There is no I in team, but there better be no superstars either

Football is a funny game. It is a team game, so superstar players like Lionel Messi or Christiano Ronaldo can’t win championships on their own. Yet, while “money doesn’t score goals” the teams with high-class superstar players like Real Madrid and Bayern Munich constantly win not only the trophies at home but also the trophies at the European level. This is obviously what drives many second-rate teams to invest in individual superstar players to improve the team. Yet, the track record of clubs with these individual superstars and a mediocre rest of the team is pretty bad. Meanwhile, there are the occasional no-name teams that work so well together that they win championships. Just think of Leicester FC winning the Premier League in 2016 or FC Kaiserslautern winning the Bundesliga in 1998 after being newly promoted to the highest tier in German Football.

In essence, it seems that in football a team has to be pretty balanced to be successful. Too much of a difference between the superstar and the rest of the team and the team fails. Nowhere is this easier to see than on the national level where players cannot be bought or sold. Teams like the Italian national football team of today and many of their best teams in the past tend to be void of global superstars but have a range of players that are all world-class. Similarly, the Spanish team that won everything from 2008 to 2012 were full of world-class players without an individual superstar. Meanwhile, Neymar as the lone superstar in the Brazilian team or Ibrahimovic in Sweden didn’t do them any favour and these teams were often better without their superstar than with him.

According to a study amongst chess players, this superstar effect is pretty universal and rooted in the psychology of social interactions. The study looked at the individual performance of chess players when they faced a superstar player like Magnus Carlson or Gary Kasparov. In theory, there are two ways a player can handle the superstar. Either he is intimidated and employs less effort and hence plays worse, thinking that the opponent is so good he has no chance of winning anyway. Or the weaker player uses the superstar as an inspiration to get better and improve his game.

It turns out that the direct effect of the superstar is always negative. When facing a superstar opponent, all players played worse and exert less effort. And when they have a superstar on their team, players exert less effort because they expect the superstar to take care of it.

On the other hand, the secondary effect of a superstar player can be positive or negative. If the skill gap between the superstar is small, the weaker players can see that with some effort they can get on that level and they exert more effort and get better over time. If the skill gap is too large, however, they give up and simply get demoralised and do a worse job.

The lesson should be clear if you are trying to build a team of fund managers, analysts, or whatever team you are building in your business. Try to build a team like Chelsea FC, Manchester City or the Italian national football team where all the players are world-class and none of them is the standout global superstar. If you can’t do that (because who has the money that Manchester City has?), try to build a team of people with relatively equal skill sets and use the ones with the slightly higher skill sets than the rest as leaders to train the group and get them on a higher level. This way, you are creating something like Leicester FC. A team without stars that consistently plays above its level where the sum of the parts creates something bigger.

But please, don’t build a team like the Brazilian national team with Neymar or Manchester United with Wayne Rooney. A team where one superstar is above everyone else and thus the team doesn’t play as a team but just expects the star to take care of everything or get the glory for any successes, deservedly or not. That is a recipe for failure.