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There are two kinds of feedback. Process feedback where the current process returns to a previous step and behavioral change feedback. Both kinds of feedback are important to football, although feedback as a way of changing behavior is the most well known within football.

Feedback has first been introduced in cybernetics in forties. Any system that can be described by the cybernetic cycle, can be considered a cybernetic system. This goes for both man and machine. The cybernetic cycle has six steps to it:

1. Select a goal.
2. Select an action to achieve this goal.
3. Execute the selected action.
4. Interpret the results of the executed action.
5. Compare the interpreted result with the selected goal.
6. If the selected goal is achieved or achieving this goal takes too much time, go back to step 1. Otherwise, go back to step 2.

First note that both an individual football player and a whole football team are cybernetic systems. For instance, player A wants to pass the ball to player B. This is his selected goal. He selects an action in the form of a combination of him running and dribbling with the ball at a certain speed in a certain direction towards a certain space because the passing line to player B is closed off by an opposing player. If player A succeeds to open a passing line he then passes the ball to player B. If the ball is received by player B the goal of player A has been reached and player A selects a new goal, for instance to run forward to give player B an opportunity to pass back to player B. If player A then sees that player B loses the ball, his goal becomes unachievable so he selects a new goal of defending against an attack.

To be clear, step 6 is alway process feedback.

Any cybernetic system can be combined with any other cybernetic system to create a new single cybernetic system. So two players of the same team can be considered two separate cybernetic systems or a single system. The same goes for all eleven players of the team. As a team you select as your goals to play in a certain formation so you can attack and defend as planned and hopefully score more goals than the opponent.

Every time you go back to either selecting a new goal or a new action that is called process feedback. As long as you keep selecting a (slightly) different action if you haven’t achieved your goal then you will become good at anything you do. Your brain is a cybernetic system as well and this is how your brain learns and becomes good at doing stuff, including football.

Feedback as a way to change behavior

The second kind of feedback is behavioral change feedback. Here someone tells you something in the hope that you will change your behavior. In principle behavioral change feedback is a special form of process feedback. The person giving you feedback, probably does so because he thinks that you did not achieve your goal. In fact, almost all processes are improved if process feedback is always combined with behavioral change feedback because it is one thing to know that you did not achieve your goal and you need to select a new action, it is much better if someone or something (a data analysis for instance) tells you how you can improve.

Behavioral change feedback is only feedback if the message actually includes information about how to change your behavior and the message is about how your behavior did not result in achieving your goal. Any information about who you are and why who you are prevents you from achieving your goals is not feedback because you can not change who you are, you can only change how you behave. At best such messages are irrelevant, at worst they are insulting.

In almost all cases there is no point in yelling, calling people names or come across as very aggressive. Applied behavioral analysis has shown that if people do undesired behaviors, the best thing to do is to ignore it. Most of the time the undesired behavior will decrease and even disappear. The only exception is that there is a rare personality type that prefers to be ignored. Instrumental learning tells us that if being ignored is a reward, ignoring undesired behaviors actually increase. But again, this is only the case in one in ten football players you work with.

Ignoring undesired behaviors is different from correcting mistakes. If people make mistakes, then behavioral change feedback is in order. It is best to tell the person as soon as possible after having made the mistake, how he could improve his behavior. Preferably in private. Make sure that you do not prioritize to correct small mistakes over celebrating what your player did right. If he did eight things right, first celebrate his accomplishments, praise him for the effort that enable him to achieve these accomplishments and compliment him in general. In general, you want to celebrate in public with the whole team. To prevent picking winners and losers in the team, it is often best to praise the success of the team and compliment the effort they have put into whatever it is that they did right. Then critique individual mistakes hours or even a day later in private.

Also, make sure that you don’t mix compliments and praise with behavioral change feedback. Instrumental learning teaches us that whatever your player has done just before you give behavioral change feed is going to decrease. That is exactly what you want if your player has made a mistake. That is how he is able to change his behavior. But if the player has just done something right, then you run the risk that your behavioral change feedback rather than decrease the mistakes, actually decreases desired behaviors. Just be sure at all times about what you’re doing: if you are giving a negative message because someone has made a mistake, make sure you don’t mix in compliments and praise. And if you are giving a positive message, make sure that you don’t do that just after a player has behaved in an undesired way.

To be blunt: formations do not exist. Why would formations not exist? Everyone is using the concept of formations in football. So at least formations seems to exist. And in a simple way formations do exist. Formations exist as a word, a term used in football and as a concept. But concepts are abstractions. Concepts do not have a physical existence in the way the pitch, goal poles and the ball exist.

Given that formation is a concept, you cannot see formations. Again, this goes against what most people think, because we football analysis many a time we see a picture of a formation. Here is an example

(Source)

The picture above seems to clearly show a 4-5-1 formation. But in fact that is not what we see. In fact the analyst has drawn extra lines to help us “see” the formation. What we really see are eleven Liverpool players at a certain position at a certain time. The source, The Coaches’ Voice, explains that Liverpool switches to this 4-5-1 formation when defending, because the manager wants to strengthen the midfield.

