Why do we strive for perfection, as opposed to “mere” greatness?
Off the back of this year’s NCAA “March Madness” Tournament–in which the top American college basketball teams vie for a National Title–and where two weeks ago, previously-undefeated Gonzaga fell to Baylor in the championship, I began to ponder this desire sports teams have to be “perfect”.
If the only true legacy that stands the test of time is hardware in the trophy cabinet, then can shooting for the unblemished stars hurt us more than we think? If your team hasn’t lost all year, should you actually be concerned? Is aiming for the magnificent 100% the precise way we might end up with 0?
In football we have the story of the Invincibles, an Arsenal team that will undoubtedly be heralded as one of the greatest in history, and whose memory will push some to try to achieve the same monumental triumph. Arsene Wenger’s 03-04 Gunners will certainly never be forgotten.
But today, I’m not here to explain how your team can secure that elusive, perfect season. In fact, as a coach, I’d stay away from it at all costs. Instead, I’ll be writing today’s piece on the merits of deliberately losing.
Yes, you heard that right. Deliberately losing. Or at least trying to.
Why Losing May Pave the Road to Victory
But wait, how can losing put you at the top of the table? … or let alone, win you trophies? Aren’t they mutually exclusive?
The short answer is “no”.
In moderation, losses (or pushing the limits of your team’s ability to the point of nearly losing), can be a vital ingredient in protecting the squad’s longevity, empower the group with a “feeling of excitement with a flavor of invulnerability”, and stave off the associated fear that comes with an environment in which mistakes are unforgivable. And don’t worry, we’ll dive into the details shortly.
It is, perhaps, alarming to note that neglecting to consider these three elements can inflict harm on a team’s chances late in a season–but it’s true. Injured players, excessive / unearned hubris, and a nervy squad unwilling to roll the dice can all break a squad at its supposed pinnacle. For every Invincible team of legends, there are hundreds, like Gonzaga, that fell just short.
And you’d hate to be one of them.
Beans in the Parking Lot
Reason #1 for why striving for 100% is a one-way ticket to fail-town is that the resources any team has at the start of a season are finite. They also begin to fatigue the second they step out on the pitch–and that tiredness accumulates in the shadows.
In order to try to win every game, most coaches will field their best eleven at any given time. It’s quite straightforward to understand that deploying your best players can lead to your best chance of victory, but every minute tacked onto each person’s running tally can wear them down over time. And, if the difficulty of the current fixture doesn’t match the caliber of player being deployed, your team selection is rife with inefficiency.
The way sports tend to work, the biggest games come at the tail end of any competition–when the title race is tight, or the championship match is on the line. Therefore, we might be encouraged to think twice before pushing pedal to the metal at the start of our journey, only to sputter off the side of the road when that checkered flag is finally within view. It’s a lonely feeling, that of being tank-empty and empty-handed.
Now, alright, we might argue, there’s a pretty simple fix to this. In order to combat the issue of exhaustion, we might think to increase our team’s fitness. If they can last longer, withstand fewer soft-tissue injuries, and so forth, perhaps we can accelerate through the early rounds and keep our foot pressed till we reach the destination. If our top players simply get less weary, then we can keep them on the field at all stages of the competition!
But this is unrealistic.
With higher fitness, what tends to occur is the adjustment of in-game tactics to take advantage of that very edge. If your players have better aerobic capacity, coaches are more liable to seek returns on that investment in the short term and introduce more intense counter-pressing strategies, play a higher-tempo, higher-line, higher-risk approach, and so forth. They won’t improve longevity, they’ll simply improve intensity, right now.
Thus, despite reaping the benefits, in the moment, they’ll end up wasting it all, just the same. A car with a larger tank doesn’t necessarily drive more miles if you keep pumping the accelerator.
So why do we chose intensity over longevity? Can we .. not do that?
Well, for one, fitter players also will be interested in attaining a short term ROI on the extra miles they’ve run in training. Shaving kilos and seeing it pay off in how many pressures you applied, this week, is far more psychologically reinforcing than thinking, “oh yeah. I’m savin this all up for later.” Sacrifices like that, if unrewarded fast, will die off quick. No one has the 5D chess mentality to simply maintain their same level of exertion and leave some gas for games 30 matchweeks away–it’s just easier to run harder, today.
