back down the chain of command. The trouble being that by the time it took to do this, the message had been passed around the insurgents’ network, which immediately went to ground.  McChrystal recognised the complexity of the situation and pushed decision making closer to the centre of the action on the front line. He trained troops to be able to question insurgents on the street and empowered them to act on what they found. This is credited as a key tactical change that helped to swing the tide of the insurgency back in the favour of the US forces.

Accepting then that in complex environments, we need to empower those in our team to make to make decisions, the most obvious way to improve decision making is to hire the best skillsets available to you. The art comes in blending these skillsets and setting them up to make good decisions.

As each person in the staff is their own complex mix of upbringing, education, skillset and experience, all may have a different viewpoint on the same set of information. Played correctly however, this is a value-add and is a key part of why diversity within your team is beneficial, each person will see things others cannot (5). Leading means you need to be able to synthesise what others are seeing and hearing and bring that together in a coherent decision.

There can be a temptation (which I have fallen for) to think you need to gather as many people/opinions together as possible when making decisions, allowing everyone in the team the opportunity to contribute. In fact, there is a limit beyond which the quality of decision-making drops. As the number of people involved in the process increases, there can be a reduction in the trust that the group members have in each other. This reduces psychological safety, and you lose agility.

For the kind of agile decision making necessary in and around a heavy fixture schedule, quality discourse will begin to reduce with as little as 5 people involved in the decision (6). A key task for the leader therefore is to figure out what the key decisions are that need to be made, and then set their team up accordingly, with the appropriate individuals correctly assigned.

Once you have your best people in place to make decisions, the next step is to ensure they are set up for success. Whilst we want people to bring all of their experience to bear on the decisions being made, we also need these to be informed by the available evidence. We should be collecting data and turning this into information (visualising it) so that the team members can then begin to process the evidence and reflect on it in relation to their existing knowledge. (I will describe this process  in more detail in part four).

Leaders need to check and challenge the decision-making process effectively. They should ensure that those involved have all had the chance to contribute, check that the team have used the available evidence and provide the greater context held, if appropriate.

Also crucial is to break an impasse when it occurs, you hold the casting vote. As the leader, the more difficult decisions will be yours to make when they are beyond the scope of your team (who can help advise). You may well be in your position due to your greater level of experience. Your team will expect you to bring all this to bear when influencing the final decision that is being made. Whilst not everyone will agree with the final decision, ensuring the relevant people have had the chance to contribute and then explaining your decision will help to unite everyone behind a course of action.

Disagreeing and committing is a key skill for high performing teams, particularly when the stakes are high.

Future thinking

• How are you able to cut through the noise to create clarity for your team in a complex environment?
• Are you able to remain consistent in your convictions?
• How able are you to let go of decisions and instead empower your team to make better ones?
• What information do you possess as a leader that you can share with your team to help inform their decisions making?

In the fourth and final part, I shall explore the remaining pillars: processes robust to pressure and a culture of curiosity and learning.

References

1. Goodhart, C.A.E., 1975. Monetary Relationships: A View from Threadneedle Street. In: Reserve Bank of Australia, Papers in Monetary Economics, Volume I. Sydney: Reserve Bank of Australia.
2. Sinek, S., 2009. Start With Why: How great leaders inspire everyone to take action. London: Penguin.
3. Marquet, L. , 2012. Turn the Ship Around! A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders. New York: Portfolio Penguin.
4. McChrystal, S.A., Silverman, D., Collins, T. & Fussell, C., 2015. Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World. London: Portfolio Penguin
5. Syed, M., 2019. Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking. London: John Murray.
6. Camilleri, T., Rockey, S. & Dunbar, R., 2023. The Social Brain: The psychology of successful groups. London: Cornerstone Press.

By John Portch

When the Leaders Performance Institute trend survey asked practitioners for their team’s greatest barriers to tech-supported innovation, nearly 45 percent cited cost and human resources.

The figure surprised both the Leaders team and Professor Fabio Serpiello, the Director of Sport Strategy at Central Queensland University, because most of the survey’s respondents work for well-resourced professional teams. It was reasonable, we felt, to assume that they’ve progressed beyond such concerns.

“We thought this warranted further discussion,” said Serpiello, who led the first of a three-part virtual roundtable series aimed at exploring the dynamics of tech-supported innovation in sport.

We must point out that none of the Leaders Performance Institute members in attendance contradicted the survey’s findings (which you can read in our Trend Report). Some recounted the type of problems they encounter when it comes to innovation.

“Some problems can definitely be too big,” said one experienced high performance specialist working with military units in the US.

“You may not get support because of the priorities of the major decision makers that control the purse strings.”

