Whilst a coach has to be curious if he really wants to develop, there is another side of the equation which is a coach’s ability to fuel curiosity in others. As any parent will confirm, children are full of questions (it has been estimated that between the ages of two and five, children ask around 40,000 questions) which seem to multiply the moment that you answer any one of them. This is a natural element of their growth process and it is through this process that they learn about the world around them.
Children should be asking questions not least because it is a sign that they are actually learning to the extent that they will remember it later on. As Ian Leslie writes in his book Curious, “when people learn something rapidly they often learn it superficially; that is, they are more liable to forget in the long term.” How the adults around those children respond to their questioning has a direct impact. Someone whose questions are answered will learn and think up of additional questions that will eventually lead to them making mental links with other subjects. By answering such questions, one is essentially fueling their cognitive abilities. On the other hand, if those questions go unanswered, then the child quickly learns that it is useless asking questions and stops doing so. Sadly, that will be the only lesson that they learn. It is easy, then, to see why it is important for coaches to absorb this information. Sadly some coaches regard questions as a threat to their authority when in truth they should be encouraging them. In today’s game, one of the most important attributes of a player is their intelligence; how they react to different situations and their ability to read how the game is flowing. For some, this ability comes naturally – just as some have a natural aptitude for certain academic topics like maths or languages – but that does not mean that the rest cannot learn. Indeed, that is where a good coach becomes vitally important because they are the ones
who realise that their responsibility lies beyond teaching players how to carry out specific skills but in fueling in them the desire to learn more about the game. These are the coaches who will challenge their players on why they made certain decisions during a game and who will be ready to answer any resulting questions. It will make them better players and, by being willing to answer questions, help to motivate them which is a handy by-product of the players knowing why they are doing things. It is through this process of probing the players into thinking and asking questions about the game that coaches can help their players gain a level of insight that would have otherwise been impossible for them to achieve. This is not exactly a novel idea. One of the maxims that underpins Ajax’s (as well as most of Dutch football) development program is that of getting players to fill in at various roles rather than pigeonholing them into a fixed one. The logic behind this is that such a move allows the players to gain a different perspective. A midfielder might get to understand why a striker might want a ball to be delivered early or why they can’t make certain runs. In other words, it places in front of them a completely new way of viewing the game and urges them to start asking what they need to do differently to solve whatever new problems they’re faced with. It is, essentially, a way of feeding players’ curiosity and making it an inherent trait of their academy. It challenges them to look beyond the boundaries of ‘their’ role and gets them to think how each action fits into the overall tactics; and how differing tactics require different things from them.
There is proof of this. In 1946, a Dutch psychologist by the name of Adrian de Groot studied chess grandmasters and amateur players. What he found is that masters have stored in memory more positions than amateurs meaning that they can instinctively recognise the patterns emerging from their opponents play. This gives them a huge advantage because they have more time to think about what their own next step should be. Unlikely as this might initially seem, there is a direct link with football. The talent that we most admire in the greatest midfielders – Xavi or Pirlo, for instance – is their ability to ‘read’ what is happening around them. Despite the incessant pace at which modern football is played, they somehow always seem to find the time to pick the right pass. In an interview that Blueprint for Football had done with Geir Jordet, professor at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, he spoke of players’ perception and their ability to visually examine what is happening around them. Through his research Jordet shows that a player’s ability to ‘know’ where others are on the pitch is neither accidental nor solely the function of his skill. Instead, it is all down to how much he looks at what is happening around him before he gets the ball. “What I've done,” he said, “which I don't think many people have done, is to actually go in and analyse exactly what happens with some of the best players in the world in the seconds before they get the ball. And there is so much activity going on.” “There is so much looking, there is so much searching and there is so much exploration. That is why I find the players who explore the most actively in that period before they get the ball they also perform better when they get the ball. I think that there is a need to focus a bit more on that side of the game then what people usually do.” Therefore, whilst master chess players can look at a chess board and immediately recognise what play each player is trying to execute, the best midfield players can take a look around them to realise what is going to happen. Neither level of expertise comes about through incident or, much less, is through an innate ability. Instead it comes about through specific training and their desire to question what happens after each play. Indeed, Jordet recommended specific exercises to help players achieve such perception most of which include placing the players in situations where they have to ask themselves what those around them are doing. In other works, it involves getting them curious about what others are doing and how their roles fit into what is happening.
