Culture change within football: what needs to happen?
Culture change within football: what needs to happen?
'I had two priorities. One was to set the right culture in the club. The second was to establish that connection (with the fans). Without those two things, I don't think you can do anything sustainable.'
Mikel Arteta, speaking in the summer of 2021
Quotes from sporting documentaries are hardly in short supply, but if you’re looking for a soundbite that summarises the significance that culture should be afforded within football, look no further than the words Mikel Arteta uttered in Arsenal’s Amazon Prime series.
Some would say that it’s easy to throw around buzzwords, but Arteta wasn’t talking fuzzily about a ‘philosophy’. This was a killer sentence delivered with absolute clarity. The key to achieving anything of note in the long-term isn’t signing a £100m centre forward: it’s developing a culture and connecting with fans.
If that sounds obvious, listen to the latest round of Premier League press conferences and search for a vaguely comparable sentence. Yes, managers are nominally restricted to answering questions generally focused on short-term targets, but you won’t find many journalists or press officers who would stop a coach from repeating Arteta’s words.
The Spaniard is far from alone in his commitment to instilling cultural change, of course. Asked to comment on the ingredients of Sarina Wiegman’s success with the Lionesses, Kay Cossington, the FA's Head of Women’s Technical Development, highlighted “the empowerment of people and individuals, driving a culture which is about performing at your best, an environment where people can excel and are genuinely happy and want to be here.
“They want to play, they want to work and there is absolute clarity on what everyone’s roles are, what their jobs are on and off the pitch for staff and players.
"But really bringing that people element to it. This is about high performance and top-end sport, but it’s about doing it in the right way.”
Arteta and Cossignton’s statements beg the question: how do football clubs - or sports organisations of any description - stimulate cultural change?
It’s a theme examined in ‘Creating an environment for thriving: An ethnographic exploration of a British decentralised Olympic and Paralympic Sport Organisation’, a 16-month study authored by Michael Passaportis, Daniel Brown, Christopher Wagstaff, Rachel Arnold and Kate Hays.
Focusing on the rollout of a ‘cultural change strategy’ across one of the governing bodies responsible for overseeing British sports, the paper highlights three factors as pivotal in allowing individuals within an organisation to improve both their performance and wellbeing:
The coach-athlete relationship: again, although this seems like an obvious place to start, the research illustrates the importance of coaches appreciating individuals’ lives beyond the field of practice. According to at least one of the study’s interviewees, it’s only by understanding what ‘makes an athlete tick’ that a coach can really lay the groundwork for an open relationship and, in doing so, allow frank exchanges '(‘you are the reigning World Champion…I don’t care if it’s difficult, you’ve still got to try’) crucial to enhancing performance.
A cohesive team ethos: even within an individual sport, the paper highlights the role that teammates - who are witnessed sharing training tips, organising joint road trips and offering moral support - play in alleviating anxiety and increasing motivation.
Differentiated athlete support networks: the study shows that athletes enrolled in a ‘high performance programme’ benefitted from the presence of a ‘close support team’ (CST), comprised of at least one coach and one psychologist. The CSTs were able to detect subtle clues that might reveal an individual’s state-of-mind and account for an athlete’s individual preferences.
Whilst these measures may seem relatively simple for football clubs to implement in theory, it’s a different story in practice. Stories of coaches refusing to speak to injured players or preventing psychologists from speaking to emotionally vulnerable players are still commonplace. Until these issues are addressed, Arsenal, the Lionesses and other similarly forward-thinking teams will continue to be the exception, rather than the norm.
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What I’m Reading
Applying data to scouting: does it make a difference? (The Athletic, £)
Leadership lessons (interview with Sean Dyche) (Training Ground Guru)
Five things I've learned from being a sports psychologist (Medium)
How do F1 teams communicate effectively (Twitter)
Do players own their data? (The Guardian)
Number of the week
12.5%
Rise in nationally registered female football players in England (from September to December 2022, following Euro 2022)
Quote of the week
I had a good chat with a few players….not in an office kind of chat but speaking to them generally about their careers, life, how they're feeling. I always think if you affect their lives you'll affect their performance.
Sean Dyche, Everton manager
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