Making this all even more difficult, in a sport where managers can be fired from two or three weeks of bad form, or players can be relegated to the reserves for a few lackluster performances, such long-term thinking is rarely rewarded in the first place. If you, the midfielder attending additional treadmill sessions to build up stamina, doesn’t showcase that ASAP, you might never get the chance to.
The result? An equally exhausted squad at the end of the season. Bumping fitness, in this sense, isn’t a solution that enables us to pursue perfection. Our players use their resources at the same rate, just in relative quantities.
And so, since we know our best must rest at some point, the challenge becomes one of disguising how you preserve certain players. A fitter squad will simply raise the mean expended energy per match, so we must allocate resources on and off the bench, instead of attempting to temper in-match exertion. Rotating the squad, and knowing both how and when to do it, is likely the preeminent coaching challenge for top managers.
And sure, we can occasionally pluck out a starter or two to earn back a few elite-player minutes at the end of the calendar, but this may not cover our bases. To do this effectively, and earn benefits elsewhere (as we’ll soon discuss), I’d like to introduce the idea of deliberately designing “Pyrrhic Defeats”.
For brief context, Pyrrhus was a king who triumphed over the Romans in 279 BCE but saw many of his soldiers die in the process. What’s arisen, in his memory, is the notion of a Pyrrhic Victory, a win that inflicts such a devastating toll on the victor, that it actually feels more like a loss.
Thus, what if, instead, we can suffer defeat in a way that actually feels like a win? What if we can prognosticate just how many losses will keep us in the running, late in the season, and actually aim to hit that target? In our first episode of the Touchline Theory Soccer Podcast, co-host Will remarked that most teams only need to win 3 of 6 group stage fixtures to advance to the knockouts. What if those 3 wins was actually the objective? What if pushing our team to the point of failure is more valuable than racking up another effortless win?
Let’s outline just how Pyrrhic Defeats can help us.
R & R
For starters, as aforementioned, they might involve resting key players. If you play a relegation fodder side with your top squad in order to ensure a victory, it probably wouldn’t be a wise expenditure of their proverbial gas. If your chance of winning the match is 90%, and it drops to 80% with your bench in the starting XI, that’s surely a winning deal.
The added bonus of this lineup rejig is that of playing youth. By rotating the squad, we not only preserve our best, but we allow the younger members a chance to grow and thrive. In terms of a long-term club model, this can be extremely beneficial. We can discuss the benefits of this at great length, in a different article.
But if we dive deeper on the idea of “player preservation”, we might notice a logical incongruity in the conventional approach that’s even more indicting.
If we’re so focused on picking up every single point, and insist on playing our best 11 against 20/21 Sheffield, we’ll continue to inefficiently tack on minutes that will likely incur injuries to our crucial players later on. This, then, forces our hand under much tougher circumstances.
In these cases, now, instead of managing the group while we’ve had a selection dilemma, there’s simply no dilemma at all. And no, that isn’t a good thing; we’ve now got our backs pinned against the wall. Post-mis-management, we can picture the common situation in which we’re left with no choice but to make the entry point for a promising academy product to be against much more formidable adversaries. We tried our hardest to scorch Sheffield, but now, in a match that may actually be more contested, we’re left shorthanded.
Imagine we throw the kid in. Imagine if the issue is widespread, with rampant injuries throughout the side, and we have two or three holes in the team–each tentatively filled by an acne-faced boy still driven to training by his mother. Such a series of impromptu introductions might be successful, but it might also put too much on the shoulders of a handful of prospects looking to make an impression at first team level. Why would you grant a U17 talent his long-awaited PL debut against City, who might batter the kid, leave him demoralized, and in the tabloids as a coaching mistake, solely because you’ve got no other options? Isn’t it better to carefully work him into a side and with a substitution feature in the FA Cup?
The rule of thumb we glean, here, from the detrimental and stubborn 100%-seeking approach, is that if a player of a certain quality isn’t necessary in any given match (and barring the importance of “getting a run of games in” or “competing for the Pichichi”), sit him. You will need him more later.
