The winning blueprint: How Lionel Messi can triumph at the World Cup

In that final, in Spain in July, the Netherlands beat Argentina 3-1. Eva de Goede, who had a crucial role in the move, had seen it and done it all before as a double world champion and a triple Olympic gold medallist, yet she described it as “one of the most amazing team-play goals I’ve ever been a part of in the whole of my career” and she is not just talking about the accuracy, the movement, the vision, the finish or the sheer, stunning beauty of it.

“If you watched that team,” she says, “you would never know what was going on.” Indeed you wouldn’t. They looked so brilliantly connected. Yet the reason it was an “amazing” piece of team play was largely because that Dutch team had been so indignantly unconnected, so bitterly divided. Yet they understood exactly what it takes to become world champions.

There are seven present world champions from seven sports involved in this story. And “present” is important, here, as we shall see.

What was striking when asking such a diverse group of winners their story – how did you do it? – was that not one of them talked initially about the intricacies of what happened on the field of play, the team formations, tactics, technique or their superstar players. They all go straight for the meaning of being a “team”.

They talk about tightness and trust, and before you think that this article is just a repeat of old cliches about the strength of the sisterhood or being a band of brothers, what was also striking was the uniform insistence that being a team doesn’t mean you have to be friends. The great Australia cricket teams of the past three decades were not mates. De Goede’s Dutch hockey team were quite the opposite; they were nearly torn in two. The South Africa rugby team is drawn from such racial and cultural diversity that many of them speak different languages. In Qatar, the Morocco team were the same, yet they were perhaps the strongest unit in the whole World Cup.

“You completely don’t have to be friends, far from it,” Eoin Morgan, the captain of England’s one-day cricket world champions, says. “The day I play in a team when everyone gets along, I think there’s an issue. If everything was friendly and great, it would be too easy and it wouldn’t work.”

When you ask Morgan the “Jenga” question – what single element would have made your team collapse if you had withdrawn it? – he doesn’t say Ben Stokes or Jofra Archer. He says, immediately: “The level of trust.”

Francois Louw, the Springbok World Cup winner, gives a similar answer. “Our alignment,” is how he puts it.

Jenny Levy, the coach of the United States women’s lacrosse world champions, touches on a similar theme. “We were all about the group as a whole rather than one person,” she says. And, no, that’s not exactly advanced teamship. But then she explains how that works: “By not having a single captain but having a number of captains or leaders.”

This was a kind of a breaking of the mould; it established officially that no single player was a bigger star than any other. She decided on five captains; they rotated the traditional captaincy responsibilities, and as a result leadership and ownership became widely ingrained. “There was probably one person or two who thought they should have been the solo captain,” she says, “and that’s probably why they weren’t.”

Think of this US lacrosse team and then Argentina and Messi. They could hardly be more different.

Jukka Jalonen, the Finland national ice hockey coach, achieved a similar balance of responsibility and trust to the US lacrosse team, but in a different way. Under his coaching reign Finland have won three world championships. Canada and Russia are generally recognised as producing more individual superstar players, yet Jalonen’s “Finnish Lions” are the Olympic and world champions. The way he manages his squad creates both teamship and a distinctive national style of play.

“Maybe we are not as skilful as other teams,” he says, “but there are lots of things other than skill: how we co-operate, how hard we play, how we do it together. We don’t give the opponent time on the puck, we put pressure on straight away. So people hate to play against us.”

How so? When an ice hockey squad of 20 is rotated during a game, it is traditional for the better players to have more time on the ice, which creates a pecking order. Jalonen, however, has a flat power structure, rotating his squad in four units of five on a largely equal basis. “Everybody is playing,” he says. “Everybody is involved, everyone is respected, everyone is equally valued. That is very good for team spirit. It’s a mental thing but also a physical thing.”

It’s a physical thing because it means the team are less fatigued at the end of games, which makes an impact particularly in tournament hockey when the team have games on consecutive nights. Finland, thus, hardly ever lose the third and final period. “When we are physical at the end of the game,” Jalonen says, “it is a little competitive edge for us.”

What has all this got to do with Sunday’s World Cup final between France and Argentina? Clearly it is all about team culture. Club football sometimes struggles in this area, particularly at the very top level, where players of so many nationalities and languages are blended into one group. In international football, however, its impact can be huge. It is one key area where Gareth Southgate has been conspicuously successful with the England team. In Qatar, where there was so little time to work on tactics and game patterns, the strength of “trust” was even more influential than normal. Look what happened to Belgium, who failed to qualify for the knockout stage.

There are untold ways and means to avoid doing a Belgium. Go to a different extreme like the Switzerland tug-of-war team. This is an amateur sport, which means that trust – that your teammates are (literally) pulling their weight in training – is huge. To build that, they therefore go ski touring together in the off season. “You have to be like one big family,” says Ueli Christen, who is a player-coach in the under-640kg (light-middleweight) category.

And how does that play out in a world championship? Christen recalls the final, in Birmingham, US, in July, against England. They had noticed that two of the England team, pulling at No 6 and No 7, would tire after four or five minutes. “So we said we have to wait a bit and not go on full attack,” he says. That required belief, trust and patience, “because then it will be much easier to make an attack. This is how it played out.”

This is how it was for De Goede and the Dutch team on the eve of the 2014 hockey World Cup, which was held in the Netherlands: they spent a night camping out inside the main stadium where the games were to be played. “That was something special to us,” she says. “It really gave us a feeling that this is our home, we’ve shared special moments together here and no one is going to beat us here.”

When speaking to these world champions, though, you realise that winning isn’t enough. Or rather, it helps if collectively you are driven by more than owning a shiny medal or having the title of “world champion” by your name.