This article was largely inspired by Ian Leslie’s book ‘Curious’ and by discussions with the author himself who kindly agreed to be a beta-reader. A first part of this article will focus on the need for coaches to foster their own curiosity. For full disclosure purposes it is noted that a copy of Curious was provided by the books’ publisher. Also, a small fraction of any book purchased by following the links in this piece make their way back to Blueprint for Football.
In his own inimitable (and, occasionally, slightly obnoxious) way, the Dutch fitness coach Raymond Verheijen likes to label coaches who have not adopted more modern ways of training as dinosaurs; creatures from a bygone era where the physical demands on players were less taxing and whose coaching has not evolved to handle a game that requires a more enlightened approach. It is very much a blunt statement that is at least in part made to generate publicity and get people talking about his own theories for the physical conditioning of players. Yet, undeniably, there is also an element of truth to it.
Football is a highly conservative game – just look at the continued resistance to the introduction of video technology to aid referees - and so it is hardly surprising that those who work in it tend to be conservative as well. None more so than experienced managers who hold on to ingrained opinions on how to achieve success and who refuse to look at ideas that challenge those opinions. It is for this reason that there are managers who still do not fully trust the benefits of a healthy nutrition regime, of proper training or of the use of statistics to help shape tactics. They believe only in what has worked for them in the past and only obvious success elsewhere can get them to consider anything that differs from that. There is little doubt that the majority of these managers possess a huge wealth of knowledge about the game of football. Most of them have spent their whole adult life working within the game and in all probability know little else apart from football. And therein lies the problem; there is a point at which the laser focus on the game at the exclusion of everything else hinders rather than helps. Their lack of curiosity about anything other than football leaves them with a poor frame of reference with which to look at any new idea that they come across. Or, to put it another way, they aren’t equipped to absorb and learn new ideas. “As we grow older we tend to become less active explorers of our mental environment, relying on what we’ve learned so far to see us through the rest of the journey.” So writes Ian Leslie in Curious, a book that deals about curiosity and the role this plays in our lives. “If you allow yourself to become incurious, your life will be drained of colour, interest and pleasure. You will be less likely to achieve your potential.” Sound familiar? It should especially if you’ve heard ‘traditional’ managers talk dismissively about the value of statistics in football or negatively on the notion of rotation in managing the squad’s fitness levels. Curious for Curiousity’s Sake? That is not to argue that coaches should be curious for curiosity’s sake. Indeed that kind of curiosity – diversive curiosity – often results in wasted effort. What people should be trying to foster is what Leslie terms as epistemic curiosity, which is a more structured and deeper form of curiosity that can ignite the desire to learn and attempt to do things that one would not normally consider. For coaches, such curiosity is vital if they want to grow and innovate. Yet identifying what they should be curious about is a bit difficult. The truth is that we never know what knowledge might come in useful in the future; what might help one make connections that others aren’t able to see. Whilst I’m not overly fond of examples that are based on Steve Jobs – there is a great deal of revisionism whenever he is put forward as a test case - this point is best explained by one element of his success at Apple. Despite having dropped out of Reed College, Jobs still took a class in calligraphy which had nothing to do with what he had been studying or was planning to work at: he undertook those lessons because it was a subject that intrigued him. Undoubtedly for many that would be considered a frivolous waste of time that should have been spent working on something that might have directly impacted his future. Yet, years later, when he was part of the team developing the first Mac those apparently frivolous lessons kicked in to help him come up with the idea of having different typefaces and fonts. It was a minor innovation but it revolutionised the world of personal computing and beyond. As Leslie puts it, “the more we know, the better we are at thinking”. Broader View Does this mean that football