All of that sounds reasonable. Nevertheless, we only see eleven players at a certain position on the pitch and then we apply our concept of formation to this picture and use that concept to explain what we are seeing. The concern is that while people consciously understand that concepts are abstraction, in most cases their unconscious mind treats them as real existing things.

One might argue that this is sophistry. That it really doesn’t matter whether a formation is only a concept if it correlates so well what we are seeing. But things get murkier once you realize that we don’t see a football match as a still picture. Yes, we see the above still picture, but in reality we constantly see players moving around the pitch. So, unless one measures what percentage of the time players were at these positions on the field, a still picture can be quite misleading. In theory this could have been the only time when these players were all at the same time at these locations. In fact, it is highly likely that this was the only time, because it is much more likely that at any other moment during the match at least one of these eleven players was somewhere else. So while the picture seems to show a clear formation, in reality the correlation between players positions and formations is way lower than the picture suggests. Some people suggest that a formation shows where players are most of the time. Heatmaps clearly dispell this idea. Centerbacks might be the most static players in the game besides the keeper, but even centerbacks move around a lot. Wingbacks are probably the least amount of time at their position according to the formation. It is already much better to say that a formation helps players to know where they have to be relatively to other players, but even that idea does not correlate well with the static picture a formation suggests.

Football is a very dynamic game and formations are quite a static way of describing football. That is the reason why analysts start to talk more and more about switching formations. Again, although it seems that being able to spot when a team switches a formation, enables one to better understand football, in reality one might be fooled by confusing abstract concepts with real existence. The more formation switches that you see, the less likely it is that these formations are real. If an analyst thinks he has spotted the team using twenty different formations during a match, he is probably counting too many positions of players as a formation, where in reality the players ended up in these positions by happenstance.

Looking at average player position, you can see that it becomes a lot less clear:

(Source)

Formations as a training heuristic

My point about formations not having a real existence, should not be taken that we should stop using the concept of formations. If a concept is practical to use, by all means use it as long as you understand that there is difference between an abstract concept and the matter what this concept is about.

Formations is a concept that is well used as a training heuristic. Getting players to understand what the manager wants. To get a player to be at the right position at the right time is a difficult job. Formations are very helpful to train players so they know where to be and where to go at what speed and direction during the match. The concept of formations is also very handy to explain to players what they can expect and what to watch out for when it comes to behavior of the opponent.

It is perfectly okay when analyzing a match to state which formation(s) the manager planned to use. This would be a less precise way of saying that the analyst finds it likely that the manager used the concept of a certain formation as a training heuristic to prepare the team for the match. If correct that would help us understand the match better.

A next step would be to actually find some kind of measurement to calculate what percentage of play time players were in positions that would correlate with a specific formation. This can be done for both attacking and defending formations. You could then compare these results with other measurements of attack and defense and see whether they support each other.

Formations as associative learning

Associative learning is one of the three ways the brain learns. Associative learning is better known as Pavlovian learning as Pavlov was the first scientist to establish it. With associative learning the brain creates a probabilistic relation between two or more sense impressions. Associative learning is the reason that formations as a learning heuristic work. By using formations as a mnemonic players start to associate certain positions and movements with the goals set by the trainer. The name of the formation then becomes shorthand for a whole set of actions on the pitch.

Fooled by Randomness is a famous book by Nassim Taleb. As it turns out it is quite difficult for humans to overcome their tendency to see patterns and not get fooled by randomness. In a player report created by a consultancy agency explained how a defender in de Premier League had a 0.11 goal scored in the 2016/2017, but that the same player had a 0.17 goal scored in the 2017/2018 season. That put the defender in the 2.5% best defenders. In the same report they also indicated that this defender had played 3000 minutes in 2016/2017, but only played 2000 minutes. But this wasn’t flagged as a warning. When I then started to look at the underlying data, it turns out that this defender had scored twice in 2016/2017 and had scored three times in season 2017/2018. Whether a player scores two or three times in a season is so much due to luck that it makes very little sense to base decision making on. In the season 2018/2019 the defender played only 1000 minutes and didn’t score.

First of all that the defender didn’t score in 2018/2019 doesn’t mean that he isn’t a good defender or that his contribution to the team’s attack aren’t better than most defenders. Because even with the third season data there still isn’t enough data to reach conclusions. The number of minutes played is a much more meaningful number because it is based on a lot more underlying data.

It is very hard to proof that an analysis is correct and more than happenstance. For that reason it is better to give an indication of how probable an analysis is. When analysts add predictions and the probability of those predictions then we can track how well these predictions hold up. Then we can use Brier’s Rule to see which analysts came up with the right predictions and which analysts didn’t. That is the best indication that the good analysts are indeed onto something that goes beyond happenstance.

