Cry for Me(ssi), Barcelona: Cultural influences behind La Pulga's exit
/The greatest transfer speculation in soccer’s recent (or possibly all) history has finally happened and the 6 time Ballon d’Or award winner has made his move to PSG from the club he joined as a 13 year old. Earlier this month, Barcelona said that Messi will not be staying at the club “because of financial and structural obstacles”. However, it’s not the timing or the transfer fee which grabbed my attention; it was the tears in the final interview as a Barcelona player.
A tearful Lionel Messi confirmed he was leaving Barcelona after 21 years at his farewell press conference. "This is the most difficult moment of my sporting career,” he told press and public, and I believe him, seemingly understanding how influential Barcelona has been on his life and development
My family and I were convinced I wanted to stay here, that’s what we all wanted more than anything. We thought we’d be staying here in Barcelona, today I have to say goodbye to all of this. We’ve always made this our home, we’re at home and we thought we’d be staying here in Barcelona.
I’ve been here so many years, my entire life since I was 13. After 21 years, I’m leaving with my wife, my three little Catalan-Argentine kids, and I can’t tell you we won’t come back because this is my home, and I promised my children that. I tried to behave with humility and respect, and I hope that is what remains of me when I leave the club.
A lot of ideas and comments have now been made around his transfer and final interview yet I wanted to look at into where these tears may have come from or why there was this sense of despair in leaving a club he almost forced his way out of last year. Barcelona FC has a famous history of player development, Messi among many others entering the club through the famous La Masia. From 1979 to 2009, 440 youngsters have left their homes and families to stay at the academy; Of those 440, 40 made it into Barcelona's first team. On 25 November 2012, for the first time, Barcelona fielded all eleven players that have come up through La Masia in a La Liga match; is this feat solely down to a style of play or is there more cultural influences at play?
Looking at FC Barcleona’s philosophy for player development, it was heavily influenced by ideology and strategies put in place by the great Johan Cruyff. He is previously quoted as saying:
“It all starts with the youth. It has to be fun for them or it makes no sense. Young players are eager to learn and they will dream of playing on the first team, so motivation is already in place. If you have proper training and coaching in place, then these youngsters will learn to dominate the ball and also learn about position play.
Maybe the most important thing is what you see in somebody. You need to pay attention to where he comes from; you need to see his character. You also need to see his habits – how does he behave and what can he handle?
It should be about what it was about for us back then – fun. You can test yourself against your friends, your neighbors and maybe someday even against the world’s best. We want to help children reach their potential and then see where they stand relative to other players. We must be patient and we must focus on developing good players and good people. If we can help clubs and countries do that, then I think we have accomplished something important for the children.”
This philosophy and ideas have been previously explored by former University of Queensland HRD student James Vaughan; he drew upon his experiences in football atmospheres within Stockholm, Sweden and Barcelona, Spain while completing his PhD in Creativity & Motivation in football and looking at how cultural aspects & influences affect the ability to create a culture or climate of creativity. Interestingly, Cruyff looks at and addresses some of the points observed by Vaughan throughout his time at Barcelona; form of life or cultural influences and the importance of this within coaching context and the importance of creative, playful atmospheres for youth engagement and development. These ideas made me consider and question, how did these factors play into seeing one of the greatest ever players be in tears to leave this home of 21 years? What cultural or coaching influences created such a strong bond to see Messi in tears to leave? What coaching methodologies could we introduce or adopt to see this level of commitment and passion towards our team or club culture?
One of the points I have looked into and previously discussed was looking at the fine balance between form of life or cultural environment versus constraint led practices implemented by coaches. Especially at FC Barcelona, Vaughan observed and discussed the use of skilful manipulation of sociocultural constraints, where the form of life or environmental conditions surrounding the club could both constrain or afford creative moments, akin to Rietveld & Kiversten’s research (2014). I believe this again shows the socially dynamic role of the coaches; both acknowledging the pull of form of life surrounding strong club and locality cultures while adopting game based or constraint led learning approach to set goals and reward actions for the behaviour you want to see from your players. However, as mentioned, it is perceived as important that the coaches are mindful and present for their adopted coaching methodologies and adopt the form of life offered from the coaching scenarios offered as opposed ignoring the sociocultural embeddedness and forcing your ideologies on the group, akin to Cruyff’s ideals of needing to pay attention to where players come from. In basic words, coach where your feet are and be present & engaged with you athletes; coaches involved in Messi’s development such as Pep Guardiola as an example engaged Messi as an individual while ensuring the development of the club’s philosophy and style of play in their exchanges.
Looking at the importance of creative, playful atmospheres for youth engagement and development, Vaughan has previously discussed as part of UQ’s student group discussions around the adopted practices of FC Barcelona’s youth sides. James discussed and supported the focus on “how to play” and performance outcomes were presented in game based activities or other forms of non-linear pedagogy. From these discussions, I believe that skill adaptability and attunement IS creativity in action; the focus was more around allowing the form of life or cultural influences to be an expression of how the teams played and developed. This could be seen as trying to balance external influences from coaches towards player development and answering individual’s basic needs theory to answer their intrinsic motivation and strivings. How did Barcelona FC create such passion and motivation for Messi to both develop as a player and engaged person, acknowledging and embracing the cultural influences Barca life had to offer?
