Edge: Leadership Secrets from Footballs’s Top Thinkers

Key to the journey is Potter, who was voted Swedish Manager of the Year after the team finished eighth in its debut top-flight campaign in 2016. ‘Graham is extra-extra-extra-extraordinary,’ says Kindberg. ‘He is one of most promising managers in Europe. I can stand up every day and argue that. He is open-minded, has values and fantastic leadership skills.’ And emotional intelligence? ‘Of course!’

Is Kindberg prepared for the day when Potter moves to another club? What will happen to ÖFK’s edge then? ‘I will be the proudest chairman on earth when a top-five club in the Premier League comes in for him, but they would have to pay a very big compensation. I will only talk to another club [about him] if it’s Barcelona who want him!’ Kindberg is smart and has already considered a succession plan – which sets him apart from most club chairmen I have encountered. He is convinced that ÖFK will one day win the Swedish title and compete in the Champions League. ‘We will be winners in a totally different way. We refuse to compete in any other way. That’s our belief.’

He enjoys taking advantage of football’s conservatism, and derives great pleasure from signing unpolished diamonds like David Accam (now playing for Chicago Fire in the MLS) and Modou Barrow (now at Swansea). ‘We look to recruit players that don’t follow the others. They might seem strange, or different, but they have a brain that others don’t recognise. The conventional football environment kills geniuses. That’s where we can find players.’ He is particularly excited about an English midfielder, Curtis Edwards, rejected from Middlesbrough’s academy, but with a huge potential for development.

HOW TO GET AN EDGE – by DANIEL KINDBERG

1 Create the environment where everybody promotes creativity, initiative and courage.

2 Delegate decision-making.

3 End the blame culture.

Potter is preparing for the new season ahead. I wonder if it might be his last in Sweden, before an offer comes in that Kindberg cannot refuse. He has already rejected approaches from other teams in Sweden. In six years, Potter has turned around a club in a negative spiral to an upwardly mobile, community-bonding, booty-shaking success story.

The ÖFK identity has come a long way in a short time. ‘We embrace diversity as part of our identity and are open-minded around how we explore different parts of ourselves as a team to develop the individual,’ Potter says. ‘We play an exciting, interesting and attacking brand of football with players from all over the world. We are a team that people are proud of, that’s grown a lot and that has made a difference to a small part of the world.’

I can’t let him leave without one final question. What is the meaning of art? ‘It’s about expression,’ he smiles, with no hesitation. ‘It’s a way of expressing yourself. In some ways, football is similar. In its simplest form, kids and everyone else who plays the game express their emotions through it. It’s just like art.’

Potter has not followed the traditional path for English coaches, and that sets him apart from most of his peers (other exceptions are Paul Clement, former assistant coach to Carlo Ancelotti at Paris Saint-Germain and Bayern Munich, and Michael Beale, who left Liverpool’s youth academy to join Brazilian club São Paulo for a seven-month spell as assistant coach).

If there is a bias towards appointing foreign coaches in the Premier League, might it be because the English coaches lack experience outside of England? Potter has shown remarkable adaptability to cope with the serious challenges that ÖFK presented. We will look at the importance of adaptability, and how to develop it, in more detail in Chapter 2. It starts with a moment of stunning skill in Dortmund, in the presence of another culturally engaged coach who sees football as a true art form.

HOW TO GET AN EDGE – by GRAHAM POTTER

1 Make sure people feel they can improve in a learning environment.

2 Find out the unique advantage that separates you from the competition in the market-place.

3 Hire managers who understand people and relationships, even if others may have more seniority and experience.

ADAPTABILITY (#uda7496f0-5138-58d1-8827-e271220e3ac8)

THOMAS TUCHEL

Be a rule-breaker

Dembélé and adaptability / The Rulebreaker Society / Forget success / Power of small rituals / Talent, aesthetics, and Nietzsche / Segmenting motivation / Mistakes don’t exist / The Lemon Tart and curiosity

Ousmane Dembélé’s first touch was outstanding. He trapped the ball brilliantly, lifting his left leg above waist height and killing it dead. He was on the halfway line, and his next move was to knock it down the touchline and run past his marker to pick it up again. He was approaching the corner of the penalty area, at speed, when he did it again. He played the ball to the defender’s left, and ran around the other side – known in France as a grand pont, a big bridge – to leave his poor marker flustered and floundering. But would there be an end product? Dembélé had just run 50 yards at speed and beaten two men. He looked up and fizzed in the most enticing cross imaginable: at perfect velocity and height, eight yards from goal, a little too far for the goalkeeper to reach.