Also, for almost all draws and matches that are won by a single goal difference, it is very hard to argue that it is not happenstance. Luck plays such a large part in football. If a match is won with a two goal difference then one can safely say that the outcome was based on more than luck alone, in most cases as there are always exceptions.

Hypnosis in sport has not been an unequivocal success. Research is inconclusive. For some participants hypnosis doesn’t work and for others it works very well. So well in fact that the performance of certain individuals rises so much that statistical analysis is pointless and that it seems as if these people gain superpowers. (The Oxford Handbook of Hypnosis: Theory, Research and Practice, Oxford University Press 2008) For instance, “Charles” was able to expand his endurance test from 90 weigth presses to 350 presses whereas even a top fit American football athlete was unable to press more than 100 times.

Hypnosis as such is still little understood. The best definition of hypnosis comes from stage hypnotist Derren Brown:

Hypnosis is convincing others to go along with your story. 

This definition immediately shows that there are two kinds of hypnosis. A broadly defined hypnosis that fits Derren Brown’s definition and a narrowly defined hypnosis where our brain starts to work differently than normally. Although it is quite hard to find biomarkers of hypnosis, hypnosis does seem to influence the workings of our default mode, a specific default activity found in the brain. With the default mode being less active than usual in a hypnotic trance, it seems that the integration of our experience starts to falter. With Tononi’s Information Integration Theory of consciousness, it becomes understandable that with less data integration happening in the brain in a hypnotic trance, we also become less conscious. For it is scientifically very clear that a hypnotic trance is quite an alternate state of consciousness.

Hypnosis in football

So does this mean that there is a role to play for hypnosis in football? I think it does. First of all, too many players suffer from anxiety or depression, or both. For those players who like to take an unconventional approach to help them get over anxiety or depression, hypnosis is an option.

Research shows that hypnosis helps specific individuals particularly well for issues with endurance. Less so with tasks that involve strength or power. What is especially interesting is that one theory is that our unconsciousness sets limits to what we seem to be able to physically endure. It is reasoned that this limit is there to protect us from damaging ourselves by enduring more than we physically can endure. It seems as if hypnosis is able, again in some specific individuals, to remove this inhibition. “Charles” noticed that after hypnosis he thought he would quit pressing after 90 times consciously, but was then amazed that his arms continued to lift weights. Most fortunately, there is no damage in these individuals that go beyond what was thought to be physically possible. So it seems that our unconsciousness is overprotective.

Finally, there are individuals who later in their career are unable to reach previous peak performance, even if they are physically able to execute the task required of them. In these cases hypnosis can help an athlete to reach previous levels of performance. 

One issue that I spot with the research, is that these scientists are trying to isolate hypnosis from other forms of suggestion. They want to research narrowly defined hypnosis. By doing this they try to exclude other factors that enhance the performance of football players. These factors are motivation, rapport, general suggestions and demand characteristics. Yet, these are all part of the broadly defined hypnosis.

So given that motivation, rapport, general suggestions and demands all help to improve the performance of players and, on top of that, for some individual players they can overcome issues with endurance, broadly defined hypnosis is quite important for football. If only for the fact that for the manager it is very important to get his players to go along with his strategy or tactics. Which is an excellent translation of “convincing people to go along with your story”, the best definition of hypnosis.

Words matter

It has been difficult to scientifically prove the difference between hypnotic suggestions and general suggestions. One reason could be that a general suggestion is already hypnotic in nature. Yet, words matter. One experiment showed that with hypnotic pain control, depending on the words used in the hypnotic suggestions, the body and the brain consistently use a physically different way of blocking the pain. Using the right words has been shown to have a dramatic different effect on people hearing them.

So for football clubs I recommend checking which players like to go on an adventure and see what they can achieve with hypnosis. The next step is to test to see whether these players are easily hypnotizable. Finally one can test whether the performance of these players increases by using both narrowly and broadly defined hypnosis.

For managers and other staff members who need to influence their players by using words, it is imperative to learn to structure their language in so called hypnotic language patterns. Often people mean well, but formulate badly. If that happens, people often get the opposite effect of what they were trying to communicate. Most people I have worked with increased their personal effectiveness when they start using hypnotic language patterns. Even if they never hypnotized a single person in their life.

Instrumental learning is one of the three ways the brain learns. The other two being imprinting and associative learning. Whereas your brain creates a probabilistic relation between two experiences with associative learning, with instrumental learning your brain creates a probabilistic relationship between your behavior and what your behavior gets you. In football excellent associative learning leads to game intelligence. Excellent instrumental learning leads to technique.

All actions a football player can take are behaviors. When a player has a great technique, this means that through instrumental learning, his brain has created a great probabilistic model that translates the experience of his environment and the control of his body into an action that leads to the ball doing what the player wants the ball to do.

Instrumental learning is based on the ABC-model. In this model A stands for Antecedents. Antecedents is everything that is happening before the action is taken or what is necessary in order to be able to complete the action. If you want a player to score at least he needs to have a ball. Almost all training and coaching is antecedental in the sense that it happens before the players does the actions we want him to take, i.e. when he is playing a real match.

