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ATHLETIC CLUB DE BILBAO

Retain your talent

A unique talent pool / Pride in el sentimiento Athletic / Social purpose and talent retention / Belonging improves commitment / Different measures of success

The route started at Basilica de Begoña, the church dedicated to the patron saint of Biscay, the Virgin Begoña. The bus made slow progress onto the south side of the river that runs through the city. It was carrying the players and staff of Athletic Club de Bilbao, one of the oldest football teams in Spain. Their destination was the City Hall, only a 15-minute walk away, but this particular journey took three hours. The starting-point was significant: before every season, the club’s directors and players visit the church to pay their respects. And they ask for a good season ahead.

No one was in a rush. The noise came from all sides, people cheering, waving and singing as the bus edged through the crowds. There were thousands of them, waving flags and dancing on either side of the Ayuntamiento Bridge. You could hear them from the Palacio Ibaigane, the old-fashioned central office which Athletic still uses, where the boardrooms are oak and the woodwork a dark, dark mahogany. The vibe there is stuffy English bank rather than community club. But the people here were young and old, grandchildren with their grandparents, making memories that will last forever.

There were even some who hired boats along the river, the Ria de Bilbao, to catch a glimpse of their heroes. There were at least a hundred of them on a catamaran and another five on a dinghy.

The boats cruised in from the north-west, past the Guggenheim Museum, which stands just yards from the place where this story began. That is the Campa de los Ingleses – the English pitch – where, next to the river, British émigrés, mainly ship builders from the south coast, but also miners from the north-east, arrived in Bilbao in 1898 and were the first to play football in the city. A plaque marks the spot, inscribed with a poem written by Basque poet Kirmen Uribe:

This is where the English played.

Here on a field by the river.

When there was only grass and a small graveyard.

Sometimes the ball went in the water,

and they had to go and get it.

If it went far they threw little stones

to bring it closer to the shore.

The stones made waves, little waves

which grew bigger all the time.

In the same way Athletic played in Lamiako,

then in Jolaseta, then, finally in San Mames.

One wave, then another, then another.

The English influence is still retained: the name of the team, Athletic Club de Bilbao, is an Anglicised one, while the red-and-white striped kit came from a club member, Juan Elorduy, who sailed to Southampton with the plan of bringing back 50 blue-and-white Blackburn Rovers kits, to match the original Athletic colours. He could not find any, so instead he brought back the first kits he saw, which were the red-and-white stripes of Southampton. He brought back 50 kits in all: 25 were for Athletic Club and 25 for another club that had recently been founded by Bilbao students in Madrid: Atlético Madrid.

The culmination of the celebration came when captain Carlos Gurpegi stood on the balcony of the City Hall and raised the Spanish Super Cup to over 50,000 fans watching below. The date was 18 August 2015 and this was the first trophy Athletic had won in 31 years. They had just beaten the dominant Barcelona 5–1 over two legs, crushing the League and Cup holders 4–0 at its home stadium San Mames (where the VIP bar is called Campa de los Ingleses). Aritz Aduriz, a player that Athletic had released twice before, scored a hat-trick in the biggest club game of his career. This victory was sweeter because Athletic achieved it with a team made up only of players from the local region.

As I retrace the journey of this procession, I see Athletic imagery everywhere: cafés with Athletic flags hanging outside, kids wearing Athletic shirts on their way to school; cars with Athletic bumper-stickers. This is a club that unites the community. It makes people proud.

This local-only policy is best explained by former Athletic president José Maria Arrate, who wrote in the club’s 1998 centenary book: ‘Athletic Bilbao is more than a football club, it is a feeling – and as such its ways of operating often escape rational analysis. We see ourselves as unique in world football and that defines our identity. We do not say that we are better or worse, merely different. We only wish for the sons of our soil to represent our club, and in so wishing we stand out as a sporting entity, not a business concept. We wish to mould our players into men, not just footballers, and each time that a player from the cantera makes his debut we feel we have realised an objective which is in harmony with the ideologies of our founders and forefathers.’

The policy was established in 1919, when the club backed the city’s movement for Basque autonomy. The relationship between the two was strong; the football club was run by socios (members), who could attend general meetings and elect a president and directors to run the club. Athletic is still run on this model. The policy only counted towards players, so it was no problem that the club’s first four managers were all English. The most successful of them, Fred Pentland, was appointed in 1921.1 Basque players – from Athletic and neighbouring Real Sociedad, who dropped its Basque-policy in the mid-1980s – had just formed the bulk of Spain’s 1920 Olympic Games silver medal-winning side. Its aggressive style of play was dubbed furia Espanola, Spanish fury, a nickname the Spanish were happy to adopt – though it originated as a less than admiring term for a ferocious Spanish attack on Antwerp in 1596.

Athletic won its first trophy with Pentland in charge, the 1923 Copa del Rey. He was persuaded to leave to coach Atlético Madrid and then Real Oviedo, but returned in 1929, in time for Spain’s first season with a national league. This was the most successful period in Athletic history, as they won two league titles – the team was unbeaten in the top flight in 1930 – and four Spanish Cups between 1930 and 1933.

Pentland saw coaching as a form of education and embraced the chance to develop up to 80 players in the club’s cantera, or academy. ‘The big clubs will have a coach and … his business will be to teach the young players unity,’ he wrote in 1921. ‘This will do away once and forever with young players playing for themselves alone.’ In 1932, after Athletic’s two straight titles, Spanish newspaper AS asked Pentland to explain his success. In a series of articles, he wrote about his philosophy. It was not just technique, but ‘the psychological and intellectual aspects of a game … in which the morality and intelligence of a player are a prerequisite’.

You might think that reducing the talent pool to only three million players – while other clubs in this globalised industry can and do recruit from all over the world – would leave Athletic struggling, or playing catch-up. The opposite is true. No club has provided more players to Spain’s national team than Athletic. No province has provided more players to Spain’s national team than Biscay.

Athletic have won eight league titles and 24 Cups, and are third in the all-time Spanish trophy table (this is a big deal in Spain). Out of all the teams in the top leagues across Europe, Athletic’s total of 32 trophies is tenth in the all-time list. There are only three teams never to have been relegated from the Spanish top division: Barcelona and Real Madrid, as you might expect. And Athletic Club de Bilbao.

The morality and intelligence that Pentland wrote about gives them an edge. Their difference gives them an edge. Even their weakness gives them an edge. I went to Bilbao to find out how.

It’s the morning after another night before. Another piece of history was made at San Mames, and again Aduriz was at the centre of it. He lit up a run-of-the-mill Europa League game against Belgian team Genk by scoring each of Athletic’s goals in a bizarre 5–3 win. I thought he might not last more than ten minutes: he collided with the post after tapping in his first goal, ending a move that he began with a pass to Iker Muniain from the centre-circle. Muniain beat his man, crossed for Raúl García to head back across goal, and Aduriz scored. He played on, his 35-year-old body energised by a fervent home crowd, and scored two more before half-time. Another two goals in the second half and the papers had their headlines. ‘Historica’ wrote Mundo Deportivo. ‘Aduriz Aduriz Aduriz Aduriz ADURIZ,’ went AS. ‘We are lucky to have him,’ said coach Ernesto Valverde, with a hint of understatement.

The pick of his goals was the fourth one, when he ran onto a pass from centre-back Yeray Alvarez that split the Genk midfield and defence. Aduriz did not even need to control the ball; he just stroked it first-time into the corner of the net. Before the game, a fan told me about Yeray, a 21-year-old defender with only five starts to his name. ‘At any other club, Yeray would not get a chance. We were worried about defence after Gurpegi left the club. But instead of buying someone old and expensive and not very good, we give a chance to our youngsters coming through. Before the season began, I thought Yeray would be a five out of ten. Instead he’s playing nine out of ten. I tell you, at no other club would Yeray even get a chance.’ (It turned out to be quite a season for Yeray, who was diagnosed with testicular cancer a few weeks after my visit. He underwent a successful operation in December and was back playing 46 days later. Five days after his comeback, he extended his contract, which now has a €30 million release clause, until 2022. Sadly, the cancer returned after the 2016–17 season ended.)

On this Friday morning, I see Yeray with the first-team, having a light warm-down session at Lezama, the training-centre nestled under lush green mountains and farmhouses ten miles east of Bilbao. This is where the club’s dedication to developing locally born players into first-teamers is demonstrated. There are six full-size pitches, one with a 1,500-seater stand and a symbolic arch that was removed from the original main stand of the San Mames before its recent reconstruction.

‘At Lezama, the work done with the different teams is unique and shared by all the coaches at the club,’ runs the club’s mission statement. ‘The player is the key element, the cornerstone of our development plan, and games are the fundamental means of learning while taking on new concepts. Along with the optimisation of the player’s sporting performance, it is about the integrated development of all their personal aspects. It is about reaching the end of the process with a human psychological profile for an Athletic player. Someone who meets the demands of today’s football, and who also represents the values and idiosyncrasies of the club.’

