Walk Don’t Run
If you don’t follow soccer/football, you might not have heard of Paul Scholes. But if you listen to what some of the most famous footballers in the world say about him in this article you’ll realize that he must have been a very special player:
“My toughest opponent? Scholes of Manchester,” said Zinedine Zidane, French World Cup Winner and 3-time world player of the year. “He is the complete midfielder. He’s almost untouchable in what he does. You rarely come across the complete player, but Scholes is as close to it as you can get.”
“In the last 15 to 20 years the best central midfielder that I have seen — the most complete — is Scholes,” said Xavi Hernandez, Barcelona midfield maestro, arguably the best midfielder in the world at the moment. “Scholes is a spectacular player who has everything. He can play the final pass, he can score, he is strong, he never gets knocked off the ball and he doesn’t give possession away.”
With such glowing reviews, you would think that Paul Scholes was the peak human athlete, but to look at him you would never guess. It turns out that what he has is very hard to measure. In the same article, scientists tried to use specific athletic metrics (speed, agility, strength, etc.) to find a correlation between athletic ability and skill. Turns out, they found none.
They next turned to measure specific soccer skills in a group of semi-pro soccer players, skills like dribbling speed, and volley and passing accuracy, etc. They then looked at how these players applied these skills in a complex match situation. Once again players with superior measured skills did not translate that advantage to the pitch in a match situation.
An even more famous example is Lionel Messi, arguably the best player in the world over the last decade; Messi is very hard to measure. He runs far less than his arch-rival Cristiano Ronaldo and is even criticized for walking around the pitch too much. Yet, season after season, Messi scores 30+ goals and creates multiple assists.
There are some great stats on how little Messi does in this 538 article.
Numbers do not tell the whole story and can miss the most important elements of the game. It turns out what makes both Scholes and Messi so great is an immeasurable thing called match awareness.
The legendary Man United manager Alex Ferguson explained Scholes’ abilities this way:
"He has an awareness of what’s happening around him on the edge of the box which is better than most players. As a kid, he always had a knack for arriving in the right area just at the right time, but he’s proving just as effective from outside the box because he’s using his experience in the right way. One of the greatest football brains Manchester United has ever had."
Turns out that he was better than other players at applying his knowledge; he was learning by doing in a growth mindset.
The closed mindset looks at problems like this and sees the stats; practice more drills, get faster, stronger, more agile. Yet all of this work only gets you part of the way.
For both of these amazing players being allowed the freedom of playfulness is an important factor in both of their lives. They apply playfulness to the game; they don’t follow the ball around the pitch, they make space for themselves and others. They play with space, breaking the rules. This is not to say that they don’t have to work hard and practice. Yet, it is the application of that skill that is the key factor, that growth mindset that allows them to be playful when all about them are anxious.
Pixar’s Ed Catmull explains this phenomenon another way: “Craft is what we are expected to know; art is the unexpected use of our craft.”
It is very difficult for numbers and stats to capture that unexpected use of craft that confounds the rigidly ordered world and creates what can best be described as art on the football pitch.
Next in this series, I’ll look at how some critical experiences in life which seem like they must be quantifiable—like pain, taste, and intelligence—in fact, elude measurement.
