A confession
The sport of the future and its training
A couple of months ago, I saw the sport of the future. It happened in a single sequence of a basketball game: a three-point shot fake by Oriol Paulí that sent two Barça defenders flying through the air. While his opponents were still suspended in mid-air, he bounced the ball, drove past them and ended up scoring much closer to the rim in a way nobody expected.
Movement is a language, whether you understand it or not. It usually emits no sound waves, but it says a great deal. Paulí’s movement did not speak verbally but motorically, telling the defenders: “Look at this three I am about to make right in your face!” However, the bastard’s movement —incredibly clever— did not let them know that he would exploit their understanding of the language once they jumped into the air, disappointed, believing they were blocking the shot. Instinctively, Oriol Paulí put the ball on the floor to finish with a lay-up just millimeters from the basket. I believe that creating an effective style of play —whether we are talking about a player or a team— is exactly this: creating a unique language of movement that your teammates understand but your opponents do not. “You want your enemies to be maximally predictable to you; you want to be maximally unpredictable to to your enemies”, says Taleb. Guardiola’s Barça showed us this, as a team, I think.
What did Antonín Panenka say to the rival goalkeeper, Maier, before taking the penalty kick that would become a historical revolution? Ted Kroeten deciphered it: his body, without making a sound, screamed powerfully: “I am about to blast this ball as hard as I can to your right.” Maier understood the language but not the intention and dove to the side. Antonín Panenka chipped the ball, very subtly, down the center of the goal. Motorically, Antonín formulated a sentence that Maier, fluent in the same grammar, had no choice but to understand.
Paulí and Antonín communicate with teammates and rivals, but also with us, the observers. To me, Paulí clearly communicated how to prepare for the sport of the future. How to face a landscape that seems destined to be ruled by Big Data, video over-analysis, an ocean of information, AI and GPS. A paradigm characterized by innovation —which is not synonymous with technology: a pen and paper in the hands of a genius mind can be more technological than any incomplete data collection interpreted by a mediocre mindset. Innovation is not always synonymous with technology: it only becomes so if it empowers us to solve problems, modify our environment or make our professional lives easier.
During World War II, the US military wanted to armor their planes so they would not get shot down so often. They analyzed the bullet holes on the bombers that returned. They were on the wings, the fuselage and the tail. While everyone wanted to reinforce those areas, Abraham Wald decided to reinforce all the others: the key was to pay attention to the planes that did not return and, therefore, reinforce the engines and the cockpit. Oriol Paulí was telling me that we must follow Wald’s lessons: fostering everything that professionals on the outside of the sideline —rather than the inside— cannot control, yet insist on trying to. Paying attention to everything that slips through the innovative —which does not mean effective— ”tools” ruling today’s training world. Because that is where and when the interesting things happen. Uncapturable. Unanalyzable. And above all:
Unpredictable.
This, Paulí told me, was the path we had to take with sports: moving from “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it” to “if you can’t measure it, you must exploit it”. More about feeling and attuning than measuring and memorizing; more about breaking the logic of the moment than perfecting game systems down to the smallest possible detail. Fernando Diniz understood this long before I did. He was kind enough to share it:
“I highly respect physiological data, but the player is not just a bunch of bones and muscles. There are other things that are often even more important. The way the players connect, the willingness to play, the moment they are living through. Low performance has a biological component, but it has other components that are deeply neglected because they are not quantified. People have no way of measuring fear, courage, joy or enthusiasm. These things cannot be measured. And honestly, these things interest me the most. If you manage to get close and do these things right —connecting with the players by asking, living together, stimulating and respecting them— I believe that football and life are more about feeling than measuring. And I always shape my work that way: never disregarding what biology shows, but integrating other components to make the best decisions.”
As a coach, I do not want to fall into the comfort —a familiar trap— of knowing my team’s behavior beforehand. I am interested in not killing my players’ capacity to do things I could never dictate or command, but which benefit us, the team, enormously: knowing when to fake a shot to draw two defenders and free a teammate; breaking the team’s help defense rules for the sake of collective effectiveness; making the antonymous pass to the one the defense anticipated; trapping a rival attacker in an unexpected moment and zone; playing a pre-written micro-pattern without letting it play us; denying the extra-pass to the 45-degree angle by leaving the corner receiver open to force the “bad shooter” to shoot; jumping to simulate a shot, drawing all the defensive attention, while keeping a teammate near the basket awake, knowing they will receive an unforeseen pass that disrupts the defense but not your teammates; turning a numerical defensive disadvantage into a socio-affective superiority... playing with the rival’s intentions, subordinating them to our own.