In the context of Pyrrhic Defeats, therefore, if we tailor our lineups precisely such that we replicate or barely supersede the level of opposition on the field, we may, in fact, suffer a few losses. That’s just how luck works. But the key thing to note, here, is that once the games roll around that require our full arsenal locked and loaded, we won’t have shot ourselves in the foot. If we can do everything to barely advance, we’re holding onto our resources until they can be unleashed onto better sides–namely, ones that, likely, have failed to manage themselves with the same degree of prudent efficiency. Now, we’re pinning our starting XI against a tattered shell of a squad.
And that’s your first route to the trophy.
If a Challenge Doesn’t Present Itself, Create It
Alright so what else? How can losing benefit us?
The next point is actually quite popular within the conventional wisdom: there’s strong value in actually learning how to cope with going down a goal, or even losing entirely.
The more atypical piece I’d add to that, is that we ought not reap these benefits on a serendipitous basis–using a “learning lesson” as a cushion for the rare and inexplainable loss. Instead, we should do this by design.
Teams that pull out all the stops to smother meager opposition never give themselves the chance to fabricate and experience circumstances they might face later on in the “post-season”. It is much more valuable for a mix of starter and bench players to grind out a tough-fought victory and practice late-match gamesmanship, closing out a fixture, and possession of the ball on thin, 1-goal-margin ice, than smashing the other team through the turf. Not only can we preserve players, but we can actually challenge the ones playing.
It is, therefore, the coach’s job to produce lineups that–in matches that are easily within reach, and would otherwise benefit the team very little–will actually push the group out of their comfort zone and teach them something. Though creating obstacles for your own team might seem counterintuitive, there’s no training ground like the true pitch. Experiencing a close-call scrimmage in practice pales in comparison to seeing it first hand in the stadium; those memories might be just the psychological edge the team needs when close matches genuinely appear, with the star-studded XI, in a tournament final later on.
Again, these tinkerings may actually cause your team to lose, in which case, you ought to be prepared to deal with it–be it by assuming responsibility, or emphasizing a particular point–but if the group yanks themselves out of the gutter and forge a victory, it will be far more meaningful and memorable than mercilessly driving a steamroller over caterpillars.
Plus, not only will the experience provide film to analyze or memories to inspire a crucial knock-out-stage comeback, in a more abstract sense, but in the case that the team survives our curated challenge, there’s actual literature and research that’s proven how “near misses” can quite concretely embolden a group. As I noted on Twitter, following Barcelona’s nail-biting win over 17th-placed Valladolid, a collection of people can feel invincible if they’ve just narrowly survived a dangerous situation.
Close-Call Anecdotes
In David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell discusses the notion of “desirable difficulty”, a concept that suggests that not all challenges are inherently negative. The line of logic being that adversity forces us to pursue avenues we may have otherwise avoided altogether, and gives us the courage to perform those same learned actions in the future.
A revealing example, noted in the book, is that of highly successful people who’ve suffered some form of bereavement as children. In the 50s, historian Anne Roe commented on the large proportion of successful biologists she’d found who’d lost a mother or father when they were young. A survey, a few years later, and this time on famous poets, revealed an eerily similar trend; a disproportionate number of those at the top had been wrenched away from family as youths. Lucille Iremonger, another historian, kept the observation-ball rolling. She soon found that two thirds of English Prime Ministers had lost a parent before 16. More and more data was piling up in favor of a seemingly counterintuitive notion, that:
.. early loss might actually yield tremendous success later on.
But surely it can’t be that simple–and it sure isn’t.
It goes without saying that strong parental guidance is invaluable for any child, and is proven to mitigate the likelihood of imprisonment, amongst other things. We rely on parents for moral compassing, financial support, educational tutoring, and so so much more. And yet, there appeared to be a curious correlation between success, and not having had them.
Psychologist Dean Simonton wanted to dig deeper. In a piece he wrote, he asked an adjacent question whose results proved highly revealing: why are so many children labeled as “gifted” early in their development, but fail to live up to their promise?
From what he perceived, many of those that impress at the beginning of their lives actually suffer from what he called an “excessive degree of psychological health”.
That’s right. Too much health. Shining early can keep you comfortable.
The kids that end up failing expectations, long term, he claims, have become “too conventional, too obedient, too unimaginative to make the big time with some revolutionary idea”. Typically, those “big time”, game-changing moments tend to be what distinguishes a champion from the rest. When you’ve been highly praised as a child with a malleable brain, you run the risk of losing the competitive edge that’s needed to sustain and polish that luster later on.
