Team structure in my soccer team

In one of my previous posts, I’ve written about my experiences with student organizations. However, it is hard to connect my student organization to a successful team, because, in my opinion, a successful team is often associated with performance and achieving goals. In a student organization the ‘president’ set goals, but it is difficult to measure its performance. So in this post I will introduce another experience with organizations, which has to do with my former soccer team.

The soccer season 2013/2014 was one of the best sport years in my life. At this time I was a player of the under 19 men team at Kampong, which is a soccer club in Utrecht, The Netherlands. This was the first time that the under 19 team was playing in a fairly high level league. My soccer friends and me were all very hyped to play the season and the club gave our team all the opportunities to prepare as good as possible. On the last day of play we had to win the last match to win the league and we did. I believe that the road to this success is due to a good team structure, but also the atmosphere in the group and the mutual contact between all the players.

So what made my soccer team successful? One determinant of this is the team structure. The book Reframing Organizations (L. Bolman & T. Deal) emerges five different team structures in chapter 5. The team structure of my soccer team is most similar to the Simple Hierarchy.

In a soccer club you have mainly one boss, who is the club owner and he or she runs the club; at Kampong this is the chairman. He decides how much money goes to certain soccer teams for equipment and at what times the team will practice and play matches. Furthermore the club has to pay the coaches and referees. Thus, the boss in this hierarchy is the club itself, leaded by a chairman.

The ‘middle manager’ of the hierarchy is the commissioner soccer. The coaches of the teams are communicating with the commissioner and sometimes with the chairman. My head coach was the boss of the soccer team but if he would fail, the chairman could still fire him. Thus the commissioner of soccer is kind of a middle manager and the head coaches must be accountable to the commissioner and so to the chairman. However the head coach has close contacts with all the soccer players and the chairman and commissioner do not.  

To continue with the Simple Hierarchy model, the coach got some help from help-coaches and trainers. The head coach is still the boss of the team, but the players are often closer to one of the help-coaches, who were in my team only some ages older than us, so you could connect with them more easily, and the specific attack/defense/keeper trainers.

To finalize the team structure, we have the team captain. The team captain is the boss on the field and often the player who has authority, can give directions to other players and has a good overview.

To summarize the team structure that I have experiences as a player of the soccer team is as follows:

The chairman of the soccer club has the highest hierarchy and is the boss of the bosses of the soccer teams, who are the head coaches. In between these two is the commissioner of soccer, who has better contacts with the head coaches than the chairman. The head coach is held responsible for good performance of the soccer team. He is not only the boss of the soccer players, but also the boss of the help-coaches and help-trainers. The latter are closer to the soccer players, but are still standing above the players. Inside the player group itself there is also one leader, which is the captain.

As I’ve mentioned before, I believe the good performance are due to the team structure, but maybe more important is the good atmosphere in the group and the mutual contacts between the players and coaches and trainers. Katzenbach & Smith’s (1993) distinguish six characteristics of high-quality teams and I want to discuss two of them.

             ‘’High performing teams translate common purpose into specific, measurable performance goals.’’ (L. Bolman & T. Deal). At the start of the soccer season the entire team made reasonable goals together and we set the goal to finish in the top 3 of the league. I believe that setting a reasonable goal is very important to perform high. We didn’t set our goal to win the league, because based on previous years we knew that we had to compete against better teams. But still setting a top 3 goal was high latitude, which encouraged the players to work harder. 

            ‘’High-performing teams develop the right mix of expertise.’’ (L. Bolman & T. Deal). In a soccer team you need the mix of expertise on the field, because you can’t play with 11 attackers. In the season 13/14 we had a good balance of players with different positions, which made the team to a strong kneaded unit. But not only the players are a mix of expertise, also the help coaches and trainers are different from each other. One trainer can be better in the mutual contacts with the players and the other is better in giving physical training. A high-performing team should indeed consist of members with different expertise. 

To conclude, as a soccer player it is hard to see the team structure at the moment itself. Afterwards I release how important team structure is and how much effort it costs to connect with other members in the hierarchy. I believe that team structure is a really important determinant of high performance; however even with the best team structure teams can still fail. In my opinion, the list of six characteristics of Katzenbach & Smith’s can be expended to much more characteristics.