ABSTRACT

Few athletes compete alone in their sports. Instead, most of them interact either with or against other athletes collectively. Indeed, even in quintessentially individual sports such as golf or tennis, competitive action is often assessed or aggregated as a team game (e.g., the Ryder Cup in golf or the Davis Cup in tennis). Furthermore, many top individual sports performers travel and work with support groups of specialist advisers. For example, three times golf major winner Pa´draig Harrington had a back-up team of seven people when he won the Open Championship in 2007 – a caddie, an agent, a coach, a psychologist, a fitness consultant, a sport scientist and a physiotherapist (Kremer and Moran, 2008a). Top tennis players have similar teams of advisers. Little wonder, then, that when Novak Djokovic lost to Rafael Nadal in the final of the 2010 US Open tennis championship, he congratulated his opponent “and his team” (cited in Evening Herald, 2010; italics mine). But what exactly is a “team”? And is “team spirit” essential for the achievement of sporting excellence? In relation to this latter question, many athletes and coaches believe in the importance of a sense of collective unity when competing in team competitions. At first glance, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to support this latter belief. For example, according to Sven-Go¨ran Eriksson, the former Leicester City and former England soccermanager, “the creation of team spirit and the building of ‘the good team’ is…one of the coach’s most important jobs” (Eriksson, 2002, p. 116). And such team-building by skilful managers can be highly effective. To illustrate, consider the remarkable achievement of Otto Rehhagel’s Greece in winning the European Championship in soccer in 2004 despite the absence of individual star players. Similarly, Barcelona, the 2011 Champions’ League winners, earned universal praise not only for their brilliant passing game but also for their extraordinary team cohesion (see Figure 7.1).