Simonton then concludes by examining the other side of the spectrum, and the one we’re most interested in:
“…gifted children and child prodigies seem most likely to emerge in highly-supportive family conditions. In contrast, geniuses have a perverse tendency of growing up in more adverse conditions.”
–Dean Simonton
Geniuses have a perverse tendency of growing up in more adverse conditions.
Okay, so let’s cut the analogy about skillful kids and bring it back to football. My proposition, here, is that we ought to create teams in this “genius” mold, as opposed to the more Icarian early shine, early burnout model. We’d hate for our team to be heralded at the start of the season, but fizzle out towards the critical end.
So how can we do that?
For starters, by overly nurturing our team’s sense of confidence, and allowing our starters to tear miserable opposition to shreds, we may actually be doing more harm than good. Aiming for perfection will invariably lead us down this road. Playing our starters against the worst teams in the table does nothing else but pad on hubris. If we’re looking to cultivate an environment in which players avoid becoming “too unimaginative to make the big time with some revolutionary idea”–roughly translating to some game-changing sequence in a tight matchup, etc.–we may be better off finding ways to introduce “desirable difficulty” into our season. We won’t be cynically deleting parents, of course, but we should try to make things challenging for them.
Gladwell actually takes this idea of “improving by choosing the rockier road” one step further.
Citing J.T. MacCurdy’s The Structure of Morale, he conjures up the story of the London Blitz. No, that’s not a reference to Arsenal’s new pressing triggers under Arteta, but a much more grim topic: the 1940/41 German bombings of England. Here’s how it relates.
In the years leading up to the bombardment itself, Winston Churchill fearfully remarked that he saw London as “the greatest target in the world”. A 1937 report grimly predicted that 600,000 would be killed in any such attack, leaving twice as many wounded.
But apart from the infrastructural wreckage and human carnage, the “Lightning War” or Blitzkrieg’s true intent was to inflict debilitating trauma and paranoia onto one of the world’s most populous cities. Hitler’s Nazi regime sought to exterminate the courage of the British people via intimidation. That was the primary objective.
But in reality, it may have actually had the opposite effect.
When the bombings, in fact, arrived, buildings were destroyed and roads were blown to bits, but the impact on Londoners themselves seemed entirely backwards:
they appeared more and more indifferent in the face of danger.
The attacks grew more powerful, more imposing, and yet, kids still played in the streets. Per one man who drove through the cratered streets of London to survey the detritus, “no one, so far as I could see, even looked into the sky”.
What psychiatrist MacCurdy proposes is that the attacks imbued city dwellers, not with the intended sense of paranoia, but with an almost baffling “feeling of excitement with a flavor of invulnerability”. If you read snippets from the very diaries of people who sustained the blasts over 8 consecutive months, it’s even more jaw-dropping:
“…it seems a terrible thing to say, when many people were killed and injured last night; but never in my whole life have I ever experienced such pure and flawless happiness.“
–A Diary excerpt from Londoner amidst the Blitz
… What?? Surely not??
How is it possible that people can so boldly bask in the face of peril? Let alone, how can they actually benefit from it? We spoke about “desirable difficulty”, but this is an entirely different level. This is severe danger. And yet, as we consider methods for strengthening a group, risk-intensification almost works to an even greater degree. The greater the incoming adversity, the stronger the outgoing team.
Regardless of its empirical efficacy, or how we distill the “message”, the surface-level incongruity of the London Blitz case means that this idea may still be hard to grasp. MacCurdy realizes that. He goes on to explain, in a lovely run-on sentence, the immense idea that finally targets the core of our philosophical dilemma,
“We are also prone to be afraid of being afraid, and the conquering of fear produces exhilaration… When we have been afraid that we may panic in an air-raid, and, when it has happened, we have exhibited to others nothing but a calm exterior and we are now safe, the contrast between the previous apprehension and present relief and feeling of security promotes a self-confidence that is the very father and mother of courage.”