In the ABC-model B stands for Behavior and is simply the action taken by a player.

C stands for Consequences. Consequences is everything that happens after someone has behaved in a certain way. Most people, coaches and trainers are unaware how important the consequences are. Because an overwhelming amount of research has shown that our future behavior is for 80% determined by the consequences of our behavior rather than the antecedents. Antecedents only account for 20% influence on future behavior. Nevertheless, almost all trainers and coaches mainly use antecedents to influence their players. And hence their effectiveness is five times less than it could have been if they also worked with consequences.

Four kinds of consequences

There are four different kinds of consequences that can be ordered according to what you want and what you get as follows:

If there is too much undesired behavior in a club or a team, then it automatically follows that the undesired behavior is being positively reinforced. If there is not enough desired behavior then it automatically follows that there is not enough positive reinforcement of the players involved. In many cases, once we actually take a look at what the consequences of the desired behavior are, we discover that there are even negative consequences for the desired behavior!

Many clubs think that they have tried positive reinforcement and that it didn’t work for them. But when we look at what has actually been done, we find that these clubs fell for the perception trap. What happened was that rather than ask the players what they actually wanted as a reward, the management or training staff decided top down what a good reward would be. That doesn’t work. One has to check whether the player involved actually experiences the consequence as positive.

As you can see positive reinforcement leads to the strongest increase of desired behavior. Therefore, it is best to use positive reinforcement as much as possible. Nevertheless, for a trainer it is also important to be able to decrease the frequency of undesired behavior using the other three kinds of consequences. The right mix of all four consequences is that you use 80% of the time positive reinforcement and 20% of the time the other three negative consequences. In many clubs this is exactly the other way around: they use negative consequences 80% of the time and only 20% of the time positive consequences. But this limits the ability of players to develop as negative consequences decreases the frequency of behavior or only weakly increases the frequency of behavior. Only positive reinforcement players develop as fast and as unlimited as their talents allow them.

Three different kinds of positive consequences

 There are three different kinds of positive consequences:

1. Natural consequences. Natural positive consequences are due to the way the world (or reality) works. Natural positive consequences lead to an excellent technique. The way to ball moves and the way the opponent is unable to block the ball and the way the player then scores a goal, are all natural positive consequences that train the brain of the player to become even better.
2. Material consequences. These consist of oxygen, water, food and sex. These four are the direct material consequences. There is one indirect material consequence: money. Money is indirect because you can buy the direct material consequences with it. For most people oxygen doesn’t work as a reward because they are saturated with oxygen. But for football players oxygen is actually a good material reward. Because being out of breath during a match works as a negative consequence. Oxygen is a great reward for training intense. Material consequences have a dark side to them. Young football stars get a lot of material consequences, and often for undesired behavior. That is why young players get into problems once they become stars. Earlier only their desired behavior was positively reinforced. But as stars all their behaviors, including undesired behavior, get positively reinforced.
3. Social consequences. These are social status like player of the match or most valuable player. The problem with those kinds of social rewards is that they make one player a winner in the team and all the other players losers. So the best social consequences are compliments. Almost everywhere we come compliments are underused. Most people react very well to sincere compliments. So great managers give their players lots of compliments. But it is important to tie your compliment to the exact desired behavior that you want to stimulate. If the brain of the player doesn’t know which behavior led to the compliment then it doesn’t work or can even reinforce undesired behavior. This happens when players give thumbs up for a cross pass that has gone wide. The player receiving the pass wants to reinforce the internal behavior of thinking of him. Yet, he actually reinforces passing wide and increases the frequency of bad passing.

There are two other things that are important to consider when using positive reinforcement:

1. Is the consequence certain or uncertain? Certain consequences have way more impact than uncertain consequences.
2. Follows the consequence immediately (i.e. within 60 seconds after the behavior) or in the future? Immediate consequences have much more impact than future ones.

“The 5 minutes right after a game is more important than the 5 days leading up to a game.” pic.twitter.com/czT6fpW1jr

— Darian Wilken (@CoachDarian) July 21, 2019

Using instrumental learning in football

Basically whenever a player behaves in a desired way on or off the pitch, someone from the club needs to be there to give a compliment. This means that during practice there needs to be a lot of compliments. Undesired behavior is best ignored. Undesired behavior is different from making mistakes. If a player makes a mistake, he needs feedback so he can avoid the mistake in the future. Feedback is given one on one in a business like manner without emotions. But also without compliments. Many people have learned the sandwich method of giving feedback. The sandwich method works great for the person who has to give the feedback for his task is made easier by mixing the negative message with compliments. Yet, it works really bad for the player as the compliments positively reinforce the undesired behavior that led to the mistakes. If you want to compliment the player for what he did right, wait some time and compliment him for what he did right on a different occasion so his brain understands that the compliments are for the desired behavior instead.

