The Aggregation of Marginal Gains: Every Little Helps

Do you kind of want it? Would it be nice to have? Is it something to do if it fits in with your schedule? These are not the words or sentiments of champions. Champions get up early. Champions go to bed late. Champions risk everything. Champions make sacrifices. Do you?

In this piece I will talk about marginal gains. This is the idea that everything positive you do can benefit the team and individuals over time, by making every aspect just a tiny bit better.

Here's an American to help us understand better.

It's actually a fairly easy concept to grasp, and probably something we strive for in many areas, yet don't realise we're doing it. Like in order to become a better person, one might learn a new language, exercise more regularly, spend more time with family, dedicate more time to sleeping, be more organised, not make stupid purchases, plan a better diet etc. There are many more examples, but think of how more wonderful you would be with better sleep, better diet, were fitter, healthier, more social, were better with money. By affecting every area, even just a little, you suddenly realise what a massive step forward you have taken.

Remember the South Park episode where the boys came together to defeat the nerd on World of Warcraft? Sacrifice, determination, teamwork in abundance, but they spent hours in the forest killing wild boars as it slowly improved their XP, helping them level up.

Some steps are easier than others, which depends heavily on both the difficulty of the task and also the incentive. People tend to work harder for positive reward rather than negative punishment, so it is easier to fund money for a holiday than it is to pay bulls. There's always that one idiot who claims to be hard up, yet still has enough for a pint and some cigarettes. The rationale is that we would rather look for that reward, for that thrill, in the here and now, as opposed to making sacrifices for the long run.

The term first entered the public lexicon around 2012 following the success of the British Cycling Team.

No one is going to credit the victory to having the right kind of seat, are they? "It's all down to the fact that my bum felt one percent better throughout this race. Thank you." So what's the point in doing it, right?

Due to the success of British cycling,

road users now have to endure this.

Before then, if you said to someone "let's make everything within our control just that tiny bit better" they would probably reply with "yeah, I reckon that will work". Now it has become the obsession of top level athletes and coaches all over the world. There is no more reckon. This is a way of life. Do you know that top athletes even have their pillows and mattresses customised? If gives them a better night's sleep, aids recovery, and creates a sense of familiarity and routine. Could you really be bothered to do that? Neither can the athletes, but the teams spend huge amounts of money on rearranging hotels and creating sleeping pods for their players, just to gain that extra little advantage. Just to gain that one inch.

Where do we start? List absolutely everything that is in your control, or at least have a small influence over. Now get rid of whatever seems immoral. Are there any lines you won't cross? I will never encourage my players to hound the referee in the hope we may get one extra decision go our way in a game. I don't want to win that way. Erase anything on that list that crosses your lines. Now, split everything into two piles. What can you change immediately, and what will change over time? Right now I can make sure that all players wear shinpads in every training session. They all have them, and that is the rule. Instant change, instant gain. What else? We can definitely do a cool down at the end of each session. We know how to do that, so can begin immediately.

Aristotle.

What about the things that will take more time? Here we have components such as stamina, tactical discipline, decision making etc. And break these down. Make them very specific. Now create a timeline. Base it on the ability and potential of the players, the time you have with them per week, and when you feel you should be achieving it. Anything that can be tested and quantified should be. Regular fitness tests to help the team reach that goal.

Below are some examples of how we can gain that extra inch. Take a look, and see which ones you can implement. This list is by no means exhaustive. And remember, you can have excuses or results, not both.

Training:

• Arrive early.
• Have everything set up ready before you begin.
• Begin on time, not five minutes past.

• 

  Fight together, and fight for every inch.

  Time breaks at only thirty seconds, rather than just letting them go.
• Have a drinks area so that no one has to run off to the other side of the field.
• Limit your instructional talks to no more than thirty seconds.
• Learn key words and establish phrases to help minimise time spent talking, and to avoid information overload.
• Have pumped up balls and good equipment.
• Enforce a no talking or other distractions rule. This keeps focus and high intensity, and allows you to get your point across in thirty seconds or less without stopping and having to tell them to shut up.
• Enforce a no complaining rule, or a no whining zone. Negativity spreads like wildfire and can destroy performances.
• Have an agreed upon set of rules so you don't have to waste time thinking if a player should be disciplined or not. If the boundaries are clear, it is easier to tell if they have bee overstepped.
• Do not do anything too complicated as it confuses them, which slows down the intensity, and wastes time which could otherwise be spent playing. If you really have to do something complicated, build upon it over time, so the players can recall the previous steps in weeks gone by.

  

  Who is the coach and who are the players?

• Wear training kit. Then everyone feels like a team, and is more likely to be in a high performing mindset, rather than a piss about with your mates frame of mind.
• Have a routine and stick to it, making transitions easier from one part of the session. For example thirty minutes fitness, thirty minutes technical, thirty minutes tactical, thirty minutes small sided game. The players know what to expect, and it makes planning easier.
• Always plan, and always have a backup plan. Always include progressions and regressions if it is too easy or too difficult.
• Make the session fluid so that all you have to do is pick up one or two cones, then you can move into the next exercise, rather than having to lay everything out again.
• Have the coaches easily identifiable. Make them stand out. If the players are in red, have the coaching staff in yellow. Who here is the coach? Oh him over there in the yellow. Easy.
• Have others around you to share the workload. When you have important decisions to make and a whole group of players that need your keen eye, you can't waste time arsing around with administration duties. Someone else can figure out player registrations. You get in there and coach or observe what needs to be done.
• Play with nets and fences so that time isn't wasted getting the balls.

Cool down. Definitely not a scientific masterpiece.