Watching on from his office is José Maria Amorrortu. A former Athletic striker in the 1970s, he is now the sporting director. His job is to assess all the talent coming through the club. It’s his second spell in the job; he returned from Atlético Madrid (where his talent crop included Spain internationals Koke and David de Gea) in 2011, when current president Josu Urrutia, another former player, was first elected.

He too was impressed with the previous night’s performance of Yeray. ‘We can say that every day, the kid who plays at centre-back who has not been playing long for the first team, he surprises us. We can see his process of development has been a success.’

In the course of our time together, Amorrortu pinpoints three factors central to Athletic’s success that are critical to businesses today. This is where we can learn from Athletic: its social purpose to represent the best qualities of the Basque region; the investment in talent as humans first, so they feel valued and in an environment where they can develop; and the importance of talent retention which, in Athletic’s unique case, overrides almost everything.

Every year, 20 children enter the cantera aged ten. Maybe two in each year, 10 per cent, will stay and make it to the first team. It’s an outstanding return. ‘Our strength is to help all of the kids reach their potential. They know and they also push themselves, that’s why they stick with it. But that number, it’s extraordinarily good.’

When he arrived for his second spell, Amorrortu produced a planning document, called Construyendo nuestro futuro (Building our Future), that forms the backbone of Athletic strategy. He shows me the document. It demands a Lezama that is open, modern, supported by its tradition, at the forefront of development, with the best professionals and integrated in Basque sport and football. Under subheadings that include Improvement, Quality, Personal Development, Sportsmanship, Talent Identification, and Recruitment, its focus is on the development of people and not just players. Remember what Arrate wrote in the centenary book: ‘We wish to mould our players into men, not just footballers.’

This is a theme we will come back to in this chapter. Companies that invest in the human side of talent get better results than those who only focus on outcomes. Google hire people they find ‘exceptionally interesting’ regardless of academic qualifications. They look for generalists rather than those specialists who may bring their own unconscious biases. When the company was specifically looking for ‘smart creatives’, it instigated ‘the LAX test’. Google execs were to imagine they were stuck at LA airport for six hours with a candidate: did they like that individual, and would they still be creative or interesting to talk to after six hours? Did they have insight? ‘If they don’t,’ said Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt, ‘I just don’t think you should be hiring them.’

Perhaps the most significant page in Construyendo nuestro futuro is the one at the back, on Social Responsibility. The task: to reinforce and expand el sentimiento Athletic, the Athletic feeling; to stay loyal to players and their families; and to carry the Athletic spirit within our daily actions. This intangible element of the club is what has sustained it for so long.

‘We have a 100-year-old culture, and that tradition is to always count on kids from our region. This has hardened into our identity,’ Amorrortu explains. ‘The values we have are fundamental and they form a culture which is the expression of a way of being. That is what Athletic has.’

So begins an elaborate verbal dance in which I try to tease out exactly what these values are and where the edge exists. Amorrortu talks a lot about feeling, belonging, culture and social capital. These are the pillars of the club, and noticeable the night before when the biggest cheers (apart from the Aduriz goals) came when local boys Iñaki Williams, Sabin Merino and Javier Eraso were all substituted on.

One club director told me part of this culture comes from one degree of separation: ‘Everyone in this city knows someone who has played for Athletic. So the sense of belonging is passed down through the generations. It’s pride. “I knew this kid and look at him now …”’ Most of the shirts on sale in the club shop don’t have player names on the back; the club wants supporters to put their own names on the back, to encourage kids to dream that one day it might be them.

Amorrortu agrees. ‘Yes, it’s about a pride in belonging to this club, belonging here, to feel part of this club. The chance that the kids might play in the first team gives them great excitement. It is these intangible things that encourage the player to make a bigger effort during his development. To feel part of Athletic is to be in communion with the values of the club. To play for this club means you identify with an idea. It’s a feeling and that’s a way of being, to feel a part of something. Athletic represents a lot. It is not only the team of the city, it also represents a philosophy.’

Amorrortu’s staff of 91 coaches try to bring this philosophy to life. The document talks about encouraging autonomy, allowing players to take responsibility, and focusing on the players’ educational and psychological improvement. He compares it to a stone that, if rubbed enough, will change shape. ‘It comes from something natural, essential, inside.’

The values relate to the region. ‘The culture here in the Basque country is a culture based on hard work, collaboration, common feeling, and of participation, of working together in a team, of a way of being,’ he says. ‘It is something transmitted down the generations in a spontaneous way. And from that, we can say we form part of a legacy that comes from our ancestors.’

Keeping this legacy going, above all, is how Athletic measures success. Players and staff alike are clearly very aware of it. ‘It’s a lot more than a football club,’ says Aduriz. ‘It can’t be compared to any other club in the world, it’s unique,’ adds Williams, tipped to be the new star for Athletic and Spain. ‘For me, victory is watching 11 Basque players every Sunday, maintaining the philosophy that’s been there for 100 years,’ says club historian and museum curator Asier Arrate. ‘That’s our title.’

They are quite right; but it’s by redefining how they measure success that makes Athletic different in the world of football. It also makes them attractive to a corporate world looking to find its own version of el sentimiento Athletic to improve performance. ‘Professional sport has a set of questions, issues and values that can be very useful for the business world,’ Amorrortu tells me. He is a regular at business conferences and says, with typical Basque understatement, that there is ‘some curiosity’ about how Athletic develops its sense of belonging among the players.

HOW TO GET AN EDGE – by JOSE MARIA AMORRORTU

1 Have an objective and make your ideas clear. What is your success?

2 Surround yourself with great professionals and behave in accordance with what you want to achieve.

3 Leave a legacy for society and create value in your surroundings. All companies need to make a profit but the benefits of social purpose are for the whole society.

Amorrortu also talks about the importance of showing patience and building for the long term. Businesses want to replicate a sentimiento Athletic but are less interested in emotional development, improving behaviours (not just knowledge) and instilling confidence in employees. ‘People think so much about short-term performance that sometimes we lack patience and we need to remember that.’ We will see later in this chapter that the effects of short-term decisions can have long-term implications. But Athletic shows patience: in the ten years before my visit, the club has had only three different head coaches, the fewest of any team in La Liga. This is not the case elsewhere: across the 92 Premier League and Football League clubs in England, 36 made a total of 51 managerial changes during the 2016–17 season (Leyton Orient boosted those numbers by getting through five different coaches).

Stability enhances the sense of belonging. An environment that threatens belonging can produce uncooperative behaviour, information hoarding and, according to a study by psychologists at UCLA,2 an experience equivalent to physical pain. ‘When our social needs are being satisfied, the brain responds in much the same way as it responds to other rewards that are more tangible. Being treated with respect and as a valued member of an organisation may activate reward systems in the brain that promote stronger learning of behaviours that predict more of these social rewards in the future.’

There are 13 men’s teams in the Athletic structure: behind the first team are Bilbao Athletic (Segunda Division B), Baskonia (division three) – in Spain, youth teams play in the lower divisions – two Juvenil teams (17 to 19 years old), two Cadetes (15 and 16), two Infantiles (13 and 14) and four Alevines (11 and 12). There are also two women’s teams.

At the end of one recent season, the coach of Bilbao Athletic’s second team, José Ziganda, addressed the board about his team’s progress. Their results had improved. The average age had dropped. Things were going well. But Ziganda was still not happy. ‘I want to develop players here and then see them stay,’ he said. ‘But I’ve not yet heard a player say to me, “I won’t leave this club until you kick me out.”’ His comments earned a round of applause.

At the end of the 2016–17 season, Athletic did make a coaching change. Valverde was appointed Barcelona coach and Athletic promoted Ziganda to head coach.3 Historians pointed out that Ziganda had replaced Valverde before, during a La Liga match at Real Valladolid in June 1995, when Ziganda came off the bench to take the place of Valverde. Both men, of course, were playing for Athletic at the time.

‘It’s logical that we also see players staying as success,’ says Amorrortu. ‘To maintain our competitive level, to play in Europe, and to have the most players from our own cantera in the first team.’ According to a CIES study, only two clubs in Europe’s top five leagues had more internally produced players in their first-team squad in season 2016–17 than Athletic.4 The average length of time a first-team debutant has spent at the club is 7.2 years, more than any other team in Spain.

Talent retention is an increasing problem for business today. A study by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that in 2016, the average tenure of a job for 18- to 35-year-olds was 1.6 years. In a few years, millennials will make up half the workforce, and expect to stay in that job for under two years. The term millennials refers to the generation born after 1984 who are often accused of being hard to manage. How to get the best out of millennials will crop up throughout this book, as most footballers still playing these days fall into this generation.

The stigma of changing jobs every few years is a thing of the past: millennials who switch jobs are believed to have a higher learning curve, to be higher performers and even to be more loyal, as they care about making a good impression in their short time at each job.

Building a culture helps you keep your talent. Andrew Chamberlain, chief economist for a recruitment company, looks for the driving forces behind why people choose their jobs and what matters to them at work. Using a data-sample based on performance reviews and salary surveys of over 615,000 candidates between 2014 and 2017, he identified the factors that drive professional happiness. His finding: the top predictor of workplace satisfaction is not pay but the culture and values of the organisation, followed by the quality of senior leadership and the career opportunities available.5

LinkedIn’s Talent Trends survey backed up these findings. Forty-one per cent of professionals saw themselves staying at their current company for under two years. Those who wanted to stay long term, it reported, were purpose oriented and had bought into their company’s culture and long-term mission.

