By John Portch with Cameron Macdonald

Thierry Henry, an assistant coach with the Belgium men’s national team, wants to help players to develop what he calls their “camera”.

“I know it might sound strange, but people always wonder about the best camera they can buy,” he said. “You have it – it’s your brain.”

The former France international, who played for clubs including Arsenal, Barcelona and New York Red Bulls, was talking at the Leaders Sport Business Summit, which took place at London’s Twickenham Stadium last month, in his capacity as an investor in the virtual reality [VR] platform Rezzil.

The aim of the company is to augment the way players train in the modern era – from professionals in top-flight club and international games to the grassroots level. Rezzil’s suite of offerings ranges from their Player collection, which helps remove the barriers to entry from training, such as access to facilities or coaches, to their Index series, which compiles data collected from virtual drills to help identify player characteristics. With a particular focus on developing the ‘cognitive fitness’ of elite players, the platform has garnered interest and investment from other former players including Gary Neville and Vincent Kompany

“You have some players that will see stuff that some players will not see,” added Henry. “I always say your eyes are useless if your mind is blank. It’s something you can work on.”

Henry, who is widely considered to be one of the most cerebral footballers of his generation, described himself as a “thinker of the game.” He said: “You will often have a coach that will tell you how to make you faster, make you stronger and whatnot along those lines, but it’s rare that you can have someone to tell you how to make you smarter and help that muscle memory that you have.”

VR has its early adopters but there is still considerable resistance across the game. “People have to be more open to accept it. It’s tough to say to someone ‘your brain doesn’t function well’ – in brackets I want to say I’m talking about the game not talking about life.”

Henry retired from playing in 2014 after having won the World Cup, Euros, Champions League, English Premier League, Spain’s LaLiga and France’s Ligue 1 amongst numerous other honours during his 20-year playing career. He is also Arsenal men’s record scorer with 228 goals.

He began coaching Arsenal men’s under-15s in 2015 and, a year later, became an assistant coach with Belgium under Roberto Martínez. The Red Devils would go on to finish third at the 2018 World Cup in Russia. Henry then took head coaching roles at another of his former clubs, AS Monaco, and at Montreal Impact, before making his return to Martínez’s coaching ticket at Belgium in 2021. The team are once again tipped to do well at next month’s World Cup in Qatar.

Inevitably, in the past seven years, there have been times when Henry has worked with players who were not blessed with the skillset he possessed as player. He told the audience that coaches must have empathy when highlighting a player’s shortcomings, let alone issues with their in-game cognition. “When you challenge someone about what they see and what they do and how smart or not they are, it can be hurtful at times,” he admits.

Stimulating the brain

Henry emphasised that it is important for coaches to make players think. “I played with players, and I won’t name names, but you ask them why they make that pass and they don’t even know,” he said. “[They say] ‘I don’t know. I saw a player and I passed the ball’. ‘Did we have an overload or did we have an underload?’. ‘I don’t know’. ‘You passed the ball on the side when there was one Arsenal player against four. If you turn the other way, we were on an overload. Why?’.”

VR can help a player repeat a scenario they played out at training. “You [can] ask players in their room, not only on the field, to recreate a scene that they played in the morning; option A, option B, option C or whatever it is. ‘Why did you pass the ball there?’ ‘We had an overload so it’s obvious’. ‘Well done’.

“Some players pass the ball because it’s blue and blue,” he said with a tone of bemusement. “So what’s the point behind it? There’s got to be a purpose when you pass the ball.”

This mentality was installed in Henry when he was an undergraduate at France’s fabled Clarefontaine academy. The teenage Henry was fast but some of his other skills were deemed underdeveloped. “All I had was my speed, so my gift, but I had a coach called Joaquim Francisco Filho, a Brazilian coach, that was giving me tasks when I was young. So he used to tell me before a game: ‘Thierry, today you can not use your speed’ and I looked at him and said ‘are you mad? That’s my thing. Why are you taking my gift away?’ And he said ‘because one day you’re going to meet someone that is as fast as you – how can you beat him?’ I started to think ‘I need to move better’. I was fast but I was never going to be gone; like if you’re fast you’re fast, if you’re tall you’re tall, but he was challenging me and stimulating me. We were also in a special school, I have to say. The way they were thinking was different.

