The psychology behind SvenUpdated: August 8th, 2007
I’ve been doing some research on Sven’s managerial career and came across this fascinating transcript from the BBC’s science programme Horizon.
Called The England Patient and broadcast in 2002, the programme describes how Sven spent 20 years developing a “psychological master plan” with Professor Willi Railo from the University of Oslo, which the pair used “throughout Europe to transform under-performing teams into winners”.
Central to their model is identifying players they call “cultural architects”.
“Cultural architects are people that are able to change the mind-set of other people. They’re able to break barriers, they have visions, they are self-confident and they are able to transfer their own self-confidence to a group of people,” Railo told the BBC.
With England, Eriksson and Railo concluded they needed three cultural architects “to spread the shared mental model” throughout the team. Railo named Beckham as one of them, which probably explains Eriksson’s reluctance to ever drop the player.
Probably just as well then that the modest Mr. Barton has now left the club. Had anyone told him that he was a “cultural architect” I suspect his head would have swelled to balloon-like proportions.