The one-club man, who spends his whole career at the same club, is rare in today’s football. Urrutia, the Athletic president, was one. A former midfielder, he spent 26 years at the club, playing 348 times. He even rejected an offer from Real Madrid in order to remain with Athletic. He has said that Athletic’s policy is about pride in its values, particularly in a world that he calls ‘dehumanised’ and lacking in values. His career was the inspiration for Athletic to instigate its One-Club Man award, recognising loyalty in other professionals. The first three recipients were Matt Le Tissier (thus further developing the Southampton connection), Paolo Maldini and Sepp Maier. The club thought that affiliating one-club icons as Athletic ambassadors was also a smart way to teach youngsters the value of sometimes resisting the temptation, whether it’s a bigger salary or a bigger club, to move on.

The Spanish phrase I hear repeated to me in Bilbao is: ‘What do you want to be in life, the lion’s tail or the mouse’s face?’ In English, the equivalent would be the small fish in a big pond or the big fish in a small pond. The business that keeps the ‘mouse’s face’ is the business that retains its talent. The lesson? The grass is not necessarily always greener on the other side.

In each summer after Athletic reached the 2012 Europa League final (which it lost 3–0 to Atlético Madrid), it lost part of the team’s spine. Javi Martinez was first to go, moving to Bayern Munich for €40 million. His spell in Germany was decimated by injuries.

Next to go was Fernando Llorente, the forward, who moved to Juventus on a free transfer. He scored 16 goals in his first season in Serie A, helping his team win the Scudetto. His next two seasons (seven goals, zero goals) were less effective, and after three years in Turin he moved to Sevilla (four goals). Ander Herrera moved to Manchester United for €36 million, and survived two seasons of upheaval at Old Trafford before being able to show his best form, and winning United’s Player of the Season for 2016–17. Llorente’s name is still mentioned often in Bilbao. That season saw him embroiled in a relegation fight with Swansea, which was ultimately successful, but there’s a strong sense he might regret having ever left Lezama.

Often players only know what they are losing once it’s gone. Santi Urquiaga understands this better than most. He was part of the original intake of players when Lezama first opened its doors in 1971. A right-back, he progressed through the Bilbao Athletic ranks and made his first-team debut at 19. He played in the Athletic team that won back-to-back league titles in 1983 and 1984 (that was the last title the team won until the 2015 Super Cup). We meet at Lezama, where he is Facilities Manager. He points to one pitch and says that back in his day it was the only training pitch there. Where a women’s team is now training was one of two sand pitches. A tennis court used to be where the main gym now is.

‘It is difficult to explain what it was like to win La Liga with Athletic,’ Urquiaga says with a smile. ‘We always say that you have to have lived it to be able to understand. The whole city came out onto the streets for the celebration party. Schools and factories and offices were all closed for the day. These were my friends, my neighbours, the people I grew up with. I lived among them in Sestao. I still do. I’m still the guy that won the title.’

Urquiaga was a Spanish international when he left Athletic and moved to Espanyol. He was successful there too, reaching a UEFA Cup final in 1986. But he says, with a tinge of sadness in his voice: ‘Even that was not the same.’ So, what is it about this culture? ‘When there are difficulties at Athletic, it is not like at other clubs,’ he says. ‘Nobody is looking to leave; you are playing with the friends you grew up with. That means you become more united when the going gets tough; you fight together, until the end.’

Urquiaga points to the far corner of the first team’s training pitch. That’s where work will start soon on a new main building. ‘As we don’t buy players like other clubs, the money made by the club is invested back into the youth system and the facilities,’ he says. ‘We want this place to be like the best university here, to have the best facilities and give the kids the best chance to make it.’

His choice of the word university is no coincidence. In February 2016, Athletic formalised a relationship with the Bilbao-based University of Deusto. Young players at Lezama can gain a university degree in physical education and sport science. The four-year course contains modules on anatomy, physiology, teaching PE, and theory and practice in sports including handball, volleyball and Basque pelota.

Iker Saez teaches the course. He is a regular at San Mames and is working on a PhD that shows education between the ages of 14 and 18 improves sporting performance. ‘I believe the best players are often the best students,’ he says. ‘If I’m smart with my brain, I can analyse the game better. But don’t forget the Athletic way is also to develop good people. They want to develop role models for society, and education is at the forefront of that.’

Amorrortu takes a similar view. ‘In the end, the kids need to perform in all that they do,’ he says. ‘Their grades are an expression of their personality. That is something to do with them as a person – it’s good to be able to play football well, but you must also be a person who knows how to value effort, who overcomes difficulties, and that is a question of personality. Education forms part of a rounded person, someone who knows about the world around them: politics, business, how things happen. Does it make them a better professional? I’m convinced it does. In the end, someone who knows how to express themselves, who knows how to reason, who has the ability to have relationships with people, that is very important. That is fundamental. That opens you up for everything, and it helps you deal with the pressure.’

The players know that if they fall behind in their grades, there is a chance they may not get picked. What happens in school tells Athletic what is in the players’ heads; and the club believes what is in their heads between 14 and 18 can be a marker for future performance. There are four players in the first team with BA or BSc-level degrees, and another six with the high school Baccalaureate qualification. Compare this with England, where Duncan Watmore is the only top-flight player to earn a degree since John Wetherall in 1992. More often, the students come from Bilbao Athletic and Baskonia. Amorrortu says around 60 per cent of the players complete their university courses.

There is one line in Amorrortu’s document that is in capital letters. It reads: ‘EL NOS ANTES QUE EL YO’ (The ‘us’ before ‘me’). Developing this sense of community, through education and belonging, can be powerful. The Athletic model reminds me of Next Jump, an American business that runs employee rewards programmes, allowing discounts from over 30,000 merchants. There are around 200 Next Jump employees based in four cities, and they benefit from a unique company structure. This includes subsidised holidays, free food (a healthy lunch if you attend a lunchtime fitness class), mentors for everyone and Code for a Cause, which offers out employees’ IT skills to charities that need it.

The other reason staff turnover at Next Jump is almost zero, and 90 per cent of employees say they love working there, is not the company dance-off at the annual party, but the No Firing policy. Once Next Jump hires you, the contract is for life. ‘Hiring managers started treating hiring like adoption: once we take someone into our family, they’re here for life, [and] when things don’t work, they’re responsible for training them, helping them,’ explained CEO Charlie Kim. He noticed that training became much more comprehensive, focusing more on character and integrity. The biggest impact he saw was in the effectiveness of performance evaluations. Instead of scepticism from employees concerned about a future firing, there was an honesty and openness in these discussions. Employees spoke frankly about their problems and concerns and, as a result, never took those stresses home with them. With a focus on developing the individuals, employee turnover is down and overall happiness up.

In the ongoing quest for improvement, Athletic can rely on one of their biggest fans: Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, famous in Spain for his outstanding work on the game theory of penalty-kicks. Palacios-Huerta is also on the board at Athletic, where his official title is Head of Talent Identification.

‘The wider lesson is that everyone at the club should understand the values of the club and their own importance to their club and community,’ Palacios-Huerta says. ‘I think that if players feel that the club they play for is their club, they’ll play with more commitment. They’ll be more committed to be better at what they do. They won’t feel like ordinary workers, they’ll feel and act as if they are owners. If the “workers” feel that they are the ones who give the club its identity and the club feels that they give the club its identity, then you create a family business which can be very efficient in a very tough market.’

Palacios-Huerta describes talent as ‘the product of abilities × commitment’. The coaches develop the players’ abilities. He is interested in the commitment. He does not want to share too many of the secrets that give Athletic an edge, but a clue into the work he does can be found in his book Beautiful Game Theory: How Soccer Can Help Economics. In Chapter 4, he describes a computerised penalty-kick game between 20 pairs of healthy subjects, half of whom were playing while hooked up to a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) device. Each pair played between 100 and 120 matches; one of them as the striker choosing where to place the ball, the other the goalkeeper trying to stop it.

Palacios-Huerta wanted to know what happens inside the brain during a penalty-kick game and whether neurological data can predict which individuals might be better at strategic decision-making. This is a subject we will look at more closely in Chapter 3. Palacios-Huerta found activity increases in various areas of the brain during the decision-making period, and that brain activity in another area related to better randomisation of choices.6 Using similar neuroeconomic techniques, he believes he can determine which players would react best in pressure environments.

I remembered these findings during the match I watched. Of the five goals Aduriz scored, three were penalties. He used two different strategies: for the first kick, he picked his spot and smashed the ball into the net, which is known as the Goalkeeper-Independent method. For the other two, he was Goalkeeper-Dependent, waiting for the goalkeeper to move first and rolling the ball into the other corner. I am sure that One-Club Man winner Le Tissier, himself a penalty specialist, would have approved.

