Let’s settle sport’s great debate: talent vs team spirit

Talent or team spirit – which is more important? It is an eternal question in sport, which will be asked once again during the European Championship.

Perhaps no side is associated with the debate more than the France national team. In 2010, anger at their manager Raymond Domenech led France to go on strike; the squad refused to train. An ignominious World Cup group stage exit, after defeats to Mexico and South Africa, swiftly followed.

Eight years later, France secured World Cup victory. During the tournament, star midfielder Paul Pogba gave a series of rousing dressing-room speeches. Before the final, he declared, “Today we look at each other and we don’t let another team take what is ours.”

Manager Didier Deschamps proclaimed the triumph a victory for team spirit. “We had psychological qualities which were decisive,” he said after the victory over Croatia in the 2018 final. “The teams which only had the best technical skills did not have enough.”

From these two French campaigns, it would be easy to conclude that team spirit – or a lack thereof – explains the very different fates on the pitch. Easy, but only if you ignore tournaments that complicate the narrative.

In 2006, despite a fraught relationship between many players and Domenech, France reached the World Cup final. In 2014, a France squad picked to be more harmonious lost in the quarter-final to Germany. The side lacked the creativity that Samir Nasri, omitted from the squad because of his perceived difficult character despite a stellar Premier League season, could have provided.

The topic of team spirit demands a certain scepticism. In 2016, the basketball team Phoenix Suns tracked the number of high-fives the team did per game, believing that doing more high-fives would create better camaraderie among players. They won just 24 games out of 82.

“There is a definite hindsight bias,” says Stewart Cotterill, professor of sport, exercise and performance psychology at AECC University College. “People look at teams who have been successful, then see that they have good cohesion, suggesting it is cause and effect.” Or, as Tottenham Hotspur striker Steve Archibald observed, “Team spirit is an illusion glimpsed in the aftermath of victory”.

“Winning covers up a lot of debilitative processes,” says Mark Eys, a researcher at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada, who studies group dynamics in sport. Yet, he maintains, “there is certainly a demonstrated link between cohesion and performance.”

Studies have assessed how cohesive athletes consider a squad to be – how well they believe team-mates get on and how much they feel united in trying to achieve a particular goal. Such research has found a link between cohesion and team success, and not only in retrospect: teams who reported more cohesion midway through a season subsequently performed better. Yet these studies were not at professional level, reflecting the difficulties of getting sufficient access to the inner workings of elite teams.

Perhaps the most enduring example of a team with slightly less talent triumphing is Europe in the Ryder Cup. For all the USA’s exalted array of golfers, Europe have won eight of the past 11 Ryder Cups. Ian Poulter – said to be Team Europe’s ‘postman’, because he always delivers – offered a prosaic explanation for Europe’s superior record. On the American tour and between Ryder Cups, he noted, players tend to travel to courses by themselves; on the European tour, players tend to travel in courtesy cars together – though he was speaking before LIV Golf uprooted the golfing landscape.

“You’re bonding with potentially another team-mate, so even a silly little thing like that all helps in the big picture when two years down the line you’re paired up,” Poulter said. At the Ryder Cup, “it comes extremely naturally to us to be able to get along as a team, and because of that we have a huge comfort level – and a team for us is very much a team.”

Yet if the Ryder Cup hints at the importance of cohesion, it cannot quite prove it. Team spirit is an amorphous concept – hard to define, let alone measure. But sports scientists have worked to assess spirit by proxy: how teams communicate.

In doubles tennis, communicating better seems to help sides win more. Between points, winning teams spoke twice as much as losing teams: an average of 82 times a match versus 42, a study of US college doubles found. Victorious sides also communicated differently. They spoke more about what they should do in the match, like serving out wide or getting to the net, and were more consistent in their interactions after each point. Losing teams were more prone to making complaints – say, excuses about their shoes.

Yet effective communication is not the same as agreeing with each other; indeed, it can sometimes be the opposite. Amy Edmondson, a Harvard Business School professor, has coined the phrase ‘psychological safety’. This refers to an environment where members of a team are free to speak candidly, without worrying about the consequences if they are perceived to contradict more senior members. Such an environment liberates a team to learn from mistakes and take risks. Most importantly, it generally improves results. “Psychological safety,” Edmondson and a colleague wrote in 2014, “has consistently been shown to play a role in enabling performance.”

An environment that encourages candour does not mean that all members of a team must like each other. Outside the changing room, Andy Cole and Teddy Sheringham barely spoke to each other throughout their four years playing together for Manchester United. Yet their professionalism and skill was such that they averaged more than a goal every 90 minutes between them while playing together.

“There is evidence that social cohesion, getting on, is less important than task cohesion – trying to achieve the same thing,” explains Cotterill. “You can have a group of individuals who do not like each other but respect each other’s ability to contribute to achieving the same team outcome.”

In sport, there is often a tension between a player’s self-interest and the interests of their team. Perhaps this is where team spirit or cohesion is most important.

If players are continually worried about being dropped, they will naturally be prone to think of self-preservation. In the 1989 Ashes, England picked 29 players in six Tests as they lost 4-0.

Consider a forward who has been told that, if they don’t score soon, they will be dropped. Such a player might be tempted to shoot rather than pass to a team-mate in a better position.

The basketball player Shane Battier was not considered a star – but he was involved in two of the four longest winning streaks in NBA history. When the league created a team-mate of the year award in 2013, Battier came second in the first year; he won the award the following year, his final season.

“If I wanted to maximise my earning potential as a basketball player, I would shoot the ball every single time,” Battier explained, outlining the tension between individual and team goals. “It’s amazing what you can accomplish when no one cares about who gets the credit.”

To Battier, selfless play during matches was underpinned by the environment off it. In any great team, he told me, “You usually have one or two guys, or ladies, who set the tone. These players are early to practice, care about the team, care about their team-mates, put the work in, aren’t afraid to be criticised – and that has a trickle-down effect on everybody else.” But in poorer teams, “the top players may not take coaching well, or criticism well – they’re lazy, they don’t put in the extra work.”

And so there are tangible traits of sides with a better spirit. They communicate more effectively, with a culture that encourages everyone to speak candidly. This can help to ensure that the side plays more selflessly on the pitch.

These are qualities that would improve any side. They are traits that can, on occasion, help lesser teams overcome those with greater star power. But, given a choice between a side with more skill and more spirit, in most cases greater talent is still the way to bet.