What is ‘innovation’?

Serpiello believes the first step is simply to define ‘innovation’.

Even more importantly, he argues that teams should alight on a shared definition; one that does not conflate the concept with ‘creativity’. (Creativity, as Serpiello explained, is the outcome of an ideation phase, while innovation covers the execution and eventual impact of an idea.)

He makes the case that when teams have an agreed definition of what ‘innovation’ means to them then it offers a “clear way to approach and analyse whether the innovation processes in your organisations work or not.”

Serpiello himself likes the definition proffered by Scott Anthony in his 2011 Little Black Book of Innovation: ‘Innovation is something different that has impact’.

He then asked the practitioners and coaches at the table for their definitions. Answers ranged from the refinement and optimisation of processes to the value of novelty and pursuit of greater efficiency.

“These are all linked to a practical outcome,” said Serpiello.

Greg Satell’s Model of Innovation

Innovation, Serpiello argues, comes in several shapes and forms depending on the nature of the problem. To make his point, he introduced renowned change management specialist Greg Satell’s Model of Innovation, which provides a practical framework for introducing innovative practices, encourages strategic thinking about problems and helps to facilitate better collaboration.

He presented a diagram of Satell’s model to the table:

Serpiello then shared his thoughts on each quadrant:

Basic research – a low understanding of both domain and problem: “We don’t really know what the problem is and we don’t really know in which field or area it happens.”

Disruptive innovation – a well-understood domain but poorly understood problem: “In this area you may need something like innovation labs or launch pads.”

Breakthrough innovation – a poorly understood domain but well-defined problem: “This is the reverse of disruptive innovation… the classic example of open innovation.”

Sustaining innovation – a well-understood domain and problem: “The most common form in sport [and often the subject of] continuous research, design thinking or road mapping.”

There were three areas in particular where the table thought Satell’s model could prove useful:

1. For clarifying expectations. “I like the idea of using this model to frame leadership’s expectations for innovation,” said a director of performance working in the US. “They say they want innovation but they may not know what that means and they may not understand the differences between basic research that requires long timeframes versus continuous improvement.”
2. For working out who can contribute. “Often you get the best answers from within and you often get the best solutions when you use the power of the people working on it,” said a high performance specialist based in New Zealand. Others agreed, including a sports scientist from Australia. “I think it’s everyone’s role, particularly in high-performance sport, we’re solving problems every day.” While the wisdom often lies within, the opposite may also be true. The New Zealander added: “This model also helps you think about where you need to go outside.”
3. Long-term planning cycles. This facet is pertinent for teams, federations and confederations alike, as a representative from a world governing body explained. “We’re trying to build some more of that collaboration to actually understand,” they said. “Not just trialling things for the sake of it, but if there is a genuine area of the game we want to try and improve.”

As Serpiello wrapped up proceedings, he set the scene for session two, which will focus on decision-making frameworks in the context of technology-driven innovation.

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Main Photo: TransferRoom

By Ethan Joyce

I’ve been a dedicated follower of Everton for a while now, meaning I’m painfully familiar with the hope and eventual disappointment that comes with the international transfer windows.

And in that time, I saw a trend I assumed to be purely anecdotal to a still-fledgling soccer nut: add-on fees in player contracts. I felt like I was noticing a growing population of them. The mechanism accounts for future bonuses due to player on-field performance (appearances, goals, etc.) and fits into a complex ecosystem that also features loan-to-buy options, sell-on fees and more.

Turns out, soccer contingency payments like this have indeed been on the rise. According to the international soccer marketplace TransferRoom, these contract features have increased 5x in the last 10 years. That promptly demanded a tool that fits the landscape for the company’s massive soccer clientele list: TransferRoom’s Contingency AI. Deployed in August, this creation helps TransferRoom football clubs track these potential payments or capital injections to maintain accurate budgeting.

Simon Ankersen, TransferRoom’s Director of Football Relations, highlighted that the company has more than 800 clubs on its platform, which includes the MLS and its 30 teams, and all of them feel varying impacts around this growing contract structure trend. A brutal pain-point combination — the manual and constant contract scanning process paired with the churn inside football offices — exposed a clear need for a monitoring tool.

“Clubs are getting more and more creative with these clauses because they want to de-risk their purchases,” Ankersen said. “The operations are getting bigger, the deals are getting bigger, so therefore you have more people involved in it.”

Ankersen told me the feature has already produced savings for clubs, as well as found forgotten clauses that had been achieved, which helped teams scratch up a little more transfer-room capital to secure player acquisitions.

