Team cohesion in football

The Real Madrid Foundation describe how they foster teamwork and team cohesion.

The Real Madrid Foundation believe that developing individual technical ability may achieve success in the short team, but that longer term success comes through enhanced teamwork (see their philosophy here in this article).

The Real Madrid Foundation argue there are two different types of cohesion:

Social cohesion: The level of connection and fellowship among individual players to work together;
Operational cohesion: The degree of involvement and commitment of group members in realizing and achieving a common goal.

It is through the intersecting support of these two different types of cohesion that leads to successful team performance.

At SNA Toolbox, we specialise in the social cohesion of teams using Social Network Analysis (SNA). Let's compare two different Australian Football League (AFL) teams in terms of their cohesion and their performance.

Figure 1: This network of trust among the players in Club A shows a very cohesive team of players. Should one or two player retire, be traded, go on the long-term injury list and spend time away from the club, then this team is still going to be highly cohesive. NB: the year this real data for Club A was collected, they were a highly successful team in the competition, sitting in the Top 4 of the ladder/points table.

Figure 2: This is the network of trust for Club B which show a more fragment team than Club A. Club B has less trust connections between players and there are some critical players in the middle briding across two groups. NB: the year this real data for Club B was collected, they were an unsuccessful team in the competition, sitting in the Bottom 4 of the ladder/points table, struggling with consistency and seen by the media as ‘in a mess’.

Figure 3: Using network analytics as well as just visually inspecting the network data, we can see that the two red dots identify two critical connectors in terms of trust for this team's trust network. Watch what happens in FIgure 4 when they are removed.

Figure 4: Once these two critical connectors leave the team, the trust connections within Club B become highly fragmented and disconnected. Those two critical connector players had a valuable role of keeping the team connected.

Conclusion: A player's worth is not just be about their performance, but on what other factors they bring to the club. As we can see in the network diagrams above for Clubs A and B, their overall team cohesiveness differs. For the fragmented Club, Club B, the loss of key personnel who are the ‘social connectors’ of the team in terms of trust become even more important, and their exit from the team can lead to unintended consequences of breaking the team into disconnected factions.

Anecdotally, when giving feedback to one of the AFL teams studied in this research (Lusher, Robins & Kremer, 2005; Lusher, 2006), one head coach said that they had an older key position player that they decided to trade for two younger key position players. However, it was only when he left did they realise that he connected up the younger player with the senior players, and after that point the players fell apart as a group.

In terms of investing in players, or trading them, imagine how valuable the information above in the network diagrams would be worth to a club. The Real Madrid Foundation are onto it in terms of recognising the importance of social cohesion. With SNA Toolbox, you can quantitatively measure those connections within your team and make evidence-based decisions on player retention.

See the Sports Team Demo Report here for a demonstration of the value of a Social Network approach to teams.

References
Lusher, D., Robins, G., & Kremer, P. (2005). Masculine behaviour and social networks in team structures. A Report for the Australian Football League (AFL). Melbourne, Australia.

Lusher, D. (2006). Masculinities in local contexts: Structural, individual and cultural interdependencies [PhD thesis, University of Melbourne]. Australia. http://eprints.infodiv.unimelb.edu.au/archive/00002448/

Lusher, D., Robins, G., & Kremer, P. (2010). The Application of Social Network Analysis to Team Sports. Measurement in Physical Education and Exercise Science, 14(4), 211 - 224. http://www.informaworld.com/10.1080/1091367X.2010.495559

Lusher, D., Robins, G., & Kremer, P. (2013). Cooperative and Competitive Structures of Trust Relations in Teams. Small Group Research, 45(1), 3-36. https://doi.org/10.1177/1046496413510362