Manchester City vs Arsenal; Good Stress vs Bad Stress
Guardiola vs Arteta
Catch-up service:
Moon Joy
How Evil Is Mark Zuckerberg?
Giving Advice Is a Treacherous Business
Against Introspection
Is the Current Gulf War Taking Place?
How To Build Your Own Tower
33 Things I Heard At Foo Camp
Football, like team sports more generally, is a rich source of case studies in organisational psychology. This one tells us a lot about the nature of stress and the importance of leaders.
Here’s all you need to know. Manchester City have been the most successful team in English football for the last ten years. They are managed by the man generally regarded as the game’s greatest manager, Pep Guardiola, a mad genius, wildly innovative tactician, and ridiculously intense coach.
Mikel Arteta is a former Arsenal player, now their manager. When Arteta retired from playing, Guardiola hired him as his assistant at Manchester City, the apprentice to his sorcerer. After three years, Arteta took the Arsenal job and began to apply what he’d learnt from the master.
Arteta is intense too, and almost as tactically sophisticated, although he does everything in a more rigid, methodical way than his former boss. Within a few years, he transformed a club that was in danger of dropping out of the Premier League’s top tier, into the second strongest team in the country. In the race for the league title, Arsenal came second to City twice. Last season, for a change, they came second to Liverpool.
This year it seemed as if the stars had finally aligned. Arsenal have been top of the league and favourite to win the title since September. Manchester City have been, by their standards, inconsistent and sputtering. Liverpool are nowhere. Finally, Arsenal were about to win their first title since 2004, and the pupil was about to best his master.
But over the last few weeks, this prospect has been thrown into severe doubt. Manchester City are now breathing hotly down Arsenal’s neck. If they win their next two games, including their game against Arsenal, they will go top of the league with only a few games to go.
If this turnaround is completed, multiple reasons will be proposed for it, including differences in squad depth and the allocation of luck. But I think the real difference will be in team psychology, as derived from the team’s respective managers.