“I genuinely don’t think the guys were completely after silverware,” Morgan says. “It was more what we could do together without the end goal being winning.”

Morgan puts this into context in the heat of the Lord’s final against New Zealand in 2019, just before Archer was about to bowl England’s Super Over. “Jos [Buttler] came over,” he says, “jovial as anything, ‘Hope your pockets are full of shamrocks.’ Adil [Rashid] was standing next to us, so I said, ‘No, Allah’s with us.’ And Adil said, ‘Allah’s always with us.’ We all had a laugh and a joke, a bit of fun and this was in the biggest moment of our playing careers. That’s almost a better feeling than lifting a trophy.”

Nikolaj Jacobsen has won two handball world championships as Denmark coach and the first, in 2019, on home turf, had a very specific purpose: “To create a very big, happy party for everyone at home.”

For De Goede and the Dutch hockey team, it is always about inspiring young girls to pursue their sport. This is not uncommon. For the lacrosse World Championship in Maryland, US, in July, the American team, Levy says, saw themselves as “pioneers for the game”. This made theirs an altruistic, rather than selfish, quest. “They were playing for something bigger than themselves,” she says, which then also translated into the way they played. “One of our rallying cries was to play this very exciting, electric style of game that kids would want to come out and see.”

This sense of greater purpose cannot be much greater than that given to the Springboks at the World Cup in 2019. It is all there, in the documentary Chasing the Sun, with every f-word employed by Rassie Erasmus, the head coach, milked to its full effect. This is his call to arms to the team before the quarter-final against Japan: “These guys [Japan] do it [want to win] because they want to grow rugby. F***ing we want to do it because we want to save our f***ing country. We want to do it because we have f***ing 27 per cent unemployment. We’ve got 14 f***ing murders a day. They [Japan] have 120 million people and are one of the richest countries in the world. It’s pissing me off that they think that gives them the right.”

This explains what Louw meant by alignment: aligned to a collective purpose. “We have our huge diversity of cultures and individuals yet we’re in the room together as brothers,” Louw says. “We were a team of individuals who were a collective.

“So when we got to the final against England, it was so much about us. There is a camera shot, from when we are walking up the tunnel before coming out, with [the captains] Siya Kolisi and Owen Farrell at the front, waiting. The camera is facing straight down to them and what you see is every single South African player looking directly ahead of them; not once did they look at the opposition. Look at the other side, there’s a nice freeze-frame and Owen Farrell is looking over, so is George Ford. There are three or four England players looking over and sizing up the opposition. But for us, it was about us; it wasn’t about England. That is how we framed it.”

You wonder, for France and Argentina on Sunday: how exactly are they framing it? Are France really even framing it all? Argentina certainly are; even without saying so, they have Messi at the centre of the frame; the fulfilment of Messi is like a noble national cause.

Also finally, and crucially perhaps: how do they communicate? Because, on the playing fields of the modern day, this is also what makes world champions.

Jacobsen’s Denmark handball team learnt the hard way, by coming fourth in his first tournament in charge, in 2018. “We had some serious talks after it,” he says. “We had to be able to demand more of each other. But if we can’t demand something without someone getting angry, then we are not a good team.”

Likewise Morgan’s England. He recalls the early days of his career and “the tough generation of going out there and gutsing something out. When I came into the team, it was actually very difficult to understand where people were at because no one talked about it.”

By 2016, he still hadn’t become the complete master of communication, as he says himself of the famous denouement to the T20 World Cup final against West Indies when Ben Stokes gave up four consecutive sixes to Carlos Braithwaite. “I gave Ben the final over. I’ve watched that tape back a thousand times. I’ve always thought, ‘What if I took more time with him to make sure he was in a good space, to make sure he had parked the previous ball mentally and is refocusing on what he is doing?’

“What I do now is to hold on to the ball for as long as I can – and then chuck the guy the ball. Even if I have to walk over to slow things down, I do that.”

Thus, in the 2019 50-over final, before Archer bowled his Super Over, Morgan changed his own fielding position so he could be closer to Archer. “After he had bowled that first ball [a wide], I walked over, slowed things down. He was losing his head a bit. I was listening. Get him back into the present and have him trusting in what I was saying – that was a big thing.”

There won’t be a single player in the World Cup final who doesn’t possess toughness and resilience – but those concepts are being redefined in modern sport. And this is what the story of the Dutch women’s hockey team is all about. They may have won the Olympic gold last year but they sacked their coach afterwards and instigated an inquest into the team culture.

De Goede has straddled two eras and had to learn fast. “I look at my younger years,” she says, “when coaches would shout at me. I didn’t enjoy it that much. I would shrug it off, go home and cry to my parents. But that would be it; I’d suck it up and start again tomorrow. It would never come into my mind that I could say anything about it.”

Yet for the new generation, this has changed, and it is this that created the split in the team. “We lost the human side with each other,” De Goede says. “It’s a fine line between what is OK and what is not and I hadn’t realised that much before. If you want to be the best, you are in an environment where you ask a lot of yourself and others. You are talking about winning a gold medal, you have to be demanding. But some girls were scared to speak up and say that it was too much for them.

“There is a switch in the generation. There are more topics nowadays that are more openly talked about: being able to share, be vulnerable. In the past you would not mention it and just crack on.”

That is why that Dutch third goal represents so much. It was a team with a purpose, a team with a mission, a team who were definitely not friends; nevertheless, a team who were learning to be modern and to debunk old dogma, a team who had moved far enough that, by that final against Argentina, they delivered their best performance.

Maybe some of that makes for a blueprint for the next football world champions.

– The Times

Originally published as The winning blueprint: How Lionel Messi can triumph at the World Cup