Beat Flückiger, the CFO for BSC Young Boys in the Swiss Super League, said the biggest risk for a smaller league club is not recognizing the earnings it’s due. He said he used to rely on a large Microsoft Excel file, pulling the figures of each contract in manually. But contracts can vary in terms — one may say an appearance is the moment a player hits the field, while another will dictate a 45-minute threshold.

“[The club was] using different data sources but never came to the point where it’s 100% satisfying,” Flückiger said. “And the clauses are so different in every contract, it’s almost impossible to do this on your own.”

TransferRoom began developing this feature in the spring. Ankersen added that the spin-up time of any project is now dramatically improved from the startup days. The company was founded in 2016 and now has approximately 150 full-time employees.

Expect more innovation from TransferRoom later this year. Ankersen shared that the company is working on another feature that will let teams forecast potential player purchases and how they could affect profit and loss, as well as help Premier League teams navigate the league’s Profit and Sustainability Rules.

“We are just unearthing more and more pain points,” Ankersen said.

This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.

By Jack Nayler

In part one, I set out the idea of complex environments using the analogy of a car in traffic. This time around I want to bring it into a more relatable context – the game, and what I believe operating in complex environments means for how we prepare athletes.

As our metaphorical car entered the complexity of a city, a player enters a match. All team sports are complex in nature. The degree of complexity in each sport varies depending on the number of players and the structures inherent through the laws of each game. Football is one of the most complex of team sports. Whilst it is continuous like basketball, it has more players. And although rugby and American football have as many or more players, there are fewer set plays in football, so it flows more. Couple this complexity with the low scoring and there is more uncertainty over results in football than in other sports; a factor that contributes to its global popularity.

The complex nature of team sports means that the generalities of complex systems also exist within the game. The player on the ball is closest to the action so has the greatest chance to influence the game at that moment. As the ball moves, so does the influence of each player, in proximity to the ball.

The future is also uncertain. Once the referee has blown the whistle to start the match, we have no idea what will happen next or even how long exactly the game will last.

Team sports: a microcosm of life

Team sports are all extremely popular as their complexity creates a microcosm of life. The tactical, technical, physical and cognitive demands are all wrapped up together and it is difficult to break them down into discrete buckets. The performance of each individual player will emerge from the interaction of all these components.

Remember that complexity is fractal, so whilst the performance of each player on the team will emerge from the interactions of these four components, the performance of the team will emerge from the interactions between each player, and the outcome of the match will emerge from the interactions between the teams, the fans, officials, weather etc.

This has implications for how we prepare our teams to perform. Once a player sets foot on the field of play, our ability to influence the outcome as coaching and support staff diminishes. We need to provide our players with the skillset to deal with whatever emerges in the game. Because the game is constantly evolving in real time, our players need to be able to make sense of what is happening in front of them and find solutions to the puzzles presented within the game.

Remember that the more we try to control a complex system and add safety, the more we can leave ourselves open to bigger problems. Coaches of all levels appreciate this. If all training consisted of each week was the starting line-up vs an opposition with the coach dictating 90 minutes of match play pass-by-pass, the team would very quickly come unstuck in the game at the weekend.

Nassim Taleb talks of Fragility, Robustness and Antifragility (1). Whilst the robust team is able to repel the challenge posed by another team, an anti-fragile team will have the toolkit to assess their opponent in real-time and exploit their weaknesses.

This is one of the reasons why we now recognise the power of games-based approaches in skill acquisition and developing fitness (2, 3, 4). I have seen through in-house research over the years the more beneficial hormonal response of games and competition for adaptation in players.

This does not mean that there isn’t space for isolated physical and skill-based training in sport. Developing running technique can positively alter factors associated with increased injury risk (5) and High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) has a beneficial effect on a variety of underpinning physical performance factors in football (6). These are key pieces of the performance puzzle. The art comes in how and when they are deployed as well as how they are blended together effectively with the technical and tactical training, to greatest effect.

Raising a player’s ceiling

What we need is a variety of complementary practice spaces to allow players (as individual complex entities) to develop capabilities themselves before then applying them in context.

In complex environments, we want to try and expand the ceiling of a player’s capabilities, so as the vast majority of the fluctuations in the system (the game) come within their physical limits. Hamstrings are the most injured area of the body in football, and most hamstring injuries occur during sprinting. It would be tempting therefore to try to reduce risk by minimising the exposure a player has to sprinting. However, as soon as the game demands that the player sprints, their risk is much greater as we haven’t prepared them properly to do that. We believe now that regular sprinting exposure (appropriately placed in the training week) will confer protection from hamstring injuries (7).