“As a striker, you’re always [with your] back to the goal and the challenge one time was that you cannot pass the ball back. Then how am I supposed to play if I cannot pass the ball back? But suddenly you stand in free quarters and you try to find space so that you can turn; you start to understand space better, running the line better, seeing things better. Speed was always there and if you can now have what we were talking about with Rezzil, to develop and stimulate your brain, after you have people along the way that think about winning. That coach who thought about winning thought about stimulating my brain and developing my brain. It was very important that I took it on board and it never left me since.”

Contactless reps

“As a player, I didn’t want to miss training because I didn’t want to miss the tactical part of it and what we were supposed to work on,” said Henry of memories of his own injuries and periods of rehabilitation.

VR has the potential to enable athletes in rehabilitation to reduce their risk of collisions or impacts. “So suddenly you go out there but you can’t really hit the ball,” he continued. “At one point the ball comes to you and you hit it and you’re like ‘why did you hit it?’ It’s just a reaction, the ball comes and you hit it, so maybe if you stay in the room [a rehabilitation facility at the training ground], they replay the training session to you, and even if the ball comes at one point you know what you have to do the day after, the week after, how long it’s going to be. I think it’s important for you to work tactically without getting injured.”

Similarly, Henry argues that you can learn to head the ball more effectively but without the need for endless physical repetition. “We don’t have a helmet and it does hurt,” said Henry, who was never a great header of the ball. “You can learn about how to head the ball without going too far in the repetition.”

As moderator Karthi Gnanasegaram brought the session to a close, Henry suggested that VR could be used to inculcate tactics at a team level. “You’re the coach and you’re behind them, you’re amongst them and we’re in the room and you tell them on the morning of the game, ‘no, a bit more on the left, a bit more on the right, you go, you squeeze’. instead of doing that on the field you can do that in a big conference room at a hotel. That type of thing can be a great advantage for any coach.”

The pressure of a game scenario may never be adequately recreated, but VR can permit the reps to build familiarity with the situation and the muscle memory to execute the moves in competition. “When you arrive in a situation [in a game], how would you handle it without losing your mind?” asked Henry rhetorically.

“This is why it’s important to see with your mind and not with your eyes.”

By Sarah Evans

Framing the topic

This was session one of our three-part Performance Support Series focusing on the overarching theme of talent development, with the title ‘Synchronising Player & Coach Development’. Across these sessions, which are being hosted by Edd Vahid, Assistant Academy Director at English Premier League club Southampton FC, the aim is to understand the challenges faced during transitions for talent, whether this be players or coaches, and explore a number of interventions to positively influence this in your environments.

Understanding the challenge

• When we say ‘challenge’ within this session, it means the transition of players through the pathway from academy to seniors.
• First and foremost its crucial to understand what these challenges are in relation to transition.
• The challenge of transition is at the heart of most sporting visions.
  • UK Sport – ‘Keep winning and winning well’ places a requirement on young athletes to have an impact on the senior stage.
  • Southampton – ‘Be the Number One Player Developer in Football’

 Aims of the session

1. Provoke thinking on player/athlete transitions
2. Create space(s) to reflect on existing approaches and challenges
3. Explore the utility of several sense-making models
4. Encourage a commitment to action

Discussion points

How effectively is your club / organisation facilitating the transition of an talented academy player to first-team player? Or in turn, how are you facilitating the transition of talent coaches within your environment?

Pre-Mortem: Your highest potential academy player / coach does not transition into the first team / elite environment. What would have contributed to this outcome?

• Opportunity: pathway, lack of bumps in the road, long-term injury.
• Competition: insufficient game time, too much expectation, mentality.
• Assessment: coaches decisions, selector bias, positional decisions.
• Differences between professional sport and Olympic sport, and individual vs team sports.
• Pressure to win games now, focuses on short term rather than a longer term developmental outlook.

Performance = Potential – Interference (Timothy Gallwey)

The reality of transitions is that they’re a zero sum game, meaning that if someone makes the step up into the senior team, someone else will move out of that space.

Challenges in creating effective transitions

• Recognising the landscape or ecosystem you operate in.
• The tension that exists between the first team environment, which naturally prioritises a shorter term focus, than a development environment that has a longer term outlook and possibly greater stability.
• Trust and Empathy: the heart of talent development work is trying to influence the trust that the senior staff have.
• Vision: the aligned vision between the first team and academy. Club’s vision led by board must have buy-in across the organisation.
• Individualised element: everyone’s pathway is so different, so it’s important to create a system that acknowledges that individuality.
• Ensuring there are aligned processes between the various stages of the pathway.

Sense Making Models : Pierre Bourdieu – Habitus, Field, Capital

• Habitus: ‘The Individual’, a product of their history, influenced by a multitude of factors. Their history will influence how they perceive, how they think and ultimately how they behave moving forwards. Are we preparing these individuals to be a ‘fish in water’ in the senior teams?
• Field: e.g. The training complex. A social arena where people compete for resources and demonstrate their power. The new ‘field’ establishes the ‘rules of the game’ and the individual must adapt if they want to succeed. This could be their attitude at training, their image, where they sit in the changing room etc. How well are we preparing them to make a good first impression?
• Capital: The currency that is going to influence success – physical qualities, cultural qualities, reputation you come with.

How well do we know our players’ Habitus? Their History?

How well do we understand the Field, and the Capital required to succeed?

Task: What are the key influences on the First Team ‘Field’? For example, the pressure to win on Saturday?

70% of behaviour is determined by our environment. Therefore if most behaviour is understandable then we need to understand where the behaviour comes from.

Understanding the landscape – O’Sullivan, Bespomoshchnov and Mallett (2021)

• Microsystem: the immediate environment – e.g. an individual playing in the academy.
• Mesosystem: the interconnection of settings – e.g. interconnection of academy and senior team. Things that can influence this are the managerial tenure, which in football on average is 18 months, financial incentives, and the average age of players in the senior team.
• Exosystem: the broader context – e.g. the Premier League, with many players being brought in from overseas, player contract length, and the transfer spend of the club.
• Macrosystem: cultural elements – e.g. the role of the media and social media.

In summary:

1. Successful transitions are critical to our talent development aspirations.
2. Understanding the transition challenge precedes intervention.
3. The transition challenge is influenced by factors that exist on multiple levels.

An article brought to you by our Main Partners

By Sarah Evans & Luke Whitworth

Our first Leaders Meet of the year took place at Cardiff’s Principality Stadium this week [Thursday] and proved to be a resounding success.

Members of the Leaders Performance Institute came from far and wide to discuss the dynamics of coach and player development.

Across the numerous conversations on the day ran a consistent thread that often boiled down to a single question: how is this dynamic evolving and what could it look like in 10 years’ time?

With this dynamic in mind, here are the choice insights from the day’s proceedings.

Session 1: Coaching & Development – What Does the Research Tell Us?

Speaker: Dr. Dan Clements, Performance Coach Manager, Wales Rugby Union

For the first session of the day, Dan opened up the conversations by sharing some stimulus around the challenges and considerations when reviewing our coach and player development frameworks. Dan leant on some evidence-based research to explain some of the embedded principles that Wales Rugby are currently focused on.

Questions to ask ourselves:

• Why do we look at coach development and player development in silos? How do we make more connection between the two, as we know there is a tendency to focus on the specialisms in isolation?
• Are we adding value to the coaches that are operating within our programmes? Are we adding value to the players within the system?
• How can we make an impact on coaches that sustains change – benefitting them and the players?
• Are we stuck in a paradox of fixing problems? Generally in performance sport we are in this mode of thinking.
• How can we make an applied development approach the norm?
• When it is going well, how can we keep a coach working in a specific domain (a perceived natural transition for a successful under-18s coach is to go to the senior game, but are they better skilled or better suited to working with younger talent?)
• How do we ensure alignment across the pathway in what to coach through a curriculum that encourages innovation?

Wales Rugby coaching principles:

• Wales Rugby principles: contextual understanding… how do we help coaches deliver better on the work included in talent development frameworks?
• Adding value: the Wales Rugby framework considers coaching support, the learning environment and then the player.
• Principles to add value: a flexible and accessible offer. Continuous learning is vital. Collaboration across the game is key. Focused on the needs of the player and coach.

Coaching matters:

• Coaching is the key to sustained success. From community, to talent to the professional stage, the most significant influence on a players.
• We are not here to develop players to do what has already been done – it is our job to do it one better. The game is constantly changing, innovating, and has evolving demands.
• Every journey is unique. We need to do more around understanding what those environments are like? How do they differ to others?
• Coaching is multifaceted, non-linear and context specific. A question we have to reflect on is are we seeing an impact in terms of player development? How can we as coach developers help to better deliver on this?
• As coaches we want to prepare you to be the best person to handle the problems you will face.
• Wales Rugby philosophy: self-concept, leadership, people and coaching craft – all wrapped around the notion of contextual understanding. It’s all well and good having a philosophy, but what does that look like in practice so it isn’t just words on paper?
• What works in coaching? Actual coaching. Observation of other sport. Discussion with peers. Self-reflection. Mentoring. With these in mind, are we providing enough opportunity around these for meaningful learning experiences?

Action research – interactive inquiry:

• Action research is transformative change through the simultaneous process of taking an action and doing research, which are linked together by critical reflection. It involves learning through action and reflection, with a practical-based approach.
• Action research has four core stages: plan, act, reflect, observe. It’s important to identify that this is constant and ongoing.
• Leveraging action research in practice and how it applies to the enhancement of learning environments (motivational climate); coaches positively engaged with their peers in learning. It gave them more confidence. Increased ability to manipulate the environment. It impacted sustained engagement – too often we do one thing, move on and under appreciate the need for something sustained.

Leveraging appreciative inquiry:

• Appreciative inquiry is similar to action research. It is strength-based, more collaborative and has an applied focus. It allows you to start with strengths and encourages engagement with new ideas
• Performance sport generally is obsessed with problem solving. We actually want players that can problem-solve. Can we move to a more asset-based approach and spend more time unpicking success?
• Considering the 4 Ds: Discover / Destiny / Design / Dream
• Positives of using appreciative inquiry: safe, agile, instructive, new knowledge, solution focused, iterative and democratic. It doesn’t ignore hard issues or problems and really attempts to achieve a healthier balance where it can often be more deficit-led.
• Some of the findings from leading an appreciate inquiry study with talent coaches: there was more positivity, collaboration and generative capacity for developing new ideas and increased innovation.

Tiered approaches to learning:

We can’t be everything to everyone. How can we do more to influence people?

• Tier 1: Bitesize Self-Directed
• Tier 2: Network Driven
• Tier 3: Collaborative Learning
• Tier 4: Individual & Bespoke

Session 2: Coaching & Development – Problem-Solving: How Does Our Approach to Player & Coaching Development Need to Evolve?

For the second session of the day, we leaned towards the expertise in the room to explore the question of how the space of coach and player development needs to evolve. Through the method of ‘diamond thinking’, the groups came up with a number of ideas and filtered them into recommendations for the wider room.

Group recommendations:

Group 1:

• Courage to challenge: in a lot of programmes there can be an underpinning fear and a lack of psychological safety in offering sufficient challenge.
• Specialism with caution: exploring the power of specialism but appreciating the blind spots that can come with this? e.g. an under-14 foundation phase coach with a specialism in coaching teenage footballers.

Group 2:

• Changing demographics in coaching pathway: the demographic of those transitioning into coaching is changing.
• Development of domain expertise: a continuing area of opportunity is to enhance the expertise in specific domains (pedagogy, sciences etc).

Group 3:

• Development space is disaggregated: bringing everything back together with performance at the heart in a more holistic way.

Group 4:

• Bespoke learning pathway: opportunities for coaches to have more options and take on a more self-directed learning approach.

Group 5:

• Balancing elements of technical, tactical & social: factoring this all in collectively. The humanistic element is often left out; so how can we make it more integrated?
• Technological Opportunities: sense-checking what’s good and what’s not across the core elements of technical, tactical and social.

Group 6:

• Enhancing learning environments by using technology: imagine a coach you’d benefit spending time with? What is the context you’d like to be in with that coach? What would you like to interact with them on? Using technology and potential impacts of VR to create realities and enhance learning environments.

Group 7:

• More accessibility: providing a highly personalised offer. Shifting the narrative around us going to the coaches to them coming to us.

Session 3: Coaching & Development – Developing Your Non-Directive Coaching Skills

Speaker: John Bull, Director & Lead for High Performance Research, Management Futures

For the third session of the day, we shifted our attentions to exploring a skill that can be hugely impactful in working with others, whether coaches or players. Non-directive coaching skills: believe in people’s potential, give them autonomy and have the skills to draw out, develop and focus their talents. To explore the skill, we leaned on the situational leadership model.

• Situational Leadership Model: pull & push. ‘Pull’ refers to the degree of coaching and motivation. ‘Push’ refers to the degree of directive input of ‘how to’.
• Situational Leadership Model: there are four types of activity – directive (instructive), delegation (hands-off with clear intent), mentoring (combination of directive and coaching) and non-directive coaching (we are not the expert, the other person is).
• How much of the conversations you have should be pushed or pulled? When you consider your conversations, consider the three levels of listening below and what gets in the way of these different levels?
• What gets in the way of your ability to listen and be open?
• If you think of times when you’ve been really good at listening, what helped?

Three levels of listening:

1. Level one – focused on your own agenda

• Relating what they’re saying to your own experience.
• Listening with our own agenda in mind, and to influence.

2. Level two – seeking to understand

• Respect their insight and expertise.
• Listening to understand without judgement.
• Fully engaged, creating good thinking space and being more curious.
• Summarising back to check understanding.

3. Level three – listening for what is not being said

• Observing body language and listening to tone of voice.

Session 4: Coaching & Development – Real Life Examples from Football & Netball

For the final session of the day, we had the opportunity to explore coaching and player development from two different organisations, supported by the research and questions that had emerged throughout the day, with England Netball Head Coach Jess Thirlby and Southampton FC’s Head of Technical Development Iain Brunnschweiler. Jess and Iain shared some of their thoughts around the siloing of coach and player development, impactful learning experiences, and developing oneself.

Speakers:

Jess Thirlby, Head Coach, England Netball

Iain Brunnschweiler, Head of Technical Development, Southampton FC

• Frameworks & curriculums: at Southampton, there is a written coaching philosophy and 11 statements about coaching. The club has evolved from having just curriculum topics to having documents around how to bring these coaching skills to life. Contained in the documents are coaching skill pillars and a number of principles that sit around the coaching sessions – the coaches are held to account so anyone visiting the environment should be able to come along to a coaching session and there is an expectation that you can see some of those in practice.
• From a England Netball perspective, there is a focus on trying to capture what ‘the Roses’ way’ looks and feels like – it includes skills, behaviours and character. Character was something that wasn’t included in previous frameworks. There is also as much a focus on social skills as technical and tactical.
• What is your point of difference? In the Roses environment, they are diverse both in terms of personnel but also tactically.
• Curriculums can be highly rigid, so it is important that there is space and scope for flexibility, or we are undoing the message of creativity and innovation that we as coaches we want to convey? The players need a sense of autonomy and freedom.
• During the Coronavirus pandemic, Southampton First Team Manager Ralph Hasenhüttl created a ‘playbook’ for the club’s playing philosophy. An ongoing challenge is balancing that tension between preparing talent to go into a really clear and specific environment, whilst also understanding they need a variety of developmental experiences within the pathway. The challenge however, is that we have to be cognisant of not filtering people into one way of doing something.
• What does the future game look like, then, what does future coaching look like and what do future environments look like? Have clear intent of how to get ahead of the curve. We know players are very knowledgeable, so it’s important to embrace this as opposed to avoiding it.
• Meaning and learning experiences: Jess shared the story of one of her richest experiences in netball. It came during a tour to South Africa where the senior players were given the opportunity to lead the team, whilst getting high challenge and high support from the actual coaches. It’s all about the timing of experiences and rubbing shoulders with others in the environment – one thing Jess is trying to create in the Roses environment is providing more opportunities for the younger players coming through who perhaps aren’t ‘Roses ready’ to rub shoulders with more senior players.
• A meaningful learning experience that Iain shared around Southampton’s coaches was in observing the coaches – filming them, coding and feeding back. This allowed the coaches to see themselves as a coach and hold a mirror up in a non-judgemental way.
• What are the relevant experiences we need? Iain talked about Southampton starting to use an ‘experiences tracker’ with the aim of identifying trends and mapping into the development plans of talent.
• When thinking about people development, find people who are disruptive to your thinking. There is also a lot of positives in wearing lots of hats.
• Coach burnout: it’s a very personal thing. If we are really clear on what we are going after as outcomes, and we empower people to do that in their own way, that’s a very powerful thing. There isn’t one way of doing it, so we shouldn’t judge others on how they go about it. If you want to be in a lead coaching role over a sustainable time, you need a stable base. What nourishes you as a coach and allows you to be the best version of yourself?
• Embrace difference: seek out people who are and do things differently you.
• Future development: Iain is studying the power of language and interacting with others – understanding their map of the world and helping them to understand it. He is also learning to play the piano to stimulate his creativity and support his mental health. Jess shared that she has a better understanding herself and how that impacts how she coaches – to tie in with an earlier point, rubbing shoulders with others away from the sport and surrounding yourself with different thinking is hugely important.

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By John Portch

When yours is a winning environment, what steps can you take to ensure that your performance levels bear the extra pressure of expectation that comes with success?

The question is on the mind of Jeremy Bettle, the Performance Director at New York City FC, who won the MLS Cup in December last year, when the Leaders Performance Institute and Dave Slemen and Anna Edwards of Elite Performance Partners [EPP] sat down with him to discuss the steps performance directors can take to become better leaders.

Joining Bettle in conversation are Darren Burgess, the High Performance Manager of the Adelaide Crows who also leads EPP’s search offering in Australia, and James Thomas, the Performance Director at British Gymnastics. The trio work in three different sports and geographies, with systems and structures that vary in their approach, but each brings a sense of vulnerability, self-awareness, and an understanding of the importance of the culture and context they are working within. Their leadership capabilities bind together a great strategy and strong culture, which is essential if teams and organisations are to retain their shape when pressure is applied. Of the expectations and pressure now thrust upon NYCFC, Bettle says: “It’s certainly going to be something new for our club this year.”

Bettle, Burgess and Thomas all have a deep desire to keep learning, which has driven them to the top of their fields and each played a part in a series of ‘firsts’ in 2021. NYCFC’s MLS Cup triumph was the club’s first, while Burgess was serving as Performance Manager of the Melbourne Demons when they won their first AFL Grand Final in 57 years. Also, under Thomas’ stewardship, Great Britain won their first Olympic medal in the women’s gymnastics team event for 93 years.

Thomas tackles the question of pressure from the athletes’ perspective. “It’s been the biggest risk or success factor of the last four years,” he says. “When we look at our gymnasts, they’re phenomenal athletes. They have the ability to execute phenomenal technical skills and they can do it day-in and day-out in the training environment. Where I see the athletes either struggle or excel is that ability to step into a competition environment and deliver it there. With every sport, you’ve got great examples of people who can do it either in a one-off or can do it repeatedly, or they can do it in training and they can’t do it in competition.

“We’ve actually put a lot of time and resource into different pressure environments whether it’s changing training set-ups, whether it’s manipulating timings just to put athletes under more pressure, less warm-up, less time between apparatus, we’ve brought in surprise friends and family to come on the balcony and watch and cheer. We try to exhaust almost all of our coaches and psychologists’ views of manipulating the training environment.” Nevertheless, as Thomas admits, “you can never quite replicate the actual competition environment.”

Burgess, who last year won the AFL Grand Final with Melbourne and previously worked in the English Premier League with Liverpool and Arsenal, finds the same applies to professional team sports. “It’s very hard to simulate pressure, especially with games happening every three or four days in the Premier League, particularly when you’re also competing in European competitions.”

His mind goes back to the two-week period in September before Melbourne took on the Western Bulldogs in the AFL Grand Final. The consensus amongst the fans and media was that Melbourne had the better team but were undermined by the fact that their route through the playoffs meant that they had played one game in 28 days.

“We decided to take the high risk of playing a match simulation,” says Burgess. “It probably cost us a couple of players who were on the fringe of being selected, but in the end, that was how we decided to simulate that pressure as much as we could. We had umpires in, full mouth guards, so it was part of our thought process to try and simulate that as much as we could. We even built up a bit of a rivalry between the ‘possibles’ and ‘probables’ and tried to manufacture that so that the ‘possibles’ put up a good fight.”

Bettle approves of such approaches. “I’m a big believer in exposing people to pressure versus shielding them from it,” he says. “I think there can be a balance there but you’ve got to get used to pressure and have strategies to deal with it. I’m a big believer in process and having done it before; and trying to make these environments a lot more automatic.”

He recalls his time working at the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets between 2011 and 2015 when there were few opportunities to generate pressure because the games came thick and fast. He was struck by the veteran players. “They show very little emotion win, lose or draw. I think because it’s so automatic to them, it really helps them to perform on a nightly basis.” By contrast, however, New York City practised penalties as they progressed through the MLS Playoffs. “Having the guys line up on halfway and having them walk out on their own; and because they’ve gone through it over and over and over again, when we actually get into the scenario, which we did twice in the playoffs, it just felt more normal to us. The guys executed it excellently when it came to it and maybe it helped, maybe it didn’t, but it made me feel better about it anyway!”

The approach is far from universal in soccer, as Slemen points out. Penalties are one of the few closed skills in football that can be practised but the prevailing culture has often been reluctant.

Bettle and New York City Head Coach Ronny Deila also tried to factor an element of fun into the team’s progression through the season and post-season. Though he has often been sceptical of organised fun in a team context, he explains that Deila’s decision to organise team dinners reaped dividends.

“I think the coach did a great job this year of recognising that our team didn’t do well when they didn’t have an opportunity to relax,” says Bettle. “So we started doing team dinners when we go on the road, on match day minus two. They’d have a glass of wine, and we’d have just a really fun night out that felt authentic and not forced. Giving the players an opportunity to enjoy it and not be so disciplined was a bit of a departure from my mindset, but I’ve come to recognise it’s been one of the most valuable things that we did last year, to put a focus on joy and fun and enjoying the experience. I think building that environment, recognising who your players are and how they’re going to respond versus having some really rigid thoughts around ‘this isn’t high performance, we can’t drink wine two days before a game’ it actually helped us.”

Much like in soccer or basketball, Thomas explains that in gymnastics the success of any rituals largely depends on the skill of the coach. He says: “Where I probably see the magic happen it’s been where coaches have managed to really understand the team and the group of athletes they’ve got, where they’re positioned.

“For the men’s gymnastics team, it was very clear in the build-up to Tokyo, they were probably fourth or fifth in the world, and it was very cleverly done by our coach to position them as the underdogs that were going to create the big upset rather than ‘we can’t achieve that’ or ‘we’re world No 1’. It was ‘let’s go on the hunt’. They really put this mindset into the gymnasts that this final 12-week prep was really just about closing the gap. You could see every day that the gymnasts came in with the bit between their teeth about closing the gap. It wasn’t necessarily about winning the medal, it was about ‘how do we get as close as we possibly can?’

“There was a sense of realism, a sense of togetherness towards something and it really pulled them together. It did feel like a team and the feedback that we had from some of the gymnasts who had been to multiple games, said it was the best team environment because they had a really clear purpose and it was really cleverly orchestrated by the coach. That’s where I’ve seen it work its best, through the coach, with a little bit of a framework of what they’re working towards and that purpose.”

Thomas has witnessed scenarios where the use of rituals does not work and puts it down to authenticity, which chimes with Burgess’ views on the matter. “It’s a really risky practice if there’s not authenticity about the ritual, the practice or the theme,” he says. “If there’s not complete buy-in, then you really are in trouble. Let’s say, for example, that your ritual, your belief is ‘selflessness’ and you want everybody to act selflessly throughout everything, the minute that your star No 10 player decides to miss a training session or turn up late or act selfishly in some way, are you going to drop that player? You have to stick to it and then it becomes part of your team’s identity and everybody respects that. Yes, it can work, but it has to work in the right environment and I’ve seen both.”