Athletic has a triple strategy that businesses can learn from today. It has developed this culture of togetherness and collaboration, helped by its history and geography, that provides an edge. The club invests in its talent as humans first, not machines whose only purpose is to produce results. Their emphasis on education, behaviour and development is testament to that. (So is the players’ car park, where I spotted just one sports car and only one convertible; the rest were extremely ordinary. It turned out the convertible belonged to Ernesto Valverde, the coach.) And the club believes that retaining talent is more important than recruiting it. When companies don’t develop talent internally or promote from within, it sends a message to employees: we will find external solutions. That can then become self-fulfilling: without opportunities, talent will leave. Athletic retains talent and, in so doing, retains its community.

I catch up with Palacios-Huerta after the game. I ask him how Athletic continues to find its edge. ‘We survive on tiny margins. In the player development aspect, in some sense we are like the Moneyball of football. We are using data to find as much as we can to gain an edge,’ he tells me. ‘The reason is because our model is like no other club; it is not about buying or selling. We don’t need to sell players and we rarely look to buy them either. It’s about developing. And our culture, this social model, it’s the biggest part of that.’

HOW TO GET AN EDGE – by IGNACIO PALACIOS-HUERTA

1 Understand better, and from a purely scientific perspective, the production function of talent during the period from 10 to 20 years old.

2 Understand better players’ decision-making processes, and how these are formed.

3 I like the definition of talent as the product of abilities × commitment. An edge is obtained by having greater commitment. Understanding and investing in the formation of commitment is key.

GAIN LINE

Measure team chemistry

Defining a team / The TeamWork Index / Turnover and cohesion / Talent portability of stars / Leicester and the super-chickens

Not everyone buys into Athletic’s brand of success, or at least the reasons behind it. ‘They think cultural input is the reason, but I would argue that it’s cohesion,’ says Ben Darwin, a former Australia rugby international whose career was ended abruptly after a horrific spinal injury suffered during the 2003 World Cup semi-final against New Zealand.

Darwin’s injury came about when a scrum he was in collapsed. He was pushed up vertically and his head caught the inside shoulder of his direct opponent. He heard a crack in his neck and immediately lost all feeling in his body below his chin.

As he collapsed onto the grass unable to move, he knew how serious the situation was. But his mind was in calm, problem-solving mode, as it was programmed to be while on the pitch. ‘Mate, I think I’ve broken my neck, I can’t feel anything,’ he told the team physio as soon as he ran over.

In the next few seconds, three more thoughts came into his head. One: my coach will be annoyed that I stuffed up that scrum. Two: if I’m a quadriplegic, what will I do with myself? Three: maybe I’ll get into computers, I really like computers – okay, that’s what I’m going to do with myself.

Darwin did not break his neck – he had suffered spinal shock, and had a prolapsed disc – and miraculously was able to walk out of hospital one week later. For that he owes a great deal to his direct opponent, New Zealand prop Kees Meuws, who heard Darwin whisper, ‘Neck, neck, neck.’ Meuws crouched over his body to protect Darwin, which saved him from paralysis. ‘I think someone just flipped a coin and it went my way.’

Darwin was 26 at the time. He had played 28 Test matches, and was a few years from his peak. He never played again. His biggest loss was the friendships he forged on the pitch. As he put it: ‘When you finish a game of football and you’ve played together and you walk off with your team-mates … and you’ve overcome an opposition, you don’t have to say anything to each other, you can simply look your fellow player in the eye, and he knows you helped him, and you know how he helped you. And that’s enormously satisfying.’

That memory stayed with him. Throughout his coaching career – at Norths in Sydney, Western Force in Perth, Melbourne Rebels in Melbourne, and Shining Arcs and Suntory Sungoliath in Tokyo – he felt that a coach’s impact was often negligible. Some seasons, he was part of an ineffective coaching group and the team was undefeated. At Western Force, he did what he felt was his best work and the team came last.

He moved to Japan, coached there – working under England’s successful rugby coach Eddie Jones – and won everything, despite doing nothing different. ‘I did my worst coaching when I was in Japan, because I couldn’t even speak the language.’ The team went unbeaten because, Darwin thought, they had been together for so long and knew each other so well.

Darwin returned to the thought that he’d had while lying stricken on the pitch. He ‘got into computers’. He set up an analytics company called Gain Line Analytics, based on his belief that there is a fundamental misunderstanding about how teams work. His view is that a team is a system of relationships, and those within it are either aligned or not. The better aligned the relationships, the more successful the team.

The numbers backed him up. Sports teams made up of players who had existing and long-term relationships, those had played with each other for a long time, were a better indicator of performance than salary. In some cases, he saw that the levels of understanding between team-mates impacted on performance by between 30 and 40 per cent.

This is known as the Juggler Effect. It confirms that skill develops in a cohesive environment. If two jugglers work together for five years, they will know each other well and improve as individuals, not just as a pair. If a juggler constantly changes his partner, he will spend more time working on developing new combinations than his own skill. In this respect, high cohesion also allows for greater skill development.

We have seen that Athletic finds its edge by building a community, developing players through education and retaining its talent. Darwin takes this one step further and explains why cohesion offers significant added value for a business. Later in the chapter we will look at a club that did not have the geographical, historical or cultural advantages of Bilbao and still managed to develop its own identity in a cohesive environment.

Darwin set himself the task to measure the intangible of team chemistry. He initially developed an algorithm to calculate team cohesion that had three measures:

 Internal experience (within current team, maybe the youth academy)

 External experience (outside of current team)

 Externally shared experience (for example, club-mates playing for a national team)7

He called it the TeamWork Index (TWI). Based on research from nine different team sports, including football, across 30 seasons, it showed a clear correlation between the quantity and intensity of linkages within a team – to put it simply, cohesion – and team performance. He added more measures, among them playing system, combinations and skill-sets, and now has a more robust TWI that, he says, predicts outcomes with greater accuracy than bookmakers. The higher a side’s TWI, the more unified the team, the more likely the club is to enjoy sustained on-field success, off-field stability and heightened brand engagement.

His first clients were rugby league teams in Australia. Gain Line Analytics now works in rugby union, Australian Rules football, cricket and football. Darwin offers a Performance Audit to help owners and stakeholders benchmark expectations; a Performance Capacity to calculate squad skill output multiplied by cohesion; a Cohesion Score to assess weak points in clients’ teams and opposition teams; and a Cohesion Predictor to assess possible outcomes with different line-ups in the short and long terms. One Premier League manager who uses Gain Line’s Cohesion Analytics said: ‘I’ve always felt this about sport, but no one has put it into data.’

At the root of Darwin’s philosophy is the belief that high turnover of players reduces cohesion. He looked at data involving 10,000 players and came up with some key findings:

1 A player’s output on the field at their previous club is not just solely because of that individual. Their output is a product of the knowledge and understanding that player has with the other players around them. This is something unique for each player at each club, and is not transferrable. So it should be expected that a player who has recently changed clubs would under-perform at the new club.

2 On average, it takes three years for a player to hit their peak after moving clubs, and that is if they manage to hit their peak. Some players are never the same after moving clubs, through no fault of their own. Add in an overseas move, or a foreign language, and it’s even tougher.

3 A player’s new club is expecting them to perform at the same standard as they did during the last game (or perhaps the best game) at their previous club. Players who have changed teams will struggle to deliver on this. The number of times we have heard players being described as ‘not the player he was at his old club’ is remarkable.

4 Moving more than three times rings alarm bells. The more times a player changes clubs, the harder it becomes to settle in to the new club.

This final point is in contrast with some attitudes in football that associate players moving clubs with shows of ambition. Fans love a new signing because it sends a message that the club has the ambition to improve (a director once admitted to me that one player was signed for precisely that reason). I spoke to a coach about one player, a France international who had played for three huge clubs before he was 21, and the coach was worried that the youngster’s entourage were more interested in signing-on fees than the player’s development.

Darwin warns that highest-risk transfers involve a young player moving from a high-cohesion team to a low-cohesion team. The fact that a player might leave a high-cohesion team also tells its own story. ‘If I was a young athlete, I would find a cohesive organisation and take a 50 per cent pay cut, as the rewards would come later,’ says Darwin.

His findings are backed up by studies in individual sports, including basketball8 and football,9 which neatly summarises the challenge of recruitment. ‘Signing players of higher quality will increase team quality but will reduce team cohesion,’ wrote Dr Bill Gerrard, Professor of Business and Sports Analytics at Leeds University. ‘And the same goes for changing the head coach, which immediately wipes out all of the player–coach Team Shared Experience (TSE). The new head coach will start with zero shared experience with the existing squad.’

Gerrard concluded that the most significant impact on team performance was the interaction of player TSE combined with the length of time that the head coach has spent with the team. And the biggest cohesion impact can come when a new coach takes over a team with a low TWI.

I thought of Darwin when Arsenal coach Arsène Wenger bore the brunt of fan-base anger on the eve of the 2016–17 Premier League season. Arsenal’s title rivals had made many expensive new signings but Wenger, whose degree was in economics, had, at that stage, bought only Granit Xhaka.