His team-mate Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang only needed a small jump to power his header into the goal. The move had taken only eight seconds. In that time, you could see just how devastating Dembélé could be. This was February 2017, and Aubameyang had just scored the winning goal in Borussia Dortmund’s win over RB Leipzig.

Dembélé: you may remember his name. He was the player I selected for the Guardian’s ‘Next Generation’ feature back in 2014. At that time, he had yet to make an appearance for his club, Rennes. I was told that this 17-year-old boy, as he was then, had a natural gift for dribbling; that he did so with grace, agility, lightness, fluidity and ease. In some ways, that run-and-cross against RB Leipzig could not have been more appropriate. His unpredictable way of playing is the antithesis of modern football.

I wanted to speak to Dembélé, but Borussia Dortmund was keen to protect its talent. Instead, my colleagues at French TV station BeIN Sports sat down with him for an interview in February 2017 and, on my behalf, asked how he felt when he was named in the Guardian’s ‘Next Generation’. ‘I don’t pay too much attention to it,’ he told them. ‘It’s not an extra pressure for me, it’s just what I do. I’m on the road I have to follow and I don’t think about anything else. I train to get into the team and I’m enjoying my football here in Dortmund.’

As well he might: in the Dortmund club shop, the name of Dembélé is the only one on the back of the shirts of the mannequins; not the top scorer Aubameyang, or the local Germany player Marco Reus, or the cult hero Shinji Kagawa.

In this chapter, I speak with the two managers who hold Dembélé’s future in their hands. I went to Germany to meet his club coach at Borussia Dortmund, Thomas Tuchel, and to France to see national team coach Didier Deschamps. They were excited about Dembélé and his potential. It’s their job to confirm that into talent.

As the season went on, it was clear that whatever they were doing was working. Dembélé provided some of the outstanding moments in European football: a dribble, burst of pace and outside-of-the-boot cross for Aubameyang to score in a Champions League knock-out tie at Monaco; a cutback, which left his marker David Alaba dizzy and grounded, and a curling left-foot shot, which went in off the crossbar, to win the German Cup semi-final at rivals Bayern Munich (and a nice celebration to follow, running straight to Tuchel for a hug). He repeated the move in the German Cup final, scoring a similar goal in a Man of the Match performance to seal Borussia Dortmund its first trophy for five years.

On the final day of the Bundesliga season, he pulled off an outrageous assist, scooping the ball over five Werder Bremen defenders for Aubameyang to volley home another goal. He was outstanding in an end-of-season friendly against England, scoring the winning goal in a 3–2 victory. In late August, just a few weeks before this book was first published, Barcelona signed Dembélé for a reported £135 million, a fee that made him the second-most expensive player in the world. (His new coach would be Ernesto Valverde, formerly of Athletic Club de Bilbao.)

Dembélé was not our only topic of conversation. Both coaches gave me a unique insight into the challenges of modern leadership. Their stories can teach us a lot about the importance of communication, self-development, motivation, disruptive thinking and, above all, adaptability, in today’s professional environment.

Deschamps does not like to talk about individual players but he made an exception for Dembélé. ‘There are times when maybe during a game there’s not much going on and then he will do something special,’ he told me. ‘It’s about getting that quality to express itself over the long term. But as far as he’s concerned, psychologically he considers himself ready. He’s also exposed to daily demands at a club that’s structured to deal with a player of enormous potential. He has got something.’

Tuchel agrees. In training sessions, the coach will tell the players to only play one-touch passes, or two-touch give-and-goes, or do a spatial awareness exercise. ‘It’s no problem for Ousmane. Within minutes, he gets it and I say, “Hey please, what was that?” He adapts so quickly to everything.’

This is crucial to success. In his short career so far, Dembélé has adapted to all the contexts he has had to face. These have involved new teams, relationships, venues, levels of performance, cultures, countries, languages, and levels of media attention. Tuchel and Deschamps understand this better than most: they have also learned to adapt to get their edge.

Thomas Tuchel walks into the Italian restaurant around the corner from the Borussia Dortmund club offices, a five-minute stroll from the Signal-Iduna Park stadium, looking nothing like a football coach. He is wearing high-top trainers, skinny jeans, a grey jumper, leather jacket and a flat cap. He looks more like an artisanal coffee-shop owner than the most exciting coach of his generation.