coaches should be taking random courses in the hope that something that they come across there might come in useful in the future? Of course not. Yet there is much that coaches can learn by being curious at what is happening in other sport, to come up with one obvious example. There is much to admire and think about if you spend some time looking at the ideas that underpin the success of the All Black rugby side, for instance. Or by examining the path that Sir Clive Woodward took to leading England to winning the World Cup. And that is only rugby. The same can be said of other team sports like basketball or hockey. Even individual sports like cycling and rowing have a richness of information and ideas. Seeing what these do probably won’t provide immediate answers by they act as a fertiliser for the brain so that when you come across a challenge it will be primed to look beyond the boundaries of football for possible solutions. Will all that can be found in such examinations be immediately useful for coaches? Probably not, but they will sow seeds that will blossom when their time comes. Steve Johnson, author of “Where Ideas Come From” calls this the slow hunch. “Rather than coming out of the blue, we believe that the best ideas are the result of hours, days, sometimes even years, of digging into a subject and pursuing the hunches that slowly emerge as a result,” he says. “Instead of focusing on the creation of ideas and trying to force them into being, one is better off focusing on understanding the relevant phenomenon in depth. Then it simply becomes a matter of being open to the ideas when they show up – be it in casual conversation, intense data crunching or, as sometimes in Mozart’s case, on a sleepless night.” Collaborate The great thing, of course, is that today it is easier than ever before to get such information.
Thanks to the internet there is a treasure trove of information that is easily accessible and available to everyone. It doesn’t beat actually talking to individuals and learning from them or seeing them execute their strategies, but it is undoubtedly a great start. And, indeed, if you want to make those individual connections the internet facilitates matters more than ever before. Twitter, for instance, can be powerful tool for football coaches. Through it they can make connections like never before and talk to fellow coaches who have different experiences to them. This is a kind of curiosity that Leslie identified in Leondardo da Vinci, one of the greatest thinkers in the history of mankind, who was a very social person talking to other experts to learn off them. “People who are deeply curious are more likely to be good at collaboration,” Leslie writes. “They seek new acquaintances and allies in the process of building their stock of cultural knowledge.” But it isn’t just renaissance Italian thinkers who acted in this manner. Look at most of the top managers in the history of the game – particularly over the past three decades – and you will find that they spent some time travelling to see how top teams prepare. Many will tell you that this was a valuable part of their education, as it provided them with insights and ideas that they would eventually use to develop their own philosophy. The willingness to make such trips – or at least a determined and sustained desire to see what is happening elsewhere - is vital. When we think of great people, those who have made the biggest breakthroughs in science, we immediately assumed that what made them different is their intelligence. That, however, is partly correct. Because, whilst intelligence does play a vital role it is not an exclusive factor.
Indeed, there have undoubtedly been more intelligent people who haven’t managed to make such contributions. A hungry mind, one which eagerly looks for information, is vital. This was determined by Sophie von Stumm, a lecturer in psychology at Goldsmitshs University, who through a series of studies, proved that intellectual curiosity – “the tendency to seek out, engage in and pursue opportunities for effortful cognitive activity” – is as important as intelligence. And if Pep Guardiola felt that he needed to see how Marcelo Bielsa worked before launching his own project at Barcelona, why should anyone else hold back from fostering and expressing such curiosity? This article was largely inspired by Ian Leslie’s book ‘Curious’ and by discussions with the author himself who kindly agreed to be a beta-reader. A second part of this article will focus on the need for coaches to foster curiosity among their players. For full disclosure purposes it is noted that a copy of Curious was provided by the books’ publisher. Also, a small fraction of any book purchased by following the links in this piece make their way back to Blueprint for Football.