During a match players need to be taught to only compliment each other for desired behavior, i.e. actions that actually led to a positive result for the team. Of course, goals and assists are already celebrated. So that is great. Yet, the team can also celebrate when they win a corner, a free kick or neutralized a dangerous situation. Make sure that the team understand that failed actions are ignored in purpose to prevent the positive reinforcing of undesired behavior.

When substituting a player, not only instruct the player coming on the pitch what to do (which is of course antecedental), but also immediately compliment the player coming off the pitch with a specific behavior of what he did right during the match.

Post match, the manager and the staff need to quickly as possible to compliment players for their actually behaviors. That means not only complimenting the players, but tie the compliment to specific behaviors that the players exhibited on the pitch. As it is hard to remember a specific action for every player, players can be divided between staff members who then compliment the players assigned to them.

Of course when the team has won, the team is happy and elated. Winning is a positive reinforcement all on it’s own. That is why teams start to perform better when they start to win matches. Losing is a negative consequence. Hence losing teams start to do less of desired behavior as that is being punished by a loss. That is why it is so important to teach and train players so they are able to emotionally let go of a loss and to focus on what went well during a lost match. This is helped when the players are actually reminded of the things they did well on the pitch by the staff in the form of a compliment.

Here is a great example of what I mean:

There’s a story about how legendary Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry turned around his struggling team. While the other teams were reviewing missed tackles and dropped balls, Landry instead combed through footage of previous games and created for each player a highlight reel of when he had done something easily, naturally, and effectively. Landry reasoned that while the number of wrong ways to do something was infinite, the number of right ways, for any particular player, was not. It was knowable, and the best way to discover it was to look at plays where that person had done it excellently. From now on, he told each team member, “we only replay your winning plays.” (source)

Research into instrumental learning and football

Instrumental learning has been tested in football in the following cases:

• Movement with the ball, movement after restarts and movement after passing raised to +90% accuracy.

Intentionality is not a real existing thing. Intentionality is an abstract concept that has very little use and a lot of downside. The concept of intentionality has been thought up by Brentano. Intentionality is about the aboutness of our mental states. The problem with this concept is that there are no mental states and our brain states are not about something.

The first issue is that many people would think that intentionality has only to do with our intentions. Intention is also a concept and also doesn’t really exist. If you think that people have intentions, then intentions are about something, i.e. intentions are about what you intend to do. As such intentions have intentionality as intentions are about something. But our beliefs also have intentionality as our beliefs are also about something. The same goes for our desires, our expectations and our motivation, to name a few examples.

The aboutness is a problematic idea. Brentano thought that there was a literal connection between our mental state and what that mental state was about. Given that no such connection was ever found, people soon changed the story of intentionality into the idea that we have representation of what our mental states are about and that those representations inside our head form our intentionality. Somehow the outside world would be mirrored inside our brain through representation of everything we sensed. As it turns out this picture of how the brain works is also very problematic.

Intentions

As most people would think that intentionality is mainly about intentions, let me give you an alternative way of looking at intentions. Human behavior is most easily explained if you consider humans to be goal achieving systems. Yet, these goals don’t have to explicit or conscious goals. For instance, the biological hardware structure of our brain forms our personality which in turn gives players a lot of goals on their own. These are evolutionary behavioral patterns around emotions, cognition and motivation and can best be explained as trying to achieve specific goals. But these are unconscious goals, if they are goals in the brain at all. Independent of whether there are goals in the brain, consciously or not, the behavior of players is best understood as if they had goals. Yet, it is important to understand that this goal achieving way of interpreting the behavior of players is being done by third parties, i.e. other human beings.

We as outsiders put intentions into players. It is our way of explaining their behavior. This is a clear clue that there are no intentions inside the player’s brain. But what then is inside the brain? For we experience ourselves subjectively that we have goals and try to achieve them. That our subjective experience is like that, doesn’t mean that there are real goals inside our brain. Inside our brain there are only brain cells and neurotransmitters and neuromodulators. We also know that our brain is capable of processing sense data. The five main senses are: seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling and tasting. So a much more probable story to replace intentions, is that players have memory like fantasies about the future where they see themselves acting in a way that makes them feel good.

What happens next is that our ability to put our thoughts into sentences, is that we start to create abstract talk about this mental imagery with a good feeling attached. We start to translate this mental picture that feels good to talk about what I want (the good feeling) to achieve (the mental picture). In the next level of abstraction, this changes to talk about intentions. From there intentions get a life on their own and suddenly people act as if intentions are real. But this simplification creates a situation where we make mistakes and misjudge people because we think we understand the non-existing intentions in their brain. Whereas we go back to understanding that (a) the fact that we use goals to understand the behavior of players, doesn’t mean that they really have those goals and (b) that even if they have those goals, these goals are nothing more than memory like fantasies about their future that feel good.

