What Can Football and Rugby Coaches Learn From Chess Grandmasters?

Player development in football, rugby and the other invasion-territorial team sports is a complex process. Expertise in these types of sports is very multi-dimensional so that increasingly coaches are moving away from a concentration on just technical skills and fitness to embrace a more holistic approach. The English FA advocates the Four-Corner Model (Technical, Physical, Psychological and Social) as a general framework for guiding the development pathway of all players regardless of age or ability. I prefer to think in terms of the four A’s – Ability, Athleticism, Attitude and Awareness – in order to highlight the importance of decision making i.e. awareness of the “right” thing to do in any given match situation. My basic question is whether or not coaches in football and rugby put enough emphasis on the development of the decision-making skills of players.

Players have to make a myriad of instant decisions in a match, particularly in those invasion-territorial team sports characterised by continuous open play. At one extreme is American football which is effectively a sequence of one-phase set plays that can be choreographed in advance and mostly puts the onus for in-game decision-making on the coaches not the players. The coach writes a detailed script and players have to learn their lines exactly with little room for improvisation. By contrast (association) football is at the opposite end of the spectrum with few set plays and mostly open play with continuous transition between attack and defence; in other words, continuous improvisation. Rugby union has more scope for choreographed set plays at lineouts and scrums but thereafter the game transitions into multi-phase open play. Continuous open play puts the onus firmly on players rather than coaches for in-game decision-making. Players must continuously decide on their optimal positioning as well as making instant decisions on what to do with the ball when they are in possession. This demands ultra-fast expert problem-solving abilities to make the right choice based on an acute sense of spatial awareness.

How can football and rugby coaches facilitate the development of ultra-fast expert problem-solving abilities? One possible source of guidance is chess, an area of complex problem-solving that has been researched extensively and has thrown up important and sometimes surprising insights into the nature of expertise. The traditional view has been that grandmasters in chess are extraordinarily gifted calculators with almost computer-like abilities to very quickly consider the possible outcomes of alternative moves, able to project the likely consequences many moves ahead. But, starting with the pioneering research in the 1950s/60s of, amongst others, De Groot and Herbert Simon, a psychologist who won the Nobel Prize for Economics, we now have a very different view of what makes a grandmaster such an effective problem solver. Four key points have emerged from the research on perception in chess:

1. Chess grandmasters do not undertake more calculations than novices and intermediate-ability players. If anything grandmasters make fewer calculations but yet are much more able to intuitively select the right move.
2. The source of expertise of chess grandmasters and masters lies in their ability to recognise patterns in games and to associate a specific pattern with an optimal move. Both De Groot and Simon tested the abilities of chess players of different standards to recall board positions after a very brief viewing. In the case of mid-game positions from actual games with 24 – 26 pieces on the board, masters were able to correctly recall around 16 pieces on their first attempt whereas intermediate-ability players averaged only eight pieces and novices just four pieces. Yet when confronted with 24 – 26 pieces randomly located on the board, there was virtually no difference in the recall abilities between players of different playing abilities with all players averaging only around four pieces correctly remembered. There is a logic to the positioning of pieces in actual games which expert players can appreciate and exploit in retrieving similar patterns from games stored in their long-term memory and identifying the best move. This competitive advantage disappears when pieces are located randomly and, by definition, can never have any relevant precedents for guidance.
3. Further investigation shows that expert chess players store board positions in their memories as “chunks” consisting of around three mutually related pieces with pieces related by defensive dependency, attacking threats, proximity, colour or type. Since there is a logic to how pieces are grouped in memory chunks, grandmasters tend to need fewer chunks to remember a board position compared to lesser players.
4. Simon estimated that a grandmaster needs at least 50,000 chunks of memory of patterns from actual games but probably many more and that this would require at least 10 years (or 10,000 hours) of constant practice.

The 10-year/10,000-hours rule to become an expert is now very widely known amongst coaches and indeed has been very influential in planning the long-term development of athletes. Much of the recent popularisation of the 10-year/10,000-hours rule is associated with Ericsson’s work on musical expertise. What is often forgotten is that Ericsson was originally inspired by Simon’s work in chess and indeed Ericsson went on to study under Simon. So our understanding of problem-solving in chess is already having an impact on player development in team sports albeit largely unacknowledged.

Chess grandmasters acquire their expertise in practical problem-solving by spending thousands of hours studying actual match positions and evaluating the moves made. Football and rugby coaches responsible for player development need to ask themselves if their coaching programmes are allocating enough time to developing game-intelligence in open play under match conditions. Not only do players need to analyse the videos of their own decision-making in games but they also need to build up their general knowledge of match positions and the decision-making of top players by continually studying match videos. And this analysis of decision-making should not be limited to the classroom. Improved decision-making should be a key learning outcome in all training sessions involving open play under match conditions.

Note

This post was originally written in June 2016 but never published. It may seem a little dated now but I think the essential insights remain valid. I am a qualified football coach (UEFA B License) and coached for several years from Under 5s through to college level before concentrating on providing data analysis to coaches. I have always considered my coaching experience to have been a key factor in developing effective analyst-coach relationships at the various teams with which I have worked.