But that’s what he is. He has been known to change his team’s formation up to six times in one game, and his original tactical ideas have led to comparisons with Pep Guardiola. In his first job as head coach, at Mainz, he took a tiny club to its highest-ever league finish and a place in Europe; at Borussia Dortmund, one of the best-supported clubs in Germany, he improved what the New York Times called ‘the most gifted collection of young players anywhere in Europe, crafted into a team of rich spirit and endless adventure’ – until, after we met, he left his position as coach, ending his second season at the club with victory in the German Cup Final.

Tuchel talks about adaptability as a necessity of leadership, though in his case it requires bravery and humility: bravery to stick to his philosophy, even if results don’t support it (which doesn’t happen too often); and humility to know he doesn’t have all the answers, while remaining open-minded enough to constantly search for them.

‘Tuchel’s team of the future may have no systems of defence, midfield or attack,’ wrote Cathrin Gilbert in German broadsheet Die Zeit,‘but simply “action principles” based on how his players behave in certain situations, the respect they have for the space, and how their character shows itself in the way they play football.’1 (#litres_trial_promo)

He does not know what his next tactical change will be, or where his next idea will come from, but he is open to anything – even, as he said, playing with only two defenders (most teams play with four, though some, Dortmund included, play with three).2 (#litres_trial_promo)

‘Two at the back, really?’ I say.

‘Why not?’ he responds, his clear-blue eyes glinting with mischief.

I ask Tuchel if he is trying to reinvent football. ‘No! A clear no. It’s not reinvention. That would mean I am changing for the sake of change. I’m not looking for change. I’m looking for an edge!’

He remembers Mercedes chief executive Dieter Zetsche comparing business to walking up the down escalator. If you do nothing, you go down. If you walk at a certain speed, you stay where you are. So you’d better run. ‘You have to adapt,’ says Tuchel. ‘It’s not about reinvention. It’s to adapt and to adapt and to adapt and to find the solutions quicker than others.’

And if that means doing things differently, then he will. Just before we meet, a year-old video of American basketball coach Geno Auriemma has gone viral. He coached the USA women’s basketball team to Olympic gold in 2012 and 2016 and has led the Connecticut Huskies to five straight national titles. ‘On our team, we put a huge premium on body language,’ Auriemma told a press conference in 2016. ‘And, if your body language is bad, you will never get in the game. Ever. I don’t care how good you are … When I watch game film, I’m checking on the bench. If somebody is asleep over there, if somebody doesn’t care, if somebody’s not engaged, they will never get in the game.’

‘I know what he’s talking about,’ Tuchel agrees. ‘We call it “the eyes”. Does he have good eyes or not? Can I trust this guy? It’s about binding relationships and respect and belief and faith. Even if you just sense it’s not there in a player, it’s already complicated.’ Tuchel sometimes looks over at his bench during a match and might see a player disengaged from the game. He will decide then not to bring them on. ‘You have to adapt.’

I’ve never heard a coach say this before. Instead, when Mario Balotelli needs two minutes to get someone else to tie his shoelaces during a game for Nice, or when Paris Saint-Germain substitute Serge Aurier takes seven minutes to get ready to come on, they are indulged as ‘characters’. Tuchel would not be so forgiving.

Tuchel tells me that shaping the personality of his players is just as important as improving their football ability.3 (#litres_trial_promo) This is part of his own methodology that he has developed to improve performance.

This is why Tuchel was the first sporting leader asked to address a fascinating group of disruptive innovators called the Rulebreaker Society. It was founded in Switzerland in 2013. Its members include Walter Gunz, who set up Media Markt, Europe’s largest retailer of consumer electronics; Gabor Forgacs, a medical entrepreneur who has pioneered 3D bio-printing technologies to produce human tissues for medical and pharmaceutical use; and Tan Lee, whose company Emotiv uses electroencephalography (EEG) to track mental performance, monitor emotions, and control virtual and physical objects with thoughts.

The Rulebreaker Society claims to bring together people who seek to innovate and inspire through their visions. They see progress in business and society through the creative destruction of conventional rules. Its inner circle has put together a manifesto, not of rules (of course!), but as a platform for inspiration:

1 No company will be market leader for a long period of time.

2 If I don’t cannibalise myself someone else will do it.

3 If someone else attacks my business model it will be a more radical and damaging approach than if I did it on my own.