Relevance for football

We know that players play at their best if they don’t overthink situations. Through associative learning and instrumental learning their unconscious mind knows what to do (technique) and how to read the match (game intelligence) unconsciously. At the same time, it is also known that if players start the match having a clear goal of what they want to achieve consciously, the play better. Unconscious processing is meant for quick decisions, yet the brain also needs a long term goal so it knows how to weigh options during the quick decision in the light of the long term goal. The long term goal for a football match is only a few hours in the future. Nevertheless, a few hours are long term for the brain. So it is important just before the match that the manager is able to create a very similar mental picture of what the team wants to achieve in each of his players. And he also needs to make sure that his players attach good feelings to this mental picture of the team’s future.

Being able to attack good feelings to the long term goal for the match, is one of the reasons why morale and confidence seem to be so important in football. The issue is that with a bad morale of the team or individual players who lack confidence is that for those players it becomes quite hard to attach a good feeling to the long term goal for the match. Without that good feeling the brain doesn’t value the mental picture of how the manager wants the match to develop as goal worthy of achieving. Without that long term goal, the brain finds it harder to make decisions quickly and unconsciously as there is no direction set to weigh different options lacking a long term goal.

Psychology without content

One of the academic philosophy books that I published is called Psychology Without Content in Dutch. In Psychology Without Content I argue that there is no content inside our brain. All talk about intentionality, but also about mental states, implies that there is content inside our brain. Yet, no one has any clue as to how our brain can be contentful. It is one thing to assume that there is content in our brain, but without any evidence or arguments for content in our brain, it is a big assumption. Nor is there a need for content in our brain. Everything our brain does can be described syntactically. There is no need for semantics.

Of course when we make a memory like fantasy about the future, it looks as if there is content inside our brain. But looks can be deceiving. It is enough for there to be a system that can be described syntactically to create this mental imagery. Even though our eyes and our brains don’t work with pixels, you can compare this with how pixels are stored in the RAM of a computer when it displays a photo or plays a movie. There is no content in the RAM of the computer. There are only electronic connections that either have a current going through it or not. Syntactically we describe this as an on/off state or a 0 and a 1. Nobody thinks that the computer itself sees this data semantically or as content. We humans watching the monitor of the computer ascribe content to what we see on the computer monitor.

The same thing is happening with us humans. Except we don’t have a monitor attached where a third party can see what we produce. Our computer monitor is society though. Semantics and content does exist, but not inside our brains. Instead these are emerging properties of our society. Through our ability to speak to each other we form a community, Content and semantics exist within this community and not within our brains. In our brains we only have encoded how to act and speak and behave within a community. This gives us the illusion of content, semantics and intentionality inside our brain, but this is only due to our functioning within a community of other language users.

The same goes for the player and the team. The manager doesn’t have content inside his brain, nor does his players have content inside their brain. The same goes for intentionality and intentions. Instead the intentions, intentionality and content exist within the team. Players often say that playing football is a team effort. This is of course true, but not only because they play together, but also because they create meaning together. As a team they create intentionality, intentions and content. Given what we know about how the brain works, this can be a very powerful tool if used correctly.

Motivation doesn’t exist as a real thing. Motivation is an abstract concept. And as with all abstract concepts, one has to consider whether its use has any value. The concept of motivation is a double edged sword. When used correctly the concept of motivation can help you a lot to motivate players. If used wrongly, then it will hinder your efforts to motivate players and actually increases the risk of hiring bad players. Fortunately, the neuroscience of motivation is the neuroscience of instrumental learning which is used in football to train a player’s technique. So we can use what we know about instrumental learning to learn about motivation.

The mistake most made with motivation is that idea that people can be intrinsically motivated. There is no motivation inside people’s brains. We, as outside observers, can describe someone’s behavior as being motivated. Or we can describe someone’s behavior as lacking motivation. Motivational problems can be defined as:

Motivational problems are performance deficits that are not due to lack of capability or due to a lack of opportunity.

In other words, the player can perform well. He can, but he doesn’t. The reason is that he lacks an incentive do perform well. Motivational problems differ from attitudinal problems. With an attitudinal problem players behave badly, but this does not relate to their performance. Players may behave correctly, but lack motivation to perform well. Or they might behave badly, but perform well. In most cases attitudinal problems stem from players’ personality.

So if a player is not performing well, first check whether this performance deficit is due to:

1. Lack of technique.
2. Lack of game intelligence.
3. Lack of opportunity, for instance because other players don’t involve him in the game.
4. Lack of proper tools. It is hard to play if you don’t have a ball.
5. Lack of working conditions. If a player is being bullied by other players his performance might suffer.

Pitfalls of incentives

There are six different ways in which you might think a player has all the incentives he needs to perform well, but in reality he hasn’t:

1. Incentives for the team do not always reach the individual player.
2. Incentives for the team do not always translate into incentives for each individual player.
3. What is an incentive for a player at a certain time, may not be an incentive for that player in another time.
4. You only look at long term incentives, but do not look at short term incentives.
5. The club thinks that something is an incentive, but didn’t check whether the player felt the same way.
6. You only look at the incentives for doing something, but you haven’t look at the incentives for doing something else.

