How to make your team more creative
- Matt Pain
- 08 January 2020
Former FA psychology research manager, Matt Pain, presents the key findings on how to make your team more creative.
There is a small but steadily growing body of research, coming mainly out of Germany and partly funded by the German Football Association (The DFB), that looks specifically at creativity in team sports. These are some of the key findings to date.
1. Creative players spend greater time in play-type activitiesCurrent theory suggests that a diversified sport experience helps to develop creative thinking. Daniel Memmert and colleagues investigated this idea by looking at the practice histories of 72 professional players from a range of team sports including football.
Coaches were asked to select the most creative and the least creative players from their teams. Creative behaviour was defined in terms of: (a) unusualness, innovativeness, statistical rareness or even uniqueness of tactical solutions to a game related task; and (b) varying and flexible tactical solutions over different complex game situations.
Both groups of players then provided information about the quantity and type of sport-specific and other related practice activities undertaken throughout their ‘careers’ – from the age of five upwards.
Results indicated (see table 1 below) significant differences between the two groups for time spent in play type activities and a marginally significant difference for total time spent in training activities for their main sport. In both cases, more creative players accumulated greater hours than their less creative counterparts.
Overall, the results show that deliberate practice and unstructured play-like involvement both have crucial roles for the development of creative behaviour in team sports.
| Highly Creative | Less Creative | |
| Career sport involvement | ||
| Begin training (age) | 6.54 | 7.45 |
| Main sport involvement (years) | 16.97 | 16.27 |
| Main sport involvement (hours) | 6842.86 | 5454.70 |
| Number of other sports | 3.49 | 3.71 |
| Play-type activities (hours) | 2857.00 | 1954.97 |
| Training activities (hours) | 3544.03 | 3146.39 |
| Early sport involvement (<14) | ||
| Play-type activities | 1340.51 | 842.14 |
| Training activities | 977.40 | 888.45 |
2. Creative players have a wider focus of attentionA wide focus of attention is important in enabling players to see a range of opportunities in a sport environment. According to Daniel Memmert, “Creative players set themselves apart in situations such as the following: although they may actually intend to pass the ball to player B, they are able to perceive at the last minute that player C is suddenly unmarked and better positioned and pass the ball to them instead.”
Failure to spot player C is called inattentional blindness and practical tests show that higher ability and more creative children are less prone to this blindness than less creative and lower ability children.
Although still in the early stages, research suggests that focus of attention could be a strong predictor for developing advantages in creative thinking in team ball sports. Interestingly, experiments in handball demonstrate that more tactical instructions from the coach can lead to a narrower breadth of attention, increasing inattentional blindness, whereas fewer tactical instructions widen the breadth of attention.
3. Creativity can be improved using specially designed activitiesFollowing on from finding 1, the first intervention study looked at the impact of diverse, self-determined, playful environments. A total of 33 children, aged 8-9 years old, engaged in a programme to improve creative behaviour in team ball sports. The programme consisted of one hour a week of game-based (playful), discovery learning activities (self-determined) across four sports: football, basketball, handball and hockey (diverse).
The lead researcher Daniel Memmert explained, “The games are constructed in such a way that the situations speak to the children. The teachers give only the idea and the rules of the games, nothing more, i.e. no special tactical advice or any kind of feedback.”
Game-test scenarios designed to assess creativity in off the ball movement and identification of space showed a high increase in creative thinking compared to a control group.
Following from finding 2, the second intervention study looked at whether creativity could be improved by an attention-broadening training program. The six-month intervention focused on the type of instruction given by the coach. In the broadening condition, no explicit tactical advice or information relating to focus of attention was given.
In the narrowing condition, explicit tactical advice and correctional feedback was given which inhibited children from directing their attention to different kinds of stimuli that could inspire unique and original solutions to game related problems. In line with theory, the attention-broadening group showed greater divergent thinking and creativity in subsequent game-test scenarios.
This article was first published in The Boot Room magazine in December 2013.