Previous research shows intrinsic motivation leads to greater persistence, improved performance and enhanced well-being in a physical setting. While intrinsic motivation stems from innate physiological need of competency and represents the prototype of self-determined behaviour, self-determined extrinsic motivators, which are extrinsic motivators which have been internally rationalised with oneself, become activities which are carried out as important and concordant to one’s values (Mageau, 2003). It has been researched that changes to people’s perceptions of competence and self-determination (relatedness and autonomy) should increase intrinsic motivations and player identification, an important area identified by FC Barcelona as part of the Catalan community. Self-determined forms of motivation also result in optimal behaviour, resulting in peak performance and persistence (Deci and Ryan, 2008), applicable to these age grade programs as these qualities should result in improved player well-being and how players collectively engage and behave within the sport, enough to generate tears when players like Messi leave.
Back to the coaching methodologies; many of these mentioned coaching methods and Cruyff’s strategies stemmed around autonomy supportive practices. As mentioned, while there is a focus on environment and development strategies, there is also a shift in player interaction through looking at autonomy supportive practices to help build on Cruyff’s focus areas of building on player behaviour, preparation and mindset as part of development process. As I have mentioned before, I believe coaches should assist players to identify problems as opposed to solving them, offering ideas and assistance for how to think and act as opposed to offering solutions. As Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi’s research addressed, creative people are driven by discovery and creation of problems as opposed to superior skills or ability. Therefore, coaches could adopt ideas from Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), where this theory has the coach standing as a recognised more capable other to the athlete with their requirement being to engage in contextual collaborative and learning relationship with athletes to ensure optimal psychological functioning for maximal sporting performance. This theory encourages players to ask questions and adopt sub routines; therefore, the players are taking over the structure of tasks and practice while acquiring performance or transfer of performance. This again allows coaches to act as mentors, supporting players to develop metacognitive skills where the athletes are aware of and take responsibility of appropriate practices and thinking strategies. These ideas towards player development helps support creative players and passionate club members as displayed by Messi over his 20+ years at this club.
How does this translate or what does it mean for coaches? How can we as coaches introduce some of these ideas in our daily practice to develop the passion displayed by Messi into our environments? What small steps or initial ideas can we introduce to allow our athletes to explore and find new information, ideas or techniques to overcome task, environmental or individual constraints while being passionate and attuned to cultural influences? Akin to my research findings, plus comments made by Vaughan and Cliff Mallett in other research papers, understanding, appreciating and embracing the uniqueness of individuals and their cultures or identity in their development and environment design, allows us as coaches to focus on interactions, relationships and creating engaging and motivating scenarios for our athletes to test and seek new information. Research by Mageau and Vallerand regards the “actions of coaches as (possibly) the most critical motivational influences within sport setting”. Coaching should be recognised as an educational dynamic relationship, where the coach can satisfy player’s goals (or needs) and development but both sides have an investment of will capital, where human initiative and intentionality are both dedicated to show commitment towards goals and relationships. The role of performance coaches for professional, HP athletes is highly important; coaches are “preparing athletes for consistent high-level competitive performance” (Côté, 2009) through effective tactics such as integration of professional, interpersonal, and intrapersonal knowledge and developing player’s specific competence, confidence, connection, and character needs on regular basis. This awareness and focus on Messi’s interpersonal interactions certainly helped developed an engaged and committed player to Barcelona’s cause for the past 20 years, bringing both personal and collective development and success as a result.
These discussed ideas are great starting points for coaches as they describe how these dynamic coaching techniques are reflective and cyclical in nature, having to constantly review and adjust accordingly, plus puts the athlete’s current needs front and centre for training design. Remember coaches; Give yourself a break, this IS complex! As we well know, coaching all sports yet especially team sports is periodic or seasonal by nature. Within age grade sports particularly, you shall be exposed to new players each season or be experiencing players as they develop and go through different stages of personality development. Like suggested, we need to offer our athletes experiences and learning opportunities to adapt, adjust and self organise based on current their current motivations and capabilities to create better people as well as athletes. Treating your involved athletes as unique people as well as athletes shall hopefully get continual development progression and sustained enjoyment and maybe some tears if or when they move on from your environments.
If you’re interested in these coaching subjects or research around coaching practices, I encourage you to look up University of Queensland Coaching and Sport Psychology home page; it offers information as to how to join the research team and current projects with different sporting organisations, looking at areas such as:
Positive psychology with a focus on self-determination theory, autonomy-supportive learning environments, and mental toughness
Coach development using psycho-social and pedagogical frameworks such as workplace learning theories
Conceptualisations of leadership and culture in performance sport settings
The learning of sport participants in varying settings (e.g. action sports, Indigenous sport) through pedagogical and socio-cultural approaches
The development of mental skills for performance enhancement, life satisfaction, and self-worth
Sport for development
This year, UQ was ranked as Australia’s top university for sports-related subjects for the third consecutive year, and rose from third to second in the world so there’s never been a better time to join our research team, regardless of your subject interest.