And so much more that I cannot even imagine, anticipate or foresee. Behaviors that I doubt any data, AI, scouting, video or Excel sheet can optimize. The first step to coaching them is often to become more humble as a coach: letting them emerge, not obstructing them with the need to control. Worrying about not ruining it. Keeping quiet —because, usually, we talk more than we should. Emphasizing it, valuing it and recognizing it when it happens. Letting the sport belong to the teams —players included— and not exclusively to the coach. This often means letting them play and holding back the constant urge to optimize through direct intervention.
And no: this does not mean the coach has no voice or vote. That they must remain silent. That they cannot give any orders. No. They can instruct, punish, break the blackboard or slam the water bottles on the floor at halftime. They can speak, interact, ask. They can intervene and, even more importantly, they can deliberately decide not to intervene. It means that everything they do or leave undone —both actions being equally relevant— must be subordinated to the desire to create this common language that respects everyone’s individual expressions, while forcing them, of course, to be comprehensible to all. To be diversely effective as a collective and unpredictable to the opponent. They can prescribe plays or closed movements, establish structures... but these should not stem from a desire of “let’s have every solution to every situation prepared and perfected”, but rather “let’s have alternative ways of communicating that allow us to be more effective”, to generate uncertainty and unpredictability. The construction of these plays and structures must not be unidirectional —from coach to players— but bidirectional —both roles feeding into each other. Coaches constrain players and players constrain coaches. “We will establish this structure not so that our ways of solving problems or achieving game objectives converge here... but to use this structure to diverge in how we are effective.” Let them fly; do not clip their wings. Now, if everyone flies off on their own... then, like a craftsman, you will need to intervene to coordinate the collective.
Paulí, faking the three-pointer —just like Panenka or Guardiola’s Barça— knew that the rival knew: when he made the Barça defenders believe they had cracked his playing pattern, he transformed that false security, plunging them into absolute entropy. That is the thing about geniuses: they use their integrative information —their order— to generate an entropy —a disorder— so massive that it renders the opponent’s behavior dysfunctional. “There is great disorder under heaven; the situation is excellent”, as Mao Zedong said. Something so powerful. Something no coach —nor any of the tools accompanying them— can dictate or control. This possibility of speaking a common language that makes us effective as a team while making the opponent dysfunctional.
This fascinating element is often at risk of being murdered by today’s ultimate coaching modus operandi. By executives who leave no room for a coaching staff to work, fail, learn and succeed. By a way of doing things built on the premise that the coach must do whatever it takes never to lose absolute control —or the illusion of it. And to achieve this, if they feel they need it, they rely on Big Data, video analysis of as many games as possible, maximum available information, AI and GPS. This is why Paulí’s action spoke so loudly to me: because it could not be understood, controlled or anticipated by this current trend —I would describe it as iatrogenic. By subjugating all these tools —interesting if used well— to such poor, mediocre beliefs, the coach —and often the team they influence— becomes the defenders jumping at Paulí’s fake: comfortable in a certainty that is false because, in reality, they are being manipulated by the immense complexity of the game and by a rival who, because they know you know... is capable of making you dysfunctional. Enzo Maresca analyzed 9 games of Sunderland playing with a back four. He “prepared” the match against them assuming he would face that. Before heading out to play them, however, in the locker room, he announced to his Chelsea players that all the preparation for the match was going into the trash. Sunderland was lining up with a back five.
All this paraphernalia kills the unpredictability that allows us to successfully surprise rivals who think they have us trapped: the coach will know the range of possibilities their team has, while probably making it easily recognizable to the opponent too. The security the coach seeks can be their own downfall. It would be interesting if rivals could not find effective solutions by analyzing a video or looking at an Excel sheet, but if the coach wants everything to originate from them... they make the opponent’s job easy. The coach will know the behavior and so will the rival.
I, however, am interested in the rival not knowing and sometimes the price to pay is a minimal loss of comfort —or certainties. By reducing entropy —the measure of disorder— the coach loses more than they gain: they destroy their own functional entropy —unpredictability— creating an ordered —so, predictable— collective behavior. Punsí says that “an excess of order in an organism is a worrying sign”. This predictability will be used by rivals to generate entropy, disrupting them, making the team more dysfunctional. Data, like the coach’s role, is essential to reduce noise and know the context and it would be useless not to use it nowadays: but the game is mastered by managing an uncertain order in the moment, not by imprisoning it in a computer or in the dictates of a single person.
That is why we must escape. Run in the opposite direction of this need for control. Let things happen that we do not know. To me, it seems more interesting sometimes not to understand —or control— what the players do well, as long as the rivals do not understand it either. “What is not intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent”, as Nietzsche said. Otherwise, the predictability emerging from the pursuit of comfort will be your defeat.
Oriol Paulí was telling me that the sport of the future will not come from refining current training methods that control the team’s game, analyzing the opponent down to the smallest detail as if we were Formula 1 engineers... but from everything that escapes this way of doing things. Because, as Oren Harari said: “The electric light did not come from the continuous improvement of candles.” The next level, the game of the future, will emerge from a paradigm shift, not from a refinement or hyper-optimization of the current one. From questioning. From conceiving things differently... and better.