As discussed, an individual player is their own complex system. Their performance will emerge from the interaction of their technical, tactical, physical and cognitive capabilities, which are all intertwined. We need to treat each player within our squad as an individual and design their training programme accordingly.  This should develop their capabilities in line with the demands that will be placed upon them by the playing style/game model and the competition, whilst considering their own personal history (injuries, training age, maturation status etc).

The on-field training should then reflect the game model, and competition demands sufficiently to allow the player to apply, develop and exhibit these physical capabilities in context of, and interwoven with, the cognitive, technical and tactical demands. Again, through research conducted in-house, I have seen the importance of training at match intensity during the week for reducing risk of injury and increasing performance; come the weekend and the research shows that maintaining higher chronic loading will help to reduce injury risk (8).

The growing appreciation of these factors have led to moves away from more traditional periodisation models first developed in individual Olympic sports where physical qualities were trained in an isolated but sequential manner. The rise of Tactical Periodisation models (9) has attempted to address team preparation holistically during the on-field training itself. Different constraints are placed upon the design of the practice on a day-by-day and week-to-week basis that provide affordances for technical, tactical, psychological and physical attributes to be overloaded on any given day.

When sports science and performance blur together

The support staff around the players need to understand this process and the underlying motivation for it each day from the coaching staff. Physical preparation, therapeutic work, psychological skills training all need to be complementary to this process and not detrimental.

As each player is their own complex system, they are themselves closest to the action. No one should know the player’s body and how it feels better than them, though admittedly this takes time to learn as a professional athlete.

I believe that a player-involved as opposed to player-centred approach is vital in developing this knowledge. Although the difference is subtle, it is an important distinction to make. In a player-centred model, the team of practitioners, ologists and experts discuss the player and develop a plan, drawing on all their expertise. A player-involved model brings the player into that process, involving them in the decision making and design of their training. The player needs respecting as a key member of the interdisciplinary team. Not only will this help to develop the player’s understanding of their body and the training process, but also their investment and trust in the programme. This is key in a sport such as football where the link between doing physical work and performance isn’t always immediately obvious and the talent pool is global; from different cultures and backgrounds.

The whole programme therefore needs careful management in a trans-disciplinary manner. When sports science first entered football around 30 years ago it was perceived as a standalone service where players spent time separately to the coaching team. This then developed into larger multidisciplinary teams of practitioners working within their field of expertise, but they were still often siloed. The rise of the Head of Performance brought distinct disciplines together to form interdisciplinary teams operating in a more integrated manner.

These lines are now blurring further. Technology has allowed S&C coaches to do many of the things that were previously the domain of the sports scientist (e.g. analysing jump tests). The rehabilitation process starts with the doctor or physio but ends with technical coaches delivering elements. Analysts and sports scientists co-create drills that match the technical, tactical and physical demands for a player completing some additional conditioning work.

What needs placing around a complex system, as a way of helping to manage and steer it in the direction we need, is a framework that guides those within the system in their decision making.

Psychology is a case in point.  There is a clear need for performance psychology to help develop the toolkit of capabilities that players have at their disposal, and the wider training should help to develop and test these capabilities in a realistic manner. However, everyone in the organisation has a brain between their ears and is interacting with one another so is, to a greater or lesser extent, doing psychology in some way. A framework, or Psychologically Informed Environment (PIE) is essential to ensure that as far as possible all the interactions happening within an organisation are in service of the performance (and I would consider wellbeing intrinsic to performance) and not detrimental to it.

So, we return to the fractal nature of complexity and the different scales at which complexity exists. The sporting organisation itself is a complex entity and each person within it will exert different levels of control at different times.

This has implications for the way that we lead these environments, and this is what I want to delve into in the third and fourth parts of this series.

Summary

• Performance in sport emerges from the interaction of the tactical, technical, physical and cognitive demands placed upon the player, and then the team.
• When preparing teams, we need to give the players the combined skillset to recognise and solve problems on the field of play in the moment, as practitioners trying to place more control will only result in bigger errors and problems.
• Instead, constraints should be placed around the practice space to allow the desired response to emerge.
• As much as possible, practices should then be designed in a complementary manner, with one eye on the whole.
• Including the player in the process has a two-fold positive effect. It educates the player and increases buy-in to the programme.
• Can you create a clear framework for performance in your environment?

