The truth is in the details

In this article I want to analyze the three pillars which, for me, are essential to be a great team sport player.

We will analyze the WHAT, the HOW and the WHEN, as applied to a high performance athlete.

For me, these are the three parameters that define a high performance player.

To carry out this analysis of professional athletes, it is very useful to first focus on grassroots/formative sports. Grassroots sports provide a good environment where the difference between WHAT, HOW and WHEN is clearly seen.

Let’s analyze what the WHAT, the HOW and the WHEN mean when applied to sport. (with examples from formative sports) Most people confuse the WHAT (what their child does, if we talk about grassroots/formative sport) with the EVERYTHING. What an athlete does is practically insignificant. It does not matter. It does not matter WHAT THEY DO.

What they DO is very insignificant when compared with the other 2 parameters I want to analyze in this article. HOW THEY DO IT and especially WHEN THEY DO IT, are the ones that really matter. Do they perform incredible dribbles? Do they make very good passes? Do they score incredible goals? Do they dribble past 3 players? Do they block every ball? Do they anticipate all the forwards and dispossess them? Do they know how to protect the ball very well so that it is not taken? Are they the top goal-scorer? Do they shoot very well from outside, like in basketball?..that is WHAT THEY DO.

I am not saying this is wrong, but this "WHAT THEY DO" makes parents believe that their child is very good (perhaps they are) and they use it as a yardstick to evaluate their child’s abilities. Especially at young ages, when many opponents have not yet learned much.

Surely, in a team and league where he/she is far superior, "WHAT THEY DO" is enough to consider him/her as the whole package. As if what they do were the only thing that mattered. WHAT THEY DO? Does he do that? Then he is very good. But in more competitive environments (or simply as he grows and the other kids learn to play too) the WHAT THEY DO, which once seemed important, dissolves like a lump of sugar.

From a certain level/age, good players are not defined by the things they can do (WHAT THEY DO)… they are defined by HOW they do it and WHEN they do it.

In fact, grassroots sport is full of stories about children who did incredible things and whose environment couldn’t understand how, when they moved up the categories, they could no longer perform them. Then they start blaming the club, the coach, the teammates, the position on the field, the minutes played… when, in reality, the reason was that HOW they did it and WHEN they did it were not good enough to compete with better players.

There are professional players who perhaps only know how to do 3 or 4 things well (just look at 90% of elite players)… they do not stand out for anything extraordinary… 99% do not overcomplicate life; they do very few different things. One must consider HOW, HOW THEY DO WHAT THEY DO… do they do it quickly? Do they do it well enough to deceive the defender? Do they do it with enough strength and intensity to counter the defender’s intensity? (and a TOP defender?) Knowing how to execute an incredible dribble and having it work when the defender is not intense or has not learned defensive mechanisms is one thing… but will that dribble work when the defender is faster, stronger, taller, jumps higher or has defensive knowledge? That is the key.

Therefore, WHAT THEY DO is of no importance if it is not coupled with HOW THEY DO IT. Because as you go up in level, fewer and fewer things (WHAT THEY DO) can be done unless you do them very well (HOW THEY DO IT). When players are young, and most opponents have not matured, simply what they do is enough and it seems they do NOT need the HOW or the WHEN.

Of the 3 parameters analyzed (WHAT, HOW and WHEN), what turns you into a TOP player is the WHEN… WHEN they do it. WHEN they do it would be synonymous with knowing how to read the game, the opponents, the teammates, the moment and converting that WHAT (dribble), that HOW (fast, deceiving the defender and with enough strength) into doing it at the right moment (WHEN) to profit from it. A very good player is NOT one who tries a super dribble many times and only gets it right 10% of the time… that is not a valid player… even if the dribble he does is incredible and unique in the world… nobody wants a 10% success rate at a high level.

A star is NOT a player who does an incredible dribble with incredible speed and intensity if he then does not know when to choose the right moment. If he does that dribble when there is only one teammate available or if he does it when the best option was to shoot, or if he does it when perhaps the good dribble should have been to the left but he did it to the right… it is not useful most of the time.

As I said before, just look at the majority of professional football players. If you analyze what THEY DO, they do very few flashy things. Most of what they do is simply not making mistakes and knowing how to pass the ball well to a teammate. (No dribbles, no incredible passes, no marvelous ball control, no historic feints… nothing that really excites the fans…) They are not known for WHAT they do, but for HOW they do it and WHEN they do it. The way they do it gives them that extra edge to avoid errors and pass the ball to their teammate, which is what 95% of professional football players do.

The majority of athletes we have seen have failed in one or more of these 3 pillars (or all 3). The problem is not being aware and then not understanding what happens when you think that the WHAT was the only important thing. If we analyze a well-known case, like Dembele from Barça, he meets 2 out of the 3 parameters. What he DOES is very good (he shoots with his right, shoots with his left, has some cool dribbles…), HOW HE DOES IT is absolutely incredible (incredibly fast, precise, unpredictable… one of the best in the world) but WHEN he does it, it is incorrect 90% of the times… therefore, we can deduce that the 10% of the times he does it well is by chance, not because he knows how to read the WHEN.

Thus, for a team like Barça, having an incredible player in terms of HOW is not enough if he does not know WHEN to do it. At the TOP level, WHEN is the most important.

Even Messi himself. He is NOT a player with 1000 different dribbles (like Romario, Ronaldinho, Pelé, Zidane…), he does not do bicycles, elastics, rabones, no no-look passes, no heel passes… where he shines in a supernatural way is in the WHEN. He is very much like Michael Jordan in that respect. They are the geniuses of the WHEN.

They have a brutal talent; that is necessary. THAT what you do comes naturally, as if it were innate… it is necessary to be a world-class player. But what differentiates them is the WHEN. Every millisecond they know how to choose the most correct decision. There is nothing pre-planned; they know when to perform the next maneuver (shot, dribble, pass, feint, stay still, accelerate, slow down...) in a manner that is almost perfect. There are players in the world with Messi’s skill but it is useless for them (therefore, they cannot use it) because they do NOT know how to choose the WHEN and end up losing the ball… and if you lose the ball many times, your coach will not let you perform those plays, because he wants to win, not for you to lose balls.

There have been many players who did things similar to Jordan (WHAT) with the same intensity, power, leap and speed (HOW) but none with the capacity to do it at the exact moment so that it comes out well (WHEN). I divide WHEN into 2 types and a third, reserved only for geniuses. (The TEMPORAL WHEN, the EMOTIONAL WHEN and the SUPERNATURAL WHEN)

The Temporal WHEN is about knowing the best moment to perform an action in a more or less natural way under normal match conditions, and the Emotional WHEN is about knowing how to choose equally or better under very high pressure. It is not the same to know how to choose the WHEN in one state or another; they are completely different things. Jordan was the best in both.

He was the best