‘There is always demand for new, but new is just new,’ Wenger told a baffled press corps at the training ground. ‘Football players have to meet their needs. When they meet their needs they express their quality. What a football club is to be built on is to make sure the players meet their needs and can develop afterwards. The fact that it’s new, after six months it’s not new any more. You come every day, you drive in here, the first day it’s new, after six months it’s not new any more. What is new makes news. But apart from that it makes noise. The noise is not necessarily always quality.’ Spoken like a true Darwin disciple – until, in the last week of the transfer window, Arsenal signed two more players, Shkodran Mustafi and Lucas Perez.

I ask Darwin about the England team and its performance at Euro 2016, where it lost in the Round of 16 to a far less talented, but more cohesive, Iceland team. Darwin was in no doubt where the problem lay. ‘It’s not about skill level but too much choice,’ he says. ‘If an English player has one bad game, he is dropped. But look at Iceland: if you have a bad game for them, you keep your place because there is no one around to come in.’ There may still be a clear skill deficit, but cohesion helps reduce that gap.

According to Darwin’s TeamWork Index, England was the worst team at Euro 2016. ‘Their numbers were diabolical,’ he says. ‘The skill is there and, from that point of view, the individuals are getting better, but the cohesion is not, and so the collective is getting worse.’

Darwin cited a 260 per cent difference in cohesion between Iceland and England. ‘It looked like the England players had an AVO [Apprehended Violence Order, like an ASBO] put out on them. They were not allowed to go near each other.’

So what’s the answer? ‘Patience with players. Not changing systems and line-ups all the time. How players handle pressure is related to cohesion and relationships within the team. England has done everything it could possibly do except for keeping the same people in the team. Patience!

‘The psychologist is on board, the beds are super-comfy, they even re-created the Wembley grass at St George’s Park. But what does the type of grass matter if it’s a different guy receiving the pass every time? This is also why low-cohesion teams struggle away from home; we call it complexity under duress but basically they fall apart under pressure. It’s not about developing skill. The thing to remember is that the talent you see is not the talent you get. They are different things.’

The TeamWork Index has a universal principle applicable to all businesses. ‘Not everyone can afford to bring in the best people, and if you do, you will have problems,’ Darwin continues. ‘You might be judging talent on the wrong standards if they are coming in from a different system to yours. New people may be indoctrinated into other systems. It’s more important to think about if your new hire is a good person – can they adapt to your system? – and remember that the younger they are, the more adaptable they are.’ We will look at the importance of adaptability in Chapter 2, where we will find out just what happened to Ousmane Dembélé after he appeared in the ‘Next Generation’ feature.

The question does not always have to be a ‘build versus buy’ one: some positions are more suited for buying in talent, and others for developing your own. One study looked at the portability of talent, by position, in the more measurable environment of American football.10 It took performance data from 75 star wide receivers – whose results are often linked to the relationship and understanding of set plays with their quarter-back – and 38 punters, whose job of kicking the ball is based more on individual skill. The data took into account the best season the player had and the two seasons that followed, dividing the groups into switchers (those who moved teams) and stayers.

The result: star wide receivers who switched teams suffered a decline in performance compared to those who stayed put. All wide receivers decline over time, but these declines were steeper than normal. Punters who switched teams did not experience a greater drop in performance than those who stayed. This suggests that punters have more portable skills than wide receivers – and in business terms, that wide receivers have what is known as company-specific human capital. David Moyes developed his company-specific human capital over ten years at Everton, so a short-term performance decline was inevitable after he moved jobs. Although, when he was appointed manager of Sunderland in summer 2016, Moyes had his own approach to talent portability. He went back to his former clubs to sign eight players: Steven Pienaar, Victor Anichebe, Joleon Lescott, Bryan Oviedo and Darron Gibson, whom he worked with at Everton; and Donald Love, Paddy McNair and Adnan Januzaj from his period at Manchester United. Sunderland finished bottom of the Premier League, and none of those signings improved on their previous performances. You could say that these players did not have the portability skills Moyes had hoped for.

‘Managers should consider minimising the portability of certain star positions in order to retain those individuals as a source of competitive advantage,’ the study concludes. In other words, if your star player wants a huge pay hike in his new contract, you pay it.

Darwin knows one cricket coach who has a tactic right out of the Athletic playbook: he makes training sessions voluntary attendance. ‘They all turn up of course, but that’s because he is empowering them and relying on their character to be professional. That leads to stronger relationships within the group.’

I ask Darwin if he could identify underlying reasons for Leicester City‘s surprising Premier League title-winning campaign in 2015–16. The team began with a relatively low TWI that had them down as a mid-table side. What helped is that they were playing in the Premier League, where cohesion has dropped by over 30 per cent since it was launched in 1992. The cohesion dynamic of the competition itself affects teams as much as their own cohesion does. The Premier League had four different winners in the years between 2012 and 2016 and the last team to successfully defend its title was Manchester United in 2008–09.

Leicester were able to jump up the table because so many other teams lacked cohesion: the Manchester clubs were struggling under coaches approaching the end of their reigns, Chelsea was in freefall under José Mourinho and Jürgen Klopp joined Liverpool after the season had started. As the season went on, Leicester’s cohesion rating topped their rivals’. They had no injuries and coach Claudio Ranieri picked his best XI every week. He would also regularly play down the team’s ambition to win the title, saying it was not possible until the point at which it was almost impossible not to win it.

There was also the super-chicken factor. An evolutionary biologist called William Muir was interested in productivity, and he devised a study of chickens, assuming theirs would be easy to measure as you could just count their eggs. Chickens live in groups, and so he left one group of chickens for six generations and monitored their productivity. He then created a second group, taking only the most productive chickens from the first group. He called the second group a ‘super-flock’. He waited another six generations, and then compared the results.

The first group was getting along just fine. The chickens were plump and feathered and their egg production was up. The second group, the one with the ‘super-chickens’, was not so good: only three were alive. They had suppressed the productivity of the others and pecked them to death. ‘Most organisations and some societies are run along the super-chicken model,’ says Margaret Heffernan, an expert in corporate cohesion.11 ‘We’ve thought success is achieved by picking the superstars, the brightest … in the room and giving them all the power. The result has been exactly the same as in Muir’s experiment: aggression, dysfunction, and waste.’

Leicester’s win was a triumph of the collective over the individual, of the group chicken rather than the super-chicken model. Even the three best players – Jamie Vardy, Riyad Mahrez, and N’Golo Kante – always put the group first. Mahrez gave up his penalty-kicking duties against Watford in November to allow Vardy to score in a ninth successive game (he would go on to break Ruud van Nistelrooy’s record and score in 11 straight games).

And what about the slump that happened the following season? Because of their original low TWI, Leicester dropped back to their long-term Performance Capacity (remember, that’s skill multiplied by cohesion), while their runs in the FA Cup and Champions League diluted in-season cohesion because of the squad players being rotated in (having sole focus on the league in 2015–16 was a huge advantage).

So a team with a low TWI can have a good season, but Darwin’s data suggests that they cannot sustain it. The last team with a low TWI to win the Premier League was Blackburn Rovers in 1995. That side was relegated in 1999.

What makes one group more successful than another? A team from MIT tried to answer that question, bringing in 697 volunteers, putting them into groups and giving them hard problems to solve. Each team worked together to complete a series of short tasks, one involving logical analysis, another brainstorming; others emphasised co-ordination, planning and moral reasoning. Overall, the groups that did well on one task did well on the others. Anita Woolley, one of the academics who conducted the study, identified the three characteristics that marked out the best teams.

‘First, their members contributed more equally to the team’s discussions, rather than letting one or two people dominate the group,’ Woolley explained. They also showed high degrees of social sensitivity to each other.12 And thirdly, the teams with more women outperformed teams with more men.13 (Athletic Club de Bilbao understands that its policy is open to the charge of lacking in diversity, but the club has six women on the executive board, which is more than any other club in Spain.14 In Chapter 5 I will look at how one French club found an edge by appointing a female head coach.)

Woolley’s MIT experiment showed that social connectedness is key to performance. Heffernan visits companies that have banned coffee cups from desks because they want people to talk to each other around the coffee machine. Idexx, an American company specialising in diagnostics and IT solutions for animal health, built allotments on site so people from different areas of the business could meet each other. ‘What people need is social support, and they need to know who to ask for help,’ she says. ‘Companies don’t have ideas; only people do. And what motivates people are the bonds and loyalty and trust they develop between each other. What matters is the mortar, not just the bricks.’

When you put all of this together, you get just what Athletic have achieved in Bilbao: social capital. ‘Social capital is the reliance and interdependency that builds trust,’ says Heffernan. ‘The term comes from sociologists who were studying communities that proved particularly resilient in times of stress. Social capital is what gives companies momentum, and social capital is what makes companies robust. What does this mean in practical terms? It means that time is everything, because social capital compounds with time. So teams that work together longer get better, because it takes time to develop the trust you need for real candour and openness. And time is what builds value.’