How to build more motivation

To get players to perform better and thus be more motivated, it is important to make sure that they have the right long term and short term incentives. Long term incentives are fame and fortune. Short term incentives can be praise by the manager. One way to effectively build motivation is the build on player’s strengths rather than their weaknesses. When you look at what a player is already able to do that is close to what you want him to do and praise him when he does what he is good at, then you can use that as a bridge towards the behaviors where you want him to be more motivated. Even though it looks like a detour, building on strengths works actually faster than working at weaknesses, even if the weaknesses are very small.

The advantages of building on strengths are:

1. Building on strengths has a better motivational effect.
2. Building on strengths tends to start from a firmer base.
3. Building on strengths helps avoid making big changes where judiciously selected small changes work as good or better.
4. Building on strengths has a snowballing effect where players get more motivated for a number of other activities and perform better.
5. Repairing weaknesses becomes harder and harder as the weaknesses become smaller and smaller. Whereas building on strengths becomes easier and easier given that the player develops more and more strengths.

Adapted from: Brethower, Dale. Behavioral Analysis in Business and Industry: a Total Performance System, Behaviordelia 1972

There is no such thing as objectivity. Everything, except for math and formal logic, is subjective. Nevertheless, this is one of the most difficult things to grasp for people as everyone is raised in a society that praises objectivity so much. So please bear with me. It is going to be a wild ride. Yet, especially in football, it is very important to understand why there is no such thing as objectivity. With the flood of data coming to football – and with almost all data providers claiming to be objective – it is important to understand why they are wrong and why their data is still subjective. Otherwise, one is going to base decisions on the wrong input. On average clubs lose money on every 1 in 2 transfers. The increased use of data has not changed this at all.

The fastest and easiest way to argue against objectivity is that point out that for a truly objective viewpoint, you have to step outside of reality. It is impossible to be part of reality and state something objective about reality. Within philosophy this is called “the view from nowhere”. The view from nowhere is a necessity for objectivity and also an impossibility. When you look at data of a player, that data – in part – forms your subjective opinion on that player. When a data provider decides what to measure and how to measure it, these are all subjective decision.

Nevertheless, most people, while agreeing that objectivity is impossible in principle, would argue that in practice one can say that data is objective, as a figure of speech. Here I will argue that it is the wrong approach and actually increases the risk of you hiring a player that the club will lose money on. How we formulate what we think influences what we think. The more careful you are able to formulate your principles, ideas and opinions, the higher the chance that your decisions work out well.

Objectivity, intersubjectivity and subjectivity

One of the most brilliant philosophers of the twentieth century, Donald Davidson, has developed a very practical model on how we can learn anything about the world. It is called “triangulation”, because Davdison discovered that you need three points to triangulate the source. In the same way as how you can triangulate the location of a transmitter by measuring the strength of the signal in three different places. As triangulation works for everything, one can also say that to learn anything about a football player you need three points.

These three points are:

1. The world.
2. Your subjective experience of the world.
3. Intersubjective stories you hear about the world.

When we apply this to football, these three points translate to:

1. The football player.
2. Your subjective experience of that specific football player.
3. Intersubjective stories you hear about the football player.

So a technical manager at a club has to have these three things for him to decide about the fate of a player. First of all, the player has to actual exist. That sounds obvious. But my guess is that there have been times in football that clubs were sold non-existing players. So the next step for the technical manager is to get stories about this player. These are the data and scouting reports that the club prepares for the technical manager. And finally, the technical manager first has to watch videos of the player (although in a very technical sense these prepared videos might also be considered third party stories about the player) and he has to see the player play live. I will get back to this last point as to why it is so important for the decision maker to go and see the player live. 

According to Davidson these three points refer to objectivity, subjectivity and intersubjectivity:

1. The world and the player are objective.
2. Your experience of the world and the player are subjective.
3. The stories you hear and read about the world and the player are intersubjective.

Davidson is a very subtle philosopher, so I will point out his very subtle point for all people who think data is objective. According to Davidson only the world and the actual player are objective. All data gathered about the player and the world are at best intersubjective. So even if you want the best defense of objectivity – which is given by Davidson – data providers still don’t get what they want as their data is only intersubjective and not objective according to Davidson.

Bayesian statistics

Although I agree on almost everything Davidson has thought up and as a guest-lecturer of the VU-university I teach managers the triangulation model, I do think that Davidson has made one crucial mistake. This mistake is why he thinks there is still some kind of objectivity, even though we humans can never reach it given that the only sources about the world (and football players) are either our own experience (which is subjective) or stories about the world (and players) which are intersubjective.