Oriol told me that the plan should not be certainty, but adaptation to uncertainty. And to trust, trying not to inhibit, what emerges effectively yet unknowingly from the depths of the player. What cannot be foreseen or dictated. And celebrating that the more diversely functional it is, the better. To never stop surprising. Because the richer the expressions of each player and the ways of combining them, the more powerful the language we share as a team will be —a language the rival will never be able to understand. A language in which we all understand each other, even if everyone expresses it true to the person they are. Where when two people speak it, unique individual forms emerge, different from when other players speak it... but understood by everyone.
To prepare for the future, however, I like to look at the past: the Lindy effect suggests that the longer a non-perishable idea, technology or practice has survived, the more likely it is to remain useful in the future. To understand what the future will look like, we do not need to dream in a laboratory; we need to look at what humans were doing thousands of years ago, because they will probably keep doing it. Whatever is most adaptable persists —whether we have an explanation for it or not: the wheel, fasting or gold as a store of value, for example.
The same goes for sports: only time will tell if today’s inventions are a historical revolution or a passing fad. This does not mean that what we create now is not useful or can’t survive. We simply cannot know. I do not reject innovation. I analyze it with caution and try to ensure that fascination does not bias my reasoning. Lindy, like Oriol Paulí, tells me what will remain present and necessary in the training of the future.
I face a harsh reality: the figure of the coach —as we understand it today— has existed for much less time than most sports. The sport is more essential than the coach —and let’s not even mention the strength and conditioning coach, the video analyst or the data scientist and AI.
Looking back, I find sport practiced as informal play and I do not see much organized training. I see game contexts that are not imposed or managed by an adult, but by motivated players who self-organize while feeling an emotion that is hard to put into words. I find this game and this decision to play it. Not the imposition of tasks that often kill this intrinsic, addictive emotion players feel; I do not see soulless cattle grazing, motorically reproducing a game plan. Going even further back, I see how play has allowed every mammal to practice crucial skills without the deadly consequences of reality. Beings playing in a safe environment, simulating reality and learning to cooperate, compete and survive. A game that generated adaptations that never occurred from the top-down —from expert to ignorant— but among equals —among intelligent people learning. A game that constantly posed exciting challenges to players, which they solved creatively. One that generated a functional diversity of responses to unexpected events in which they experience a sudden loss of control. Homo sapiens experiencing a discovery, intra- and interpersonal, of their own personal methods for coping with different kinds of unexpected misfortunes.
Yes: I look at sport, I look back and I find that the street is much more Lindy than any playbook, game model or training methodology. I think we are mistaken in replacing the game, the spirit of the street —thousands of years old— with hyper-structured training —a few days old. Lindy, without making a sound, tells me that, probably, if we do not change things and become revolutionaries, the sport will also outlive us, the coaches.
In that past where I see no coaches, however, I do observe the presence of leaders. Even if there was no coach, I believe that in societies —such as a team— there has always been a guardian of the collective purpose: in football, before the figure of the manager emerged, for instance, the captain took charge of it. Someone who shows the way, who creates meaning for the effort, who does not pull or push but makes the group want to walk. Someone who elevates bodies, not cuts off heads. Who does not put the players at the service of the coach, but rather, among equals, putting all the components of the team —coach and staff included— at the service of collective effectiveness. This is why I think we must seek to create this language and, should we want to use Big Data, video over-analysis, over-information, AI and GPS... subordinate them to this intention. I do not criticize structure while embracing freedom. They are not antonyms. I seek a structure that enables new freedoms. I do not reject innovation; I detest subordinating ourselves to it instead of using it to our advantage.
Forgive me, for perhaps my hearing is not very sharp. It would be no surprise if I were wrong. Paulí’s action —advised by Lindy— tells me how we can do a job that favors the longevity of the coach’s figure: creating conditions so that behaviors we cannot imagine can emerge. There is no need to solely pursue having players execute what had been prepared, dictated and imagined. We must look for what will allow us to do things together that we could never have planned, foreseen or anticipated.
The coach must keep intervening. But not necessarily from the logic of control: rather by creating meaning as a leader, being more humble and a protagonist in the shadow; intervening less to prescribe and more to create conditions. Let us not impede, let us preserve and, if we can, amplify what today’s “tools” cannot foresee. Let us not disrupt what the intelligence of our people has not yet revealed it is capable of creating. In the pursuit of effectiveness, let’s take advantage of everything we did not expect to find. Let’s not avoid the uncertainty of the game; let’s exploit it. It is then, I think, that the figure of the coach, even if less long-lived than the game, can become revolutionary: the Paulís who send opponents flying will appear thanks to our intervention, not despite it.
Martí Cañellas | Fosbury Flop