The Athletic directors Amorrortu and Palacios-Huerta agree with Heffernan’s hypothesis. Social capital builds trust: that’s the Athletic way. Then there is that term ‘culture’. If something is happening in a group and we can’t see the explanation, it’s often put down to the culture. ‘Culture is an ambiguous word that can refer to many intangibles in sport,’ Darwin adds. But don’t confuse it with cohesion. For Darwin, culture cannot be measured; cohesion can.

HOW TO GET AN EDGE – by BEN DARWIN

1 Understand the state of an organisation so that decisions can be made (and expectations understood) in context.

2 The knowledge of success or failure must be held in the organisation, not in an individual.

3 Decisions with the short term in mind will impact long after in ways not envisaged.

ÖSTERSUNDS FK

Find your USP

The Solidarity Gala rap / Dangers of blame culture / Swap stress for bravery / Create your own distinction / Swan Lake and reindeer lasso / The Privilege Walk / What is art?

As one of the oldest clubs in Spain, it makes sense for Athletic Club de Bilbao to make tradition, history and community such a critical part of its USP. But what about the clubs who don’t have that kind of history, or a start-up looking to create an edge in the market: they cannot rely on a past, or even a point of distinction, that doesn’t yet exist. That was the conundrum that faced a genial young Englishman who found himself in a freezing part of northern Sweden with his wife and new-born son and a team that was under-achieving at all levels. As we will see, he worked on an identity. He developed cohesion. He found an edge. And the results followed.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, you have just seen the football-playing, music-making, love-making, heart-breaking, booty-shaking, fist-pumping, legendary UHHH-EFFF-KOE!’

In September 2016, in Frösö Convention Centre, a former aircraft hangar in a small city in northern Sweden was packed to the rafters. Graham Potter, dressed all in black, was on the stage addressing a crowd of over 1,600 people. The audience was going wild. They had just seen players from their local football club, Östersunds FK, known as ÖFK, put on a show like no other. Potter was ÖFK coach.

This was the Solidarity Gala, and it was raising money for people driven from their homes by war. It began with Iraqi striker Brwa Nouri addressing the venue with a plea for community. ‘Solidarity is a collective that takes responsibility for something, without having any self-interest in it to look after the well-being of a group.’

Former ÖFK player and now marketing executive Jimi Eiremo then played a haunting tune on the näverhorn, a traditional Swedish instrument similar to a didgeridoo, made out of birch-bark. Around him, the team sang the melancholy regional anthem ‘Jämtlandssången’. Potter even sang a solo verse, as did Christine, one of the club cooks. Christine is a refugee from Congo who settled in Östersunds and is one of the most popular figures at the club. Her performance, given the context, was poignant.

Nouri, Sotte Papagianipolous (Greek/Swedish) and Saman Ghoddos (Swedish) then stepped forward to perform a brilliant rap based on Ison & Fille’s hit ‘Jag skrattar idag’ (I laugh now). The song is about living for the moment and not having regrets. Next up was youth coach Andreas Paulsson, who shouted into the mic, ‘Let’s speed this up!’ and after an impressive beat-box session, sang Justin Bieber’s ‘Love Yourself’ in perfect tune. Curtis Edwards, a former Middlesbrough academy player, then belted out the George Michael song ‘Freedom’.

The first-team squad joined together in singing ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’, ‘Human’ and ‘We Are the World’. This one was an emotional one, as drawings from children saying ‘Tack ÖFK’ – thanks ÖFK – were shown on a giant screen behind the stage. The kids weren’t the only ones giving thanks. ‘Football was my saviour, and by that I don’t mean the actual kicking of a ball, but more about what this club stands for and the values it has,’ said Nouri.

Every member of the squad, including the coach and his assistants, performed during the show. It ended with a burst of red-and-black confetti and the first-team players and youth players wildly dancing to ‘Can’t Stop the Feeling’. The mood was joyous. Relief was mixed with pride. The show was sensational.

‘It was a wonderful night,’ Potter tells me a few months later, as he prepares for a pre-season training camp in warmer climes than northern Sweden. Potter has guided ÖFK from Sweden’s fourth division to the first division, and survival in the top flight, in the space of six years. In 2017, ÖFK also won the Swedish Cup, the first major trophy in their history. Potter is a hero in the ‘Winter City’, which until recently was more famous for its Nordic sports.

Östersunds has a cross-country ski stadium and a snow piste. It has hosted several Nordic Games and ski orienteering world championships. But now it has another source of pride. One journalist who visited Potter’s house saw a bouquet of flowers on the kitchen table and a note from AnnSofie Andersson, the mayor, saying, ‘Congratulations, you are amazing. We are so glad you live in Östersunds.’

Potter was an average player (his words), who considers himself fortunate to have been a professional for 13 years. He played in the top flight, for Southampton and Stoke, but most of his career was in the lower leagues. He always had a thirst for knowledge. One afternoon he was idly skimming a newspaper when he realised how much time he had on his hands. He signed up to an Open University degree in social sciences and studied American and European Union politics. When he retired from playing, he wanted to combine his continuing education with some coaching. So he became a football development coach at the University of Hull and continued his early coaching career at Leeds Metropolitan University, where he enrolled in a Masters course in leadership and emotional intelligence.

He explored leadership theory and how success is related to overall environments. He wrote a thesis on the importance of reflection and self-determination in individual development. Potter learned that self-awareness was the foundation of emotional intelligence; it’s a lesson that remains with him today. He was the only sports coach on the course. His course leader was a former military man, and everyone else was either in the army or a surgeon. ‘They were all highly technically gifted but needed support around emotional management and particularly when mistakes happen and their responses to that.’ It was fascinating for Potter, whose own environment had been based heavily on a blame culture, where coaches would tell him to cut out silly mistakes, and players were castigated for individual errors. Potter decided he wanted to be different.

That’s when he met ÖFK chairman Daniel Kindberg, who was then the club’s sports director.15 Potter was offered the job of academy head. He turned it down. Over a year later, Kindberg had become chairman. One of his first moves was to return to Potter and recruit him as head coach.

The duo spoke the same language. Kindberg is a former lieutenant-colonel in the Swedish army. He saw active service in Congo, Liberia and the Balkans. It was there that he learned how stress and fear limit decision-making. ‘It’s simple: if you’re in a combat situation, and you make a mistake, your friends die,’ he tells me. ‘So if you’re stressed, it’s harder to make the right decision.’ When he returned home from tours of duty overseas, he spent time thinking what it was like to be afraid and how it affected him. It made him confront future problems in a different way. ‘We need to take away the stress, to encourage bravery, and to be convinced by your inner self.’ Even if it doesn’t work? ‘You don’t know unless you try!’

Potter said that there was ‘a philosophical connection’ between him and Kindberg. Sir Alex Ferguson always said that new managers weighing up job offers should not choose the club, but the chairman they work for. Potter liked Kindberg’s vision. The chairman wanted to do something different, to create an identity, to make a difference and to have a football club to be proud of. Even though the club had just dropped into the fourth tier; even though the fans were deeply unhappy and leaving in their droves; even though Potter did not know Swedish football; even though he had a wife and new-born son, he moved to northern Sweden and took the job. This was practising the boldness and risk-taking mentality that he preached.

It was much harder than he thought. The club was in a negative spiral. There was a strong blame culture. Recruitment decisions were not working. And his wife, Rachel, found it hard to adapt. The climate was fierce, as arctic Kallvastan winds whipped off the giant lake, Storsjön, at temperatures as low as minus 25°C. Potter was working 12 hours a day and Rachel was a new mother who didn’t speak the language. She has now learned Swedish and, along with her three children, is the one who has to encourage Potter to speak it more often. They are now both fluent, as are their children.

Kindberg’s vision had included ÖFK getting into the top division and eventually playing in Europe. ‘From where we were, you could argue that was an insane target,’ Potter says. It’s not so insane now.

His first step was to bring some element of joy back to the club. The focus had been outcome-based, valuing results only, rather than performance. Potter tried to create a new environment, one that recognised potential and was built on trust and mutual support. No more blame culture. It related to the values Kindberg wanted the club to espouse, which were published on the club website shortly after Potter’s arrival. It is to the great pride of both men that these values remain in place today, and that their power has had a social impact on the Östersunds and wider Jämtland community. They were: Openness, Long-term, Sincerity and Honesty, Reliability, Professionalism.

Your organisation may or may not have a mission or values statement. The likelihood is that it does, but you just don’t know it. Such a statement can be a useful tool to generate feedback about whether the business is fulfilling those values, or implementing that vision. It may seem unnecessary but in the case of ÖFK, whose values are a clear source of pride, it has proven extremely beneficial.

It’s also easy to forget about the importance of relationship-building in today’s workplace, where deadlines are usually yesterday and stress is never far from the surface. We are given short-term growth targets to meet that are inhibiting and stressful. A culture of short-termism and need for profit restricts employees’ risk-taking; they are too scared to deviate from the normal for fear of blame if targets are not reached. How can this be an efficient environment for success?