Where I agree with Davidson is that all relations between the world, our experience and the stories being told about the world are ruled by Bayesian statistics. Our brain is a Bayesian future prediction machine. All our experiences are generated by brain processes that can be best understood by the Bayesian framework. As we literally experience the stories other people tell or write, all stories are also ruled by Bayes Theorem.

Yet, there are different Bayesian schools. Davidson thinks that the best version of Bayesian statistics is one where statistics is about the probability of propositions – statements of facts. Proposition have a truth value and once the probability reaches 1 (or 100%), the proposition is declared as true (and 0 or 0% is called false). 

But this is not the way Bayesian statistics was thought up by it’s originator, professor Bruno de Finetti. He stated that probability is about events and that events don’t have a truth value. They happen or they don’t happen. But an event can’t be true or false. For that reason De Finetti divided the world of logic in two different logics: 

1. The logic of certainty. This is an axiomatic system where you come up with axioma’s and rules. In such a system you can define truth and falsehood. In fact this is exactly what is the case in mathematics and formal logic. Most people think that “1 + 1 = 2” is a convention. But this is not the case at all. With set theory one can proof that 1 + 1 = 2. This proof is absolute. Anyone accepting the axioma’s will agree that the proof is true, no matter where or when the live. In fact even aliens from outer space will agree that the proof is true as soon as they understand and accept the axioma’s.
2. The logic of uncertainty. Everything else is subjective. That means that everything in football is subjective. All data, all opinions, everything.

Once you replace the faulty Bayesian statistics about propositions with the correct Bayesian statistics about events (as a historical note: this is one of the few minor contributions I made to the field of philosophy), then truth falls away and at the same time we completely do away with objectivity. A probability of 0% does not imply an impossibility or falsehood, but only a subjective probability estimation that judges that the event is extremely unlikely. In fact so unlikely that we have no smaller number to express how unlikely we judge it to be. A probability of 100% does not imply a certainty or truth, but only a subjective probability estimation that judges that the event is extremely likely. In fact so likely that we have no greater number to express how likely we judge it to be.

Convergence

Now that we have completely done away with objectivity, there is still a question to answer:

Why do people cling to objectivity?

Within philosophy, it is one thing to argue against an idea, but once you have successfully argued that – as we argued against objectivity – one then has to explain why people thought of the idea in the first place. With objectivity the reason is simple. People confuse convergence with objectivity. In fact, once you learn about convergence, all need for objectivity falls away. Everything you ever wanted from objectivity, you get once you embrace convergence. I cannot stress enough how important the concept of convergence is for football.

If everything is subjective then all our probability estimations are subjective too. Nevertheless, people often come to the same number when estimating a probability. For instance, I judge that there is a 100% chance that a pen falls to the ground if I drop it. And I am sure that you also have the same judgement. Nevertheless, De Finetti argues strongly, even though we come to the same numbers, your 100% differs from my 100% because we reached this judgement through a different path because you had different experiences of falling pens and you heard different stories about gravity than I have. So even when we come to the same numerical conclusion, it is not the same conclusion.

It might not be the same conclusion, but – and here comes the most important part – we do converge to the same judgement. We can easily measure convergement. This is simply the number of people to come (almost) the same judgement. For falling pens the convergence is probably close to 100% of all people. So what people call objective is actually nothing more than high convergence. And what people call subjective is nothing more than low convergence.

What this means in football

Convergence is the reason why it is so important to make decision with a team in a club. If you have reliable staff the higher the convergence among reliable experts is, the smaller the risks you take. Convergence prevents you from buying players that make a loss.

If high convergence is what people really mean when they talk about objectivity, then ask yourself this simple question:

How much convergence of judgement is there in football?

At the time of this writing, I spent three years in the world of professional football. Compared to every other sector of our society (and as a trainer I have direct experience of most of them), there is so much less convergence within football than everywhere else. Yes, we all convergence to the judgement that Messi is highly likely to be a player able to contribute. And there are a number of other superstars that most people agree on. But with 90.000 professional players the number of players where there is a high convergence, is very, very small. Of course, most staff of the club will have a high convergence on players they can’t afford. But there is very little convergence in the club for players they can afford. And that is the reason why making decisions within football is so very hard.

Almost all data – even if you accept that all data is subjective – only adds an additional talking point when discussing which players to hire. People are often amazed why clubs don’t decide more on data. But these people think that football is a sector where there is often a high convergence on what to do, just like the rest of the world. They overestimate the level of convergence in football in general and within club specifically.

If only because – as we have seen – data is only just another story the decision makers hear, on top of everything else they hear and read. And of course their own experience. Data providers force decision makers to take this approach by providing the club only with “objective” data without telling the club what the probability will be that particular player will be able to contribute to the team. That is the most important judgement and almost all data providers leave the people at the club to draw that conclusion. To my judgement because they know that their own judgement in this regard will be very faulty. And my guess is, that the staff and decision makers at the club – consciously or unconsciously – take this into account when they receive data reports about players. And that is another reason why, even though there is so much data, data has still made little impact on football as compared to what is yet to come.