Like I said, not exhaustive, but all this done in conjunction will make for better training sessions. Over two hours, you will spend about ten minutes more playing and training, rather than arsing about. Six sessions, and you have clawed back an extra hour of practice from all that previously wasted time. Not to mention that the quality will be about ten percent better too, as it will be more intense.

Bikers.

Every little gain has a knock on effect that manifests itself into other areas. It's like a snowball rolling downhill. We will complain that our players act a certain way, like they are lazy or distracted, and how that ruins sessions, and that we waste too much time explaining things again and going over mistakes, but what if we broke it down and tried to find out why? Do you let them get away with it when they are late? Do you let them train in the wrong kit or the wrong shoes? Are they stood around for ages while you talk endless rubbish about the Austrian Wunderteam of the thirties, and that you like the ideas of Brendan Rogers, but just think he's a bit of an idiot, and that actually the Germans dominated football in the seventies, not the Dutch? We've all seen it. Some of us will have done that ourselves. It's time to stop. When explaining a game, this is all you need to mention; the area, the teams, the rules, how to score. Play.

It all adds up. Look at dny successful coach, and you will notice their attention to detail. They care about things that you would not have deemed important or worthy of even caring about. They focus on the finer details. If you get the little things right, the big things will fall into place.

Now let's have a look at how we can apply the principles to performances within a game. We have just made training more effective and you can notice the differences in the players.

This speech will never not work.

• Thorough warm up - Better mentally and physically prepared going into the game. More switched on in the first ten minutes. Could prevent two early goals in a season. Not much.
• Thorough cool down - Better chance at preventing injury. Means our players will miss less games and will suffer less overuse injuries. May get an extra two games out of two players by avoiding injury. One of them could be an important player who goes on to score one winning goal in a game they may have been injured in.

  

  Fail and come back stronger.

• High pressure - Better organisation and quicker to the ball in the opposition half of the field. It may win us a corner or so per game. If we work on the idea that five corners equals one goal, over five games, we may score one extra goal from forcing errors in their defence.
• Tracking back - Sometimes the defence can deal with it, but we need to prevent overloads. By following your runner, you could stop them from scoring. You could do it one hundred times and only intercept the ball once, but if everyone does it, we could prevent one goal per game.
• Set pieces - It depends on the level at which you play, but goals coming from free kicks and corners account for a significant proportion of goals scored. Better organisation in attack and defence may score us an extra four goals per season, and it may prevent four goals per season.
• Fitness - Certainly killed us on Sunday. If we had ninety three minutes in us rather than just ninety, we win the game 1-0. Our opponent continued for all ninety three minutes, scoring two goals in injury time and winning 2-1. Being fitter might only prevent five goals per season.

• 

  SWP and Lampard, now featuring in Gangs of New York.

  Analysis - Can be time consuming and boring, but worth doing. Videos of games, highlighting team and individual performances, showing errors and how we can adapt certain aspects of the game. For example, looking at the attacking runs of the wingers might enable them to put in an extra cross or two per game. Not much, but it is an inch worth gaining. Both wingers put in two extra crosses per game, that's four more crosses for the CF to run onto, that could give us an extra goal every other game.
• Know your role - If every player has a little bit of a better understanding of their roles and responsibilities, they improve their performance. Even as much as five percent per player would be like having an extra half player on the pitch. Improve every player performance by ten percent and we are then figuratively playing twelve versus eleven. How much would it help to have an extra player on the pitch? Especially against tough teams, we would love to play with twelve. Even if it seems unimportant, like the right defender and the left defender bombing forward to join in with attacks, it gives us another player in an attacking area. That's another resource. That puts the odds slightly more in our favour. Overlapping fullbacks may only give us an extra goal per three games.

These are just some examples, but I will add it up, using a twenty game season to make the numbers easier.

Goals prevented: 2, 20, 4, 5 = 31

Goals scored: 4, 4, 10, 6 = 24

Now these are just rough estimations, and it depends on the team you are playing, as well as your own strengths and weaknesses. The point is that it demonstrates how every little inch counts. Twenty four scored and thirty one prevented are very high estimates, but who knows? It's something to strive for.

I will make a comparison using teams from the English Premier League last season. After the final thirty eight games, the following positions looked like this, with goals for, goals against, and goal average.

1st. Chelsea - 73 - 32 - +41
4th. Manchester United - 62 - 37 - +35
10th. Crystal Palace - 47 - 51 - -4
17th. Aston Villa - 31 - 57 - -26
20th. QPR - 42 - 73 - -31

Goals convert into points. Manchester United in fourth finished seventeen points behind the Champions Chelsea. The difference in their goal difference was six. Six 1-0 wins gives you eighteen points, enough for Man Utd to move above Chelsea into first place. Likewise at the bottom. QPR were relegated with thirty points, and Aston Villa were safe with thirty eight. The goal difference was five between the two teams. Five 1-0 wins gives QPR an extra fifteen points, which would have put them at 14th place, meaning they would still be playing Premiership football this season. Every little helps.

The players have to understand this, and it is so important for them to see the value in everything that you do. As with the parents, who still have a huge influence over the younger ones, they need to be on board too.

So how do we convince them it is worth it? Meetings, videos, presentations, reaffirming the key points, have the rest of the coaching staff truly buy into it. It will take time, and not everything can be done at once, so change the easy stuff immediately and come up with a plan for when certain objectives should be achieved by.

It will be slow, and at times even painful, but it does add up. People will tell you certain things are pointless, and will try cutting corners wherever possible. Champions don't cut corners. Champions don't half effort it. Champions are all in.

Now try your best to not let this pump you up: