Thoughts from Sports

I love watching sports, and in most sports I follow a particular team and find that makes it more fun. I suppose it is a pretty inane thing, and people who don’t follow sports struggle to understand those of us that do. All I can say is it gives a rush of adrenaline and interest, and that the partisan side of it seems to be a net gain – when my teams win I feel great for days, while when they lose I convince myself it is just a game.

Living in the US is a great bonus for me. Sadly I get to see no cricket and little rugby, but that is more than compensated by the diet of soccer, all readily available at very convenient times for me. And I love most of the major US sports as well, so overall I can catch as much great sport as I like.

My favourite sport to watch is the Ryder Cup every two years. Watching regular golf is really dull, but the Ryder cup has great spice and tension. Like all great sport it always builds to an agonizingly slow climax and has many twists and turns. And my team nearly always wins!

So, looking for lessons for business and personal life, why is it that Europe wins despite having theoretically weaker golfers? This year’s captain, modest Paul McGinley, offers a few clues, gleaned from various interviews of team members. Europe’s captains have always been recent vice captains. There is great attention to detail and building spirit and partnerships. McGinley gave nearly everyone a well-timed rest during the event to have energy for the crucial singles. Most of all the team seems to want to win the cup just that little bit more than the US. In the past Europe has been able to motivate from its underdog status, but no more, and McGinley brought in Sir Alex Ferguson specifically to handle maintaining motivation when favourite to win.

I noticed one other factor. Everyone from Europe said they had come to do a job, to win the cup. Apart from playing with the rules and spirit of the game, nothing else mattered. Size of victory, personal legacy or contribution, recognition, or demonstrating things to the media had no role whatsoever. This single-minded pursuit of a goal can create a powerful internal team momentum, immune to outside distraction.

Team bonding, so a team can perform at a level greater than the sum of its parts, is a very delicate matter. Everyone must be fired up, aggressive but not so wild as to break the rules, with team accountability but without bullying. Personal determination must be huge, but ego subsumed to the team result. This is all very difficult, as demonstrated this week by the book of ex-England cricketer Kevin Pietersen.

Kevin must be a nightmare to work with. He has such huge talent that every team will want to accommodate him – just look at England’s test victories over the last ten years and note KP’s scores in those games – but he comes with an ego that is massive but frail. The bitterness in the book is tragic really for one with such gifts. Considering also Oscar Pistorius, one can only despair at what apartheid did to generations of young minds, as well as its more obvious tragic legacies.

Yet there is clearly a grain of truth in KP’s allegations. England seems to have a constructed a winning formula around a coach of military methods, a somewhat aloof captain, KP, and an inner gang of close buddies – Prior, Swann, Broad and Bresnan (with Anderson invited but neutral). All these elements contributed to team success, but all created baggage too, and it is no surprise that it all collapsed at once last winter. The bowler cabal is interesting as it reminds me a bit of the ethos of British public (private) schools. These all-male institutions are riddled with gossip, ritual humiliation and minor bullying. I was there myself, and I retain the capacity to inflict all of these things in certain circumstances to my great shame.

McGinley’s pursuit of a goal, including everyone on the inside and excluding everyone on the outside, seems a more sustainable model. Ferguson used this – though he himself was clearly an indispensible part, judging by what happened after he left. Mourinho has it sometimes, but cannot resist playing the media and thus separates himself from his team – note that his teams tend to perform even better for a time after he leaves them. Manchester City do not, and Yaya Toure seems to be heading into a KP situation quickly.

My favourite regular sport to watch is American Football (NFL), and Bill Bellichick and the New England Patriots have the internal winning drive there, leading to unprecedented sustained success. Bellichick treats the media with disdain while building unity within the club. Two weeks ago they lost a game very heavily. The media reaction was outrageous – we had a week of the team being written off as a spent force. Not surprisingly, last week they came out and won handsomely. A new player, Derelle Regis, who has succeeded at many teams, highlighted how the team had focused inwards and ignored such distractions.

Another way to succeed is to find an edge that no one else has discovered and build your system around it. It can take many years for others to catch up. Bellichick did this a couple of times, most recently with his use of two tight ends. The Seattle Seahawks may have this edge at the moment, as by far the youngest and lightest team in the league. In soccer, Barcelona and tiki-taka had such an edge for many years. Of course, eventually others learn to counter and copy, and then it may be hard for teams with an edge to move on – look at Spain in the recent world cup.

Major sports, especially NFL, have a massive influence on US society. There has been a spate of incidents of players abusing their partners or kids. This happens all the time, especially among the sort of communities that NFL players tend to come from, and is dealt with by the law of the land. But the NFL profile is such that it can change society. Once a video was released on one major player actually knocking out his then girlfriend in an elevator, all hell broke loose. The NFL, ever conscious of public opinion, starting banning these players for long periods. More startling, society suddenly woke up to domestic abuse as an issue and started campaigning for tougher laws. The NFL duly obliged and is supporting such campaigns. Change will result, if not in law then at least in awareness and acceptability. This is good change achieved via a dubious route. If you think about it, it does not reflect well on American society.

Statistics are big in all American sports, and generally I find them beneficial and adding to the entertainment on offer. There is the famous example of the Oakland baseball team creating an edge by using statistics. European sports are way behind – only recently does OPTA start to be used by coaches and journalists in soccer, far too late. On the BBC web page, some articles are well constructed using statistics (Robbie Savage for example) while others remain in the dark ages (Phil McNulty).

A bad example was the recent Ryder Cup. The BBC offered player ratings based on their results and some gut feel. Even the result analysis always contains a major flaw, in that singles points should count double (since a point in earlier rounds is essentially shared with a partner). I also spent hour an hour looking at scores by hole for the players. Whereas the BBC lauded Spieth and damned Mahan and Kuchar, I could work out quickly that the latter two had played as well as anyone on the US side while Spieth’s relative hole scores were the worst of anyone. True, that is only one factor in match play, but it is not irrelevant either.

Baseball especially is obsessed with statistics. I love baseball, it has the same slow build up of tension as test cricket and the same depth as well. But, just as cricket was blindsided by Kerry Packer and is still in a mess over the IPL, baseball runs the risk of losing its public from being too slow. People want faster action nowadays, and a playoff game last weekend than ran to six hours while yielding only three runs was hardly an advert for the game except to purists. Yet baseball refuses to change, and one reason is statistics. They have unbroken statistical records in countless categories, that would become invalidated by major changes such as shorter games. Statistics can be a curse as well as a blessing.

Playing and watching sports can offer lots of excitement as well as some lessons. Finding a winning team ethos and an edge matters as much in business as in sports, as does learning how to handle mavericks and smart use of data. There are other lessons too, for example about diversity, and I’ll return to the subject soon to explore those.