The science of football - part 2

You can read The science of football- part 1 here

So moving on from the king of mistakes , let’s talk about another factor that affects game performance. We have all heard a common line used by almost every commentator to describe a performance glittered with mistakes by an exceptional footballer. “He’s having an off day. There is no way he would perform like this on another day. ” Since I have asked quite a few questions already, here’s another one. What exactly is an off day and what are the chances of a player who performed badly to play well the next time and sustain the credibility of his ability?

England players after another penalty shootout loss

Players at the top of the world game today have approximately two seconds on the ball to make a decision before they are challenged. 2 seconds to take a shot or 2 seconds to pick out a pass or 2 seconds to dribble out of danger and give themselves 2 more seconds until they’re challenged again. Now football is a really fast game. So fast that its increasingly becoming very clear that their brain works faster than their feet for a majority of players. Brain science has discovered that the brain makes sure people feel emotions 200 milliseconds after an event happens, and think consciously 500 milliseconds later.

Now that doesn’t really connect with the point I’m trying to make but could footballers perform badly if they aren’t emotionally ready? Emotionally in the sense that they aren’t ready mentally to go out there and put what they learnt in training to practice in a real game.

This can be subdivided into various factors, the biggest and most popular one being, motivation. Motivation can do wonders, we all know it. A fully motivated Sunday League player is said to get the better of a top-flight European player on his day. The subject I want to touch though is, who is more motivated? The older and more professional ones or the young aspiring ones who are still finding their feet?

Motivation trumps talent. This is one line clearly etched in my mind since the day Adi Viveash, the current manager of the Chelsea youth team said a couple of years back. In modern football, it is quite rare to see every club putting up players in the team-sheet that have graduated or come through their own youth academy. Any youth player you would talk to today will tell you that if he shows enough hunger, motivation and talent, he will have a fighting chance to replace the current experienced player in the main squad.

Now this is a scenario of young players in clubs not associated with the big team’s of Europe, who prefer quick fixes to long term plans. There are the Uniteds, Arsenals, Dortmunds, but the scenario of young football players coming through a huge team is quite rare.

Nicky Butt was one of the lesser known players belonging to the Class of 92 who took British football by storm. He was kept away from the FA Cup final team-sheet in United’s historic 1998-99 season and Butt was distraught. He did not know how to pick himself up after it as all the other players took part in it with Paul Scholes scoring a goal. However in the semi-final of the Champions League that season, Paul Scholes picked up a yellow card which would rule him out from the final. United went on to win it, but Sir Alex Ferguson had problems. United’s hope rested on the only recognized central midfielder in the squad, Nicky Butt.

“The manager came up to him and told him, forget the FA Cup final, you’re playing in the Champions League final” was what Ryan Giggs had to say about the incident. Butt finally realized that at the end of the road, his reward was going to be massive. He picked himself up and put in a really good match which saw United lift the cup, do a historic treble after an infamous comeback. There was no better way for Nicky Butt to realize that perseverance paid dividends.

Nicky Butt distinguished himself in the 1998-99 season

This is just an example about how a young player who had his dreams crushed one day only to be resurrected the next, motivated himself to be part of history. But now, back to our question. Who is more motivated or easily affected by words? Was it Roy Keane who missed the final via injury or Nicky Butt who tasted European success?

Shojaei Masoumeh and Hoji Ghasem Amir from Al-Zahra University in Iran contributed to the Journal of Sports Science and Medicine. The edition came out in 2007 in which they both had a section labelled, ” Psychology Applied To Football Games ” . Their aim was to find out motivational traits of randomly selected Iranian elite soccer players from different age groups. Before explaining the result, we must talk about the method used.

61 soccer players of senior, U-19 and U-23 national teams were selected. They used the Sports Attitude Inventory to collect data. Now the Sports Attitude or Performance Inventory is a study that develops a comprehensive athlete attitudinal survey consisting of sport-related attitude items with six factors, competitiveness, team orientation, mental toughness, emotional control, positive attitude, safety consciousness. I’m not able to show the exact way the data is collected or recorded, but the result is readily available.

On the basis of results, the elite players’ motivation to achieve success (70.5) was twice as much their motivation to avoid failure (34.6). So if you were to tell those senior players to come out of a match with a win, they were twice as much likely to be able to achieve that when told to avoid losing a match. Funny how a difference in few words could cause such a difference. Moreover, senior national team players (149.2) and midfielders (147.2) had more competitive motivation than other players.

So if you were a senior player you put on more of a fight than the younger ones when playing in a top game, which is quite understandable. The ending line says that the fact that the older players of the senior national team scored higher than younger players on motivation to avoid failure indicated that the senior players were more motivated when told by the coaches to achieve a certain goal.

We get a vague picture that the senior players seem to react more to words and are more motivated to accomplish something. We now move almost 3,000 miles away from Iran, where we have Marijana Mladenovic and Aleksandar Marjanovic from the College of Sports & Health, Belgrade, Serbia. They did a study on differences in sports motivation of young football players from Russia, Serbia and Montenegro. They used what is called as the Sport Motivation Scale which was made in 1995 by Pelleiter, Fortier, Vallerand, Briere, Tuson, and Blais coupled with t-test, multivariate analysis of variance and analysis of variance. Now I won’t be going deep into it, as it was mind-boggling enough for me, but we have a look at the subjects they used.

The research included 178 young football players aged 12 to 15. Their research goes into quite some detail, but in the conclusion part, one line clearly stands out. The twelve-year-old football players were significantly more demotivated than their peers aged 13, 14 and 15. Demotivated, as in they no longer have the inspiration to be a part of an event that involves social interaction. Now there were various factors as to why this had happened for which a further study would have to take place.

Another interesting point was that young football players from Serbia and Montenegro were found to be considerably more motivated than their Russian peers by the intrinsic desire to achieve their sports competence. The study indicates that being from a different region does in fact mean that you could be significantly less or more motivated from a person belonging to another part of the globe.

Football as we know it is an open book filled with tiny annotations that we as fans have no idea about. The more we think we know, the less we actually do.