“It’s easy to get good players. Getting them to play together, that’s the hard part”
Casey Stengel, Baseball Player and long time Manager of New York Mets

There are any number of quotations about cohesion in sport teams, but Casey Stengel's is a great one. The cohesion and connectivity of members of a team is of critical importance to their success. That's why people often say ‘A champion team will always beat a team of champions'. Why? Because the ability of a champion team to work together - their connectedness as a team - makes them greater than the sum of their parts.

Real Madrid are a strong supporter of the idea of group cohesion in football. According to the Real Madrid perspective, there are two different types of cohesion: 

• 'operational cohesion' represents the ability of a team to play together; 
• ‘social cohesion’ reflects the ability to connect as people. 

One type of cohesion reinforces the other. 

SNA Toolbox offers innovative ways to assess social cohesion in sports teams via the use of Social Network Analysis. Beyond player responses to “I feel connected at this club”, see the actual connections of trust, friendship, influence and (dis)respect between your players. 

The network image below shows friendship relations between players, as friendship is a great marker of connection to and respect of another person. Friends are people we value.

Note the different colours of the dots (i.e., the players) which reflects the different friendship groups as detected by our network analytics.  There are 5 groups of friends within the team. The yellow dotted players in the top right of the network are all larger in size, proportionally representing the number of nominations they received as ‘best players’ in the team - as rated by the players themselves. Notice how this group of friends (in yellow) are predominantly larger dots, meaning they are regarded as best players? This is indicative of a ‘best player club’ type attitude.

In addition, notice that the grey and the dark green groups of friends are the connecting friendship groups in this team. Both groups keep the team connected. Without these friendship groups, there would be no connection between the yellow, light green and light blue friendship groups - that is, the team would be disconnected. However, this is a connected team, with no isolated people or groups, and while it could be more cohesive it looks quite reasonable.

Some might argue that ‘what you want is for everyone to be friends with everybody in the team’. I would reframe that as ‘it would be desirable for everyone in the team to have respect for every other person in the team’ but for ‘everyone to be friends’ is just not feasible. Close friendships take time and energy, commitment, listening and engagement. There just are not enough hours in the day or mental energy to be very close with 34 other people (there are 35 players in this network) - and that is even before you consider other relationships in your life.

To understand more about networks in sports teams, have a look at our interactive Sports Team Demo Report on the SNA Toolbox website. The demo shows insights about cohesion, but also player culture, and peer-rated performance.

Finally, I wish to finish with my all-time favourite sports quote:
'Baseball is ninety percent mental. The other half is physical.’ – Yogi Berra