It’s much harder, and braver, to look long term and develop deeper respect and connections between colleagues by devoting time to ÖFK’s intangible values. This is particularly true when working with millennials. Simon Sinek, an author on modern management whose work is admired by a coach we will meet in Chapter 3, claims that millennials have it tough: brought up by parents who told them they were special and could do and have anything they want, they often find that not to be the case in the real world of professional business. So they often suffer from low self-esteem, have little resilience and a reliance on technology, rather than real-life connections, as a coping mechanism. ÖFK have found smart solutions.

‘We have built a working environment based on hard-core values that we all have to follow,’ says Kindberg. ‘It’s a standard of how we look at each other, at people, at society and at football. In this environment, creativity, initiative and courage blend with competing every day to be the best. The same is true if you are the striker or a clerk in the office. Everyone here is the same.’

The pair embraced the need to create an identity, practically from scratch. But where to start? Potter carried out due diligence. He looked at the competition; studied what other teams in Sweden were doing, the culture of Swedish football, the recruitment patterns; and looked at ways to compete, and possible advantages that Östersunds could find. If ÖFK competed on the same terms, they would fail, because they had less money than their rivals. So how could they develop an edge?

‘We had to find different players, and give them a reason to come here,’ says Potter. ‘We wanted to improve careers here, and work on players as people too. We used our location in northern Sweden as an advantage; it helped us create a tight-knit group. Swedish football was compact and physical; we looked for players who had different qualities, and came from different areas. This diversity also helped us. We looked at personality attributes and those who played football in a different way to other teams in Sweden. Our style was possession-based. We wanted players who could control the ball, who were flexible [position-wise] and, most of all, who wanted to improve.’

The universal principle of this is clear. Every business would like to create a USP but it can only do so by understanding the market and the competition; only then can it harness advantages for the greater good. This can be as true for the individual as the business. Potter simply asked: ‘What is my distinction?’ By choosing diversity as his USP, he has gone for the polar opposite of Athletic Club de Bilbao, for whom proximity is the USP.

Kindberg reduced the concept of hierarchy by empowering five individual departments to run themselves. He estimates that the board takes 1 per cent of decisions, he takes 4 per cent and 95 per cent are generated by empowered employees.16 ‘Everything we do has the aim of helping us win football matches,’ he said. ‘We use different methods to widen our eyes, improve our social conscience and take responsibility for ourselves. We cannot compete with other clubs financially. So we find other ways.’

One of those ideas came about after a meeting with Karin Wahlén, whose father Lasse Lindin is ÖFK general manager. Wahlén was a bookish child who grew up wanting to be a librarian. She ended up working for a publisher, then setting up her own cultural agency to promote museums and literacy for groups who don’t normally engage with culture.

Kindberg missed his initial meeting with Wahlén, who was convinced that meant he was not interested. When they did meet, she went in heavy with her pitch. ‘Getting the players into culture will improve their performances. It will take them out of their comfort zone and make them braver on and off the pitch,’ she said. ‘When we are brave we can explore our creativity without being afraid of the unknown.’

This chimed with Kindberg’s view, so he set up a two-day workshop where the players met authors, dancers and artists, and shared views on the creative process. It was a success, but nothing changed. So Kindberg asked Wahlén for more. He appointed her ÖFK’s ‘cultural coach’ and, later that year, the whole club put on a play. The coaching staff performed monologues, the players acted a meta-comedy about not knowing how to put on a play, and the youth academy did a dancing and singing extravaganza that required over 20 costume changes. ‘Everyone loved it, and the results improved soon after,’ said Wahlén, a passionate ÖFK fan whose daughters are careful not to stress her out on match-days.

Other cultural projects followed. In 2013, the club put on an art exhibition. In 2014, they published a book, My Journey, featuring every club employee’s story. In 2015, there was an art/dance piece, called ‘Strength through Diversity’. One year later, the club performed a modern dance interpretation of Swan Lake at the city’s local theatre on the main square, Storsjö. Maria Nilsson Waller, the choreographer, described dance to them as ‘movement of the soul’.

In rehearsals, the players began with nervous giggles as they divided into pairs and lifted each other up. But their inhibitions quickly left them as Waller’s drills had them moving in harmony. The rehearsals were like training sessions, a safe area for learning (and making mistakes), and peppered with positive feedback and support structure. Everyone was out of their comfort zone and helping each other. In football parlance, it was a real leveller. The power of touch in the dance also brought an intimacy to the group.

Psychologists have shown that sporting teams win more if they touch each other as a way of establishing bonds of trust. One study of NBA teams found that those who touched more (defined by a fist-bump, high-five or a hug) won more games.17 The smallest touch is a bonding tool of support. You are not alone on the field. Someone has your back (literally, in this dance). We will discuss the importance of tactility in the methodology of one of football’s most intriguing managers in Chapter 2.

And so, to show-time. There were 450 people in the venue, mostly theatre-going types. Midfielder Monday Samuel opened up with a graceful solo, before his team-mates joined him. The movements were elegant, the dances polished and, most of all, the focus was intense. This was not a joke for the players. Potter also performed a solo: lying on his stomach, legs bent at 90 degrees, on the gold confetti-covered stage. He slowly lifted his head and neck, but not his shoulders, and looked around him. There was a refined dignity, a stillness, to his movement. It was excellent. Afterwards assistant coach Billy Reid sang The Drifters’ ‘Saturday Night’ and the mood turned joyous as the whole team danced around him. They were back in their comfort zone.

Once mocked for its cultural projects, ÖFK was now having its performances reviewed by Stockholm’s high-culture media. ‘It was beautiful,’ Sverige Radio’s cultural expert Gunnar Bolin tells me. ‘The sincerity and power of expression made it extremely moving.’ Two theatres in Stockholm asked ÖFK to perform Swan Lake at their venues. The team declined. Bolin had noted that it was not just the players who were dancing, but all the club employees. ‘Even the ones who were not quite so flexible as the younger players,’ he smiles.

‘The cultural theme allows us to be more open, to be braver, to improve decision-making,’ Kindberg says. ‘It helps the group come together. When we look at players, people look at qualities like physics, technology and understanding of the game. But we believe the mental part is the most important. By allowing players to venture into situations they do not know, and challenge their own fears, they grow as individuals. By extension, that gives them greater courage on the pitch.’

Potter agrees. ‘The environment we have established means everyone is prepared to trust the process, but it’s definitely a challenge and by no means comfortable for any of us out there. You have to overcome some inner demons and insecurities to get out there and do it.’ Potter found his Swan Lake solo particularly tough. ‘We had just got promoted to the Allsvenskan [Swedish first division] and there was a huge buzz around the performance. It was very difficult to do, and I felt a right wally at times.’

Potter understands the positive effect of the coach showing his nerves and vulnerabilities to the group. ‘Culturally, everyone thinks a leader needs to only show strength and be this macho figure, but it doesn’t have to be like that.’ Potter was not scared of his team seeing his weaknesses. Sometimes giving them that glimpse can be transformative.

The time spent working on the dance also taught a valuable lesson. Time is important. Things don’t happen straightaway. The players in the squad are used to instant gratification: being able to watch TV on demand, order things online and even meet partners instantly on smartphones. But it takes patience to write a book, to put on an art show, to learn a dance. It can be arduous and punishing, but ultimately it is worth it. The lesson that ÖFK players took in from Swan Lake was not just about cohesion; it was also about self-confidence, job fulfilment and patience.

Management has changed from the days when Potter was a player. Millennials will no longer put up with always being told what to do. ‘It just won’t work any more,’ he says. ‘If you rely on your position of power, or control over the group, it’s only a short-term solution. You need to be authentic in the relationships you have, show the qualities you want to inspire in the group, and sometimes it’s about not having all the answers. As long as you are dedicated to improving yourself and those around you, are able to adapt and make good decisions, then you can manage. It helps to have some self-awareness, as if you understand yourself then you can understand others. That’s how you can build relationships that withstand the pressures of losing games.’

This was also apparent in the preparation for ÖFK’s 2017 cultural project: an investigation into the Sami culture, to culminate in an exhibition comprising photo, film, crafts, music, song and speech. Known in English as Laplanders, the indigenous Sami live in the Arctic area of Sápmi, which encompasses parts of northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. The whole club has learned about the Sami’s language, faith and narrative tradition, with help from Maxida Märak, a hip-hop artist, activist and Sami expert. One lesson was about reindeer husbandry and, in the absence of a real reindeer, Potter wore fake horns and challenged striker Alhaji Gero to lasso him. So he did.

Potter’s studies at the Open University, Hull and Leeds reinforced his interest in self-reflection and forced him to think about what kind of leader he wanted to be. He did not want to repeat the patterns he saw from his own playing career. So, what type of leader is he? ‘I value people and I value relationships and I am as authentic as I can be. My job is to understand the person first and foremost, and help them improve. For me, this role is not about winning matches or winning leagues, it’s simply about whether you can affect someone’s life in a positive way.’

Potter is convinced the cultural projects can work in another environment, though he warned against going from doing nothing to performing Swan Lake. ‘It was a gradual process,’ he says. ‘But the fundamentals are the same across industries: if you have people who are very good at doing something, whatever that is, and you want to explore a new way to challenge them, or develop the team, or find out about themselves, this is a way to do it. Lots of professional life is about coping with the struggles and attitude to that. In football it’s a misplaced pass or a lost game – or an angry fan. In another environment it might be a grumpy client or a difficult moment. But being comfortable in uncomfortable situations is a way of teaching people in a new way.’

