There is such a thing as too much talent

NWA Media/ANDY SHUPE - Hudson Garrett, left, and Chandler Kemp, both 6-year-olds from Fayetteville, laugh as they attempt to lower themselves to the ground with a soccer ball held between their heads while attending the Oliver Soccer Camp Tuesday, July 22, 2014, at the Lewis Soccer Complex in Fayetteville. The weeklong skills camp is meant for players 5-12 and is a part of Fayetteville high school soccer coach Steve Oliver's World Cup Summer Soccer Series that continues through Aug. 13.
NWA Media/ANDY SHUPE - Hudson Garrett, left, and Chandler Kemp, both 6-year-olds from Fayetteville, laugh as they attempt to lower themselves to the ground with a soccer ball held between their heads while attending the Oliver Soccer Camp Tuesday, July 22, 2014, at the Lewis Soccer Complex in Fayetteville. The weeklong skills camp is meant for players 5-12 and is a part of Fayetteville high school soccer coach Steve Oliver's World Cup Summer Soccer Series that continues through Aug. 13.

Here's a fun question to consider while recruiting players for your little sports team: Can a team ever have too much talent?

Those who follow the trades and roster jockeying by National Football League, Premier League and National Basketball Association teams could reasonably assume that the answer is no. But a new study of hundreds of games in several professional sports leagues suggests that, in fact, talent does have a tipping point, beyond which too many great players become detrimental to a team's success, a finding with broad implications for coaches at all levels of play, as well as fans and athletes possessing transcendent and more average gifts.

For the new study, which was published in Psychological Science, researchers with the Insead business school in Fontainebleau, France, Columbia University in New York, and other institutions first set out to determine just how important most of us consider talent to be. They gave 35 casual soccer fans the opportunity to assemble a national-caliber team, choosing from imaginary players ranked as good or great. After choosing their starting 11 players, the volunteers were asked to rate how they thought their team would perform in a tournament.

The volunteers choosing the highest number of top-rated players for their squads -- often filling all 11 positions with greats -- subsequently rated their chances of winning a tournament higher than did people who had sprinkled in a few merely good players. The results show, the authors write, that "people believe that more top talent increases a team's performance," and "that the effect of talent would never turn negative."

But is that belief justified? To find out, the researchers next turned to real-world data about pro sports, beginning with numbers from FIFA, the international soccer governing body, in part because the study's lead author, Roderick Swaab, a professor of organizational behavior, is also a soccer fan.

So he and his colleagues gathered the names of all the players who had belonged to national soccer teams from 2008 to 2014 and cross-indexed them with rosters from the world's elite club teams, like Manchester United or Real Madrid. The best players from national soccer teams would be expected to be included on the most elite club teams. By this method, the researchers designated a set of players as the world's best.

They then returned to the rosters for the national teams and counted how many of these best players each team had. Finally, using a complicated points system, the researchers determined how well the national teams had performed from 2008 through 2014, compared with how well they really should have performed, given their concentrations of talent.

To broaden and solidify their findings, the researchers repeated the experiment as closely as possible with data from the NBA and Major League Baseball.

In the case of basketball, the researchers relied on a statistic known as a player's Estimated Wins Added to settle on the top players from 2002 through 2012, checking those names against the athletes selected for the NBA All-Star teams during those years. They then, as before, counted the number of top players on various teams, ranked the teams accordingly, and, using information about wins and losses for each team, determined whether the teams with the most great players had the best win percentages in those seasons.

They performed similar calculations for 30 Major League Baseball teams, using players and results from 2002 through 2012.

The results were most notable for how they differed among sports. In soccer and basketball, the researchers found, adding superstars was productive -- up to a point. But once a team consisted of more than about two-thirds superstars, its performance would begin to suffer, with fewer wins than would be expected, given the caliber of its talent.

But in baseball, the data showed, team performance did not decline, no matter how many stars were clustered on a roster.

Cumulatively, the findings suggest that in sports requiring teamwork and coordination, you can have too much talent.

Basketball and soccer require player interdependence, communication and ego sublimation, which are not skills at which all stars excel, Swaab said. Baseball, on the other hand, is essentially "an individual sport" in a team setting, he said, allowing multiple superstars to coexist successfully on a roster (recent Yankees seasons notwithstanding).

The message, Swaab said, is to bear in mind that interpersonal dynamics should be considered alongside athletes' abilities when building a sports team. Coaches might want to "invest more in training to formalize roles, ranks and responsibilities" among their players, so superstars understand that they, too, must pass as well as receive the ball.

Swaab suggested a counterintuitive solution. "Hire fewer top talented individuals," he said, and give the rest of us a chance.

ActiveStyle on 09/22/2014

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