On June 24th, 2004, David Beckham stepped up to take a penalty that could keep England in the European Championships. The ball sailed high into the Lisbon night, landing somewhere among the stunned fans. England were out.
Why did one of the most technically gifted players in football misfire so spectacularly? The answer lies deep in the brain. Human performance is a delicate balance between two primal forces: the anticipation of reward and the fear of punishment. When either becomes too strong, the brain’s chemistry tilts and even well-learned skills can collapse.
Beckham – a famously patriotic sportsman – stepped up to take that penalty; he was pulsing with a desire to win for his country and simultaneously dreading the possibility that he might fail and let England down.
The result was that a well-learned skill – that notoriously accurate curving right footer – was scrambled and replaced with a ludicrous, looping shot. Not because he had lost the skill but because too much wanting – choking – and too much anxiety – fear of failure – unbalanced the chemistry of his brain.
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Fast forward to today.
Arne Slot, Liverpool’s post-Jürgen Klopp manager, is suffering comparable pressures. A £450 million summer spend, a fan base intoxicated by last season’s triumph and a press pack hungry for blood – these forces create a psychological crucible. Slot, of course, has also had to contend with the tragic death of striker Diogo Jota in a car crash last July. Every decision Slot makes is under the glare of hostile scrutiny.
And when the gap between expectation and reality yawns wide, the risk of individual and collective cognitive collapse skyrockets.
Making good decisions under pressure in complex, uncertain situations is hard enough. Doing it in the glare of very public, hostile and schadenfreude-fuelled scrutiny is near impossible. Arne Slot is at real risk of doing a Beckham. According to many, he may done so already: for example, making 10 changes to the team after a loss to Brentford and going on to see his young, inexperienced side lose 3-0 to Crystal Palace.
So how can managers – and all of us – manage to make good decisions under such circumstances? Here are some suggested mental tactics:
Constructive amnesia
The 2024 League Champions? Forget it. Glorious history, 20 times league champions? Ignore it. Klopp? Press delete. History is a tyrant.
The middle-distance runner Sonia O’Sullivan famously disappointed when she failed to finish in the 5,000m final at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. She told me that a series of crushed expectations meant she had to recalibrate her mind utterly. Olympic medals? Forget it. World Champion? Press delete.
[ Sonia O’Sullivan: I’ll always remember my first time winning a national titleOpens in new window ]
O’Sullivan learned to focus on modest, intermediate and unglamorous goals such as improving her time on the next Saturday’s road race in London. She did this for years, harnessing a primitive biological process called the winner effect, until eventually she won silver medal at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
When any mammal – including humans – wins an encounter against another mammal, this slightly increases their chance of having another success because of a boost to hormonal receptors in the brain that edge up motivation. This is called the winner effect.
The American boxing world has known about this principle for more than a century, which is why they have “tomato cans”. Boston-Irishman Peter McNeeley was one: he was the first opponent for former champion Mike Tyson after he came out of jail in 1995. In spite of Tyson’s clumsy and ill-timed punches, the match only lasted 89 seconds. A second tomato can was presented to Tyson later that year, and he was quickly finished off too.
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Tyson then went on to reclaim his world championship title from Frank Bruno. Tyson’s brain had to be re-engineered by guaranteed success experiences against tomato cans. Arne Slot clearly didn’t know about the winner effect when he put out a massively changed and untested team to meet Crystal Palace after their defeat to Brentford. That was a terrible decision.
Instead of harnessing the winner effect as boxing promoter Don King had done for Tyson, Slot did the opposite – seeding a sort of loser effect which perpetuates itself in a comparable downward spiral dynamic.
[ Can Arne Slot revive this Frankenstein’s monster of a Liverpool side?Opens in new window ]
Arne Slot has to do a Sonia O’Sullivan. He and his team have to forget last year’s success. Why? Because it sabotages the winner effect; it neutralises O’Sullivan’s Saturday-race-equivalent wins by making them seem trivial in comparison to the big prizes.
Make a virtue out of adversity
Under great pressure and uncertainty, it can be hard to see a good way forward for a manager – but also for any of us. A Beckham-like clouding of our minds makes the right decision even more elusive. That’s when good managers can harness the winner effect by setting internal goals for the team that seed small psychological wins – like “forget about winning for the moment – our job is to show grit and pride. Let’s turn that fear into anger – better still, into edgy excitement.”
A Blitz spirit
Nothing binds people together more than common threat. A demoralised British population famously rallied together in the face of German bombing in the second World War. Ukrainians are showing a similar rallying together today in the face of Russian bombing.
If you can network brains together in a group through a common purpose against a common threat, the group’s performance will outstrip the sum of the individual talents of the team.
Slot’s team is brimming with individual talent, but their brains are not networked. Comments about the current Liverpool squad include doubts about their drive, hunger, confidence and belief. These are not separate states of the mind and brain – they interact and reinforce each other, in both upward and downward spirals.
If Slot can evoke a sort of Blitz spirit in his team, he will generate important hormonal changes in their brains. In-group feelings trigger the social binding hormone oxytocin, which lifts mood and lowers fear.
Research on group intelligence tells us that smarter, better-performing groups happen when two factors are in place. First, all group members feel they have a voice and can express it equally. Second, the members of smarter groups are more adept at reading others’ emotional expressions.
The tragic death of Jota may have damaged the brain-networking in the Liverpool team. Did the manager address this shocking loss of a popular and charismatic team-mate? Did he let the players have a voice? Most young men aren’t used to death – they feel immortal. Could this shock have sucked some of the meaning from their team spirit?
Whatever Slot’s response was to this traumatic event, he now has to harness the collective brain power of his team; perhaps he can engineer an energising sense of common purpose through a feeling of shared threat from a hostile outside world.
Prof Ian Robertson is author of The Winner Effect: the science of success and how to use it; and How Confidence Works: the new science of self-belief