The cultural work is not just crystallised into the performances. Kindberg sees the whole process as one of self-improvement. ‘We want to show that our football is more than football. We are happy, we are open, we are braver than the normal standards, and we use this to challenge people by taking them out of their comfort zone.’

This is where Wahlén comes in again. As well as collaborating with Kindberg on the cultural projects, she organises regular workshops for the team. The players are encouraged to make emotional connections with each other. She remembers the conversations that followed the Privilege Walk, when the whole squad stood in a line in the middle of the room and were asked a series of questions:

If you are a white male take one step forward.

If there have been times in your life when you skipped a meal because there was no food in the house take one step backward.

If you have visible or invisible disabilities take one step backward.

If you attended school with people you felt were like yourself take one step forward.

If you grew up in an urban setting take one step backward.

If your family had health insurance take one step forward.

If you feel good about how your identified culture is portrayed by the media take one step forward.

If you have been the victim of physical violence based on your gender, ethnicity, age or sexual orientation take one step backward.

If you have ever felt passed over for an employment position based on your gender, ethnicity, age or sexual orientation take one step backward.

If English is your first language take one step forward.

If you have been divorced or impacted by divorce take one step backward.

If you came from a supportive family environment take one step forward.

If you have completed high school take one step forward.

If you were able to complete college take one step forward.

If you took out loans for your education take one step backward.

If you attended private school take one step forward.

If you have ever felt unsafe walking alone at night take one step backward.

Some players ended up at the back of the room, while others were now right at the front. One player had taken so many steps forward, he was up against the wall. He had never realised how much privilege he had, compared to his team-mates. ‘It was such an interesting way of making us all aware of who we are,’ says Wahlén. ‘It was an intense session, but we were able to openly discuss why and how these issues had affected our lives.’

Wahlén admitted that she had preconceptions that footballers can only play football; she realised the players had the same assumptions of themselves. ‘They only see themselves as footballers, but they are not; they are sons, fathers, husbands; they are emotionally aware, socially responsible and confronting their own biases.’ They are also regularly having conversations that Wahlén never imagined. How does music move you? What makes dance, dance? What is the meaning of art? How does this photograph make you feel?

The players have started their own voluntary book group, and not a single sporting title has been chosen. Instead, more heavyweight subjects are being tackled, such as identity, race and love (Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adache18); the Vietnam War (The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien); friendship across generations (The One-in-a-Million Boy by Monica Wood); and our role in the world (Ishmael by Daniel Quinn).

The players tell Wahlén that they like to read a lot now because everyone else is. She hears them talking about books and finds their conversations more fascinating than those of the cultural elite she often works with in Stockholm. ‘The players don’t have any literary truths, so they interpret what they read with authentic openness,’ she says. ‘It’s much more interesting for me.’

The fans have picked up on the players’ behaviour. At a time when fan violence is not uncommon in Sweden, ÖFK supporters have responded to their club’s efforts and become socially responsible. At the last home game of the 2016 season, there was a Gay Pride flag in the stands to mark ÖFK’s certification as an LGBT supporter, the first of its kind in Swedish football.19 There is a closeness with the fans, who have taken a lead from the club and embraced their differences.

At the start of the 2016 season, Kindberg wrote an open letter to the fans. I have not seen a mission statement quite like it. ‘Together with you, we want to be role models!’ he wrote. ‘Östersunds Fotballklub, ÖFK, is a club with clear values. We go our own way. Our belief is that our players perform better both individually and as a team if they are offered an environment that is challenging and stimulating across many human levels … ÖFK stands for openness, diversity, and tolerance. We stand for sincerity and honesty. We will always be trustworthy and professional. We want to create a new kind of football culture. We want to be good role models. We propose that all ÖFK supporters endorse these five simple rules of conduct:

1 The stadium is a place for everyone. We behave in a way so every visitor, from a small child to a 100-year-old, feels safe and welcome.

2 We may have opinions about a player but we never use derogatory or offensive words.

3 The players and supporters of our opponents are our friends. We do not boo them when they come onto the pitch. We do not boo when they do something good. In general, we boo as little as possible.

4 We may have views about the referee, but we never use derogatory or offensive words.

5 We always stay away from violence.

We are ÖFK. We go our own way!’

In return, the fans are inventive with their banners, even making a special one for Potter’s wife Rachel. Behind the goal, in the pre-season friendly against Everton, the fans unfurled a giant red tifo, a banner with ‘RACHEL’ written on either side of giant white hearts. The head of the supporters’ group, the Falcons, also wrote a thank-you letter to Rachel. It included the lines: ‘I don’t know you and you don’t know me, but I just want to say thank you. I’m not sure if you realise how much you, indirectly, affect me (and many others) every single day. You need to know how much joy you’ve given us. And still do. Everyone in Östersunds is talking football nowadays. Everyone is proud of ÖFK … That wasn’t the case in 2011 but much has changed since you and your husband first arrived five years ago.’

‘I wanted the people of Östersunds to be proud of its football club,’ says Kindberg. ‘This city is warm, welcoming, safe and secure.20 The fans are also part of our team and they recognise these values that we have. We want to take a stand against society and use our role for good. That’s another product of the environment we have built. If it connects with the core values in the club, then fine. I believe that can give us an edge and help us win games.’

The project is not over yet. Kindberg told Potter when they first met that Europe was the target, and he was not just talking about going to Tenerife on a pre-season training camp. ‘We still see this as the start of our journey.’

Key to the journey is Potter, who was voted Swedish Manager of the Year after the team finished eighth in its debut top-flight campaign in 2016. ‘Graham is extra-extra-extra-extraordinary,’ says Kindberg. ‘He is one of most promising managers in Europe. I can stand up every day and argue that. He is open-minded, has values and fantastic leadership skills.’ And emotional intelligence? ‘Of course!’

Is Kindberg prepared for the day when Potter moves to another club? What will happen to ÖFK’s edge then? ‘I will be the proudest chairman on earth when a top-five club in the Premier League comes in for him, but they would have to pay a very big compensation. I will only talk to another club [about him] if it’s Barcelona who want him!’ Kindberg is smart and has already considered a succession plan – which sets him apart from most club chairmen I have encountered. He is convinced that ÖFK will one day win the Swedish title and compete in the Champions League. ‘We will be winners in a totally different way. We refuse to compete in any other way. That’s our belief.’

He enjoys taking advantage of football’s conservatism, and derives great pleasure from signing unpolished diamonds like David Accam (now playing for Chicago Fire in the MLS) and Modou Barrow (now at Swansea). ‘We look to recruit players that don’t follow the others. They might seem strange, or different, but they have a brain that others don’t recognise. The conventional football environment kills geniuses. That’s where we can find players.’ He is particularly excited about an English midfielder, Curtis Edwards, rejected from Middlesbrough’s academy, but with a huge potential for development.

HOW TO GET AN EDGE – by DANIEL KINDBERG

1 Create the environment where everybody promotes creativity, initiative and courage.

2 Delegate decision-making.

3 End the blame culture.

Potter is preparing for the new season ahead. I wonder if it might be his last in Sweden, before an offer comes in that Kindberg cannot refuse. He has already rejected approaches from other teams in Sweden. In six years, Potter has turned around a club in a negative spiral to an upwardly mobile, community-bonding, booty-shaking success story.

The ÖFK identity has come a long way in a short time. ‘We embrace diversity as part of our identity and are open-minded around how we explore different parts of ourselves as a team to develop the individual,’ Potter says. ‘We play an exciting, interesting and attacking brand of football with players from all over the world. We are a team that people are proud of, that’s grown a lot and that has made a difference to a small part of the world.’

I can’t let him leave without one final question. What is the meaning of art? ‘It’s about expression,’ he smiles, with no hesitation. ‘It’s a way of expressing yourself. In some ways, football is similar. In its simplest form, kids and everyone else who plays the game express their emotions through it. It’s just like art.’

Potter has not followed the traditional path for English coaches, and that sets him apart from most of his peers (other exceptions are Paul Clement, former assistant coach to Carlo Ancelotti at Paris Saint-Germain and Bayern Munich, and Michael Beale, who left Liverpool’s youth academy to join Brazilian club São Paulo for a seven-month spell as assistant coach).

If there is a bias towards appointing foreign coaches in the Premier League, might it be because the English coaches lack experience outside of England? Potter has shown remarkable adaptability to cope with the serious challenges that ÖFK presented. We will look at the importance of adaptability, and how to develop it, in more detail in Chapter 2. It starts with a moment of stunning skill in Dortmund, in the presence of another culturally engaged coach who sees football as a true art form.

HOW TO GET AN EDGE – by GRAHAM POTTER

1 Make sure people feel they can improve in a learning environment.

2 Find out the unique advantage that separates you from the competition in the market-place.

3 Hire managers who understand people and relationships, even if others may have more seniority and experience.