–J.T. MacCurdy in The Structure of Morale
If our community, or our team, is sheltered from scary things like failure (even by virtue of having earned that immunity, a la being so good that they rightly conquer everyone else), they may develop a fear of fear itself. Facing this, and defeating it, like in the case of an attempted Pyrrhic Defeat paired with an against-all-odds triumph, can produce both excitement and relief. The difference between that prior state of nervousness and the newly-earned sense of ease is what breeds true confidence and this holy notion of courage.
The assumption, from Churchill’s wavering voice a few years prior, was that a strike would plummet the city into a state of psychosis. Having never suffered through an onslaught of the Blitz’s magnitude, London had been conditioned and primed to accept a purportedly inevitable feeling of terror in the case of disaster. But, as Gladwell elucidates, “…courage is not something that you already have that makes you brave when the tough times start. Courage is what you earn when you’ve been through the tough times and you discover they aren’t so tough, after all.”
To win championships, courage may just be the most vital ingredient of all–and without it, you just might end up with nothing.
Dice Rolling
There is a third, largely related element to consider here, too. We’ve mentioned the quite meta “fear of fear itself”, but what about something a little more relatable? What about the fear of making mistakes?
Striving for 100% instructs a team that the only accepted performance is perfection. Every result must go our way. In a sport that’s often defined by extending outside of comfort zones, attempting creative and risky things we may never have before, this indoctrination can be hugely debilitating.
For anything beautiful to come about on the pitch, someone must push the boundaries. In doing so, we must accept the potential consequences. If those consequences are, in fact, unacceptable, those boundaries may, simply, never be pushed.
Thus, if our game model is solely around the aim of winning, and for that matter, winning everything, we’ll coat our players with inhibitions. We’re bound to inculcate a habit of passing responsibility onto teammates when we’re called upon, or playing conservatively when times get tough, as we suck the life out of our own side.
Any player who fears being the shatter-er of a perfect season will hide when they’re needed most. A trophy-winner’s courage won’t be found in someone who lays it off so they don’t have to shoot, who hesitates instead of making the tackle, or who wavers instead of coming out confidently to save the 1 on 1. To win championships, risks must be taken, and if we’ve designed an environment that punishes that, we’ve failed our players and ourselves.
Unload Your Cargo, Traveller
As it goes, this widespread, individual anxiety of being the “streak-breaking culprit” only mounts the longer we continue to win. If we go 20 games unbeaten prior to a knockout stage match, not only is the nerviness of playing an elimination game present, but so is that of fracturing this invisible, albeit delicate and devoutly upheld, run of form. Even though the streak in and of itself carries little meaning, if any at all, its something people latch onto, and can often be confused as being even more important that the current fixture itself. What matters, today, is getting to the next round, but for many, it’s staying unbeaten. Sometimes, when we anchor the significance of the task at hand in something much greater, we intimidate ourselves.
In muddling the current moment, with the past, we artificially augment the stage. Just like flipping 5 consecutive heads means nothing for your subsequent coin toss, the prior victories mean nothing for the current match. Yes, they’ve earned us the right to play in it, but now that we’ve arrived, they’re inconsequential. When we aggrandize our own stakes, we do nothing but overcomplicate things.
So, in order to avoid that common psychological pitfall, I suggest rupturing the streak on purpose. Snip the bracelet, my friends.
In an effort to preserve the squad, push the team to a Pyrrhic Defeat or Near-Miss, and rid ourselves of the fear of committing errors, this fourth and final angle also finds solace in the failures that may eventually arise. I’ve been up front about how opening the team up to losses via the aforementioned strategies may, in fact, cost you points in the table, while detailing the benefits that may come, in spite of that. This culminating idea claims that those lost points may be a virtue in and of themselves.
By ridding ourselves of this ethos of a phantom, perfect legacy, we ride into competitive fixtures with no ghosts hanging over our heads. The focus is on the current game, and nothing else. For players that suffer already from overwhelming athletic challenges, this frees up mental disk space.
These perfect seasons, they can be a burden. And, by nature of that burden continuing to pile on with each added victory, it becomes more and more likely that we’ll crumble under the weight. Instead of tiptoeing through the final grueling stages of our trek, hoping that each new step isn’t the straw that breaks the camel’s back, we’d be better off unloading some of that cargo early, when doing so can actually be forgiven. If we’re caught up in being the best, carrying the most, and going the furthest, we might never cross the finish line.
Till next time.