References

1. Taleb, N.N., 2012. Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder. New York: Random House.
2. Gabbett, T., Jenkins, D., & Abernethy, B., 2009. Game-Based Training for Improving Skill and Physical Fitness in Team Sport Athletes. International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching, 4, pp. 273 – 283.
3. Kinnerk, P., Harvey, S., MacDonncha, C., & Lyons, M., 2018. A Review of the Game-Based Approaches to Coaching Literature in Competitive Team Sport Settings. Quest, 70, pp. 401 – 418.
4. Manninen, M., Magrum, E., Campbell, S., & Belton, S., 2024. The effect of game-based approaches on decision-making, knowledge, and motor skill: A systematic review and a multilevel meta-analysis. European Physical Education Review, 31, pp. 18 – 32.
5. Clemente, F., Ramirez-Campillo, R., Nakamura, F., & Sarmento, H., 2020. Effects of high-intensity interval training in men soccer player’s physical fitness: A systematic review with meta-analysis of randomized-controlled and non-controlled trials. Journal of Sports Sciences, 39, pp. 1202 – 1222.
6. Silva, M., Fonseca, P., Fernandes, R., & Conceição, F., 2024. Is Running Technique Important to Mitigate Hamstring Injuries in Football Players?. Applied Sciences.
7. Edouard, P., Mendiguchia, J., Guex, K., Lahti, J., Prince, C., Samozino, P. & Morin, J., 2022. Sprinting: a key piece of the hamstring injury risk management puzzle. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 57(1), pp.4–6.
8. Morgans, R., Oliveira, R., Mandorino, M., Zmijewski, P., Ryan, B., Modric, T., Teixeira, J. & Moreira, A., 2026. The loading impact of training and match-play on non-contact muscle injuries in elite male soccer players: A seasonal analysis. Biology of Sport, 43, pp.107–114.
9. Delgado-Bordonau, J.L. & Méndez-Villanueva, A., 2012. Tactical periodization: Mourinho’s best-kept secret? Soccer Journal, May–June, pp.28–34.

Main Photo: Getty Images

By Joe Lemire

PlayerData, a lower-cost option for athlete load monitoring, has released the smallest indoor/outdoor tracking unit just a few months after raising a seed round led by Darco Capital and Bolt Ventures, the family office of serial sports owner David Blitzer.

Other strategic investors in the Techstars-backed company include Pentland Ventures, Accelerate Ventures, Hiro Capital, and angels who previously invested in Strava and Revolut.

PlayerData’s new product, the Edge Air Tracker, is about half the size of competitors, and it combines GPS and LPS tracking, the latter an indoor alternative when satellite coverage is not available. The LPS system uses portable beacons that the company says can be set up in less than an hour. The Edge Air Tracker received the higher-standard FIFA Quality certification this summer.

“We had to build it in a PlayerData way: easy to use, fits in a backpack, mobile and affordable,” said CCO Jess Brodsky. “What gets us going is we get to give something to people that is just as elite quality — we don’t sacrifice on data quality — but to everybody.”

PlayerData’s Edge Air Tracker combines GPS and LPS tracking, the latter an indoor alternative when satellite coverage is not available. (Image: PlayerData)

The founding story is that, a decade ago, University of Edinburgh student Roy Hotrabhavanon had fashioned his own training tech to compete in archery by taking parts from consumer box retailers. Realizing there was little business upside in a niche sport, he sought to build for soccer instead, discovering there was a market gap particularly for grassroots, academy, university and women’s clubs who didn’t have the budget for an incumbent system such as Catapult or StatSports.

PlayerData is ubiquitous in the UK, where it records data from 94% of the country’s soccer pitches, Brodsky said, noting that the total includes the Premier League because its officials wear the monitoring devices during matches. The startup moved into the US market about two years ago, and Brodsky said the company has doubled or tripled its ARR (annual recurring revenue) in each of the past five years, building up to about 60,000 sensors in the market.

One of the biggest recent additions to the client roster is IMG Academy, where nearly 1,000 student-athletes will use the technology. The soccer program will install solar-powered beacons around all 15 soccer fields, and PlayerData and IMG will collaborate on developing and soft-launching sport-specific experiences in the app for volleyball and softball.

Abi Goldberg, an assistant strength and conditioning coach at Rutgers, supports the men’s and women’s soccer program whose seasons are concurrent, meaning she is balancing the training needs of both with little overlap. The use of PlayerData with both teams, Goldberg said, is helpful because the hardware and software systems are “incredibly user-friendly,” allowing her to review the data and communicate it the coaches even if it’s just a short window between their practices.

Often, each team’s director of operations will be tasked with overseeing PlayerData use at road games, but Goldberg said the tech doesn’t require an S&C professional to manage. She has even loaned devices to a few of the athletes for use in the offseason.

“Most GPS systems are in a big heavy briefcase-looking thing — I think there’s some been security nightmares in the airport — but these are way more compact,” she said. “They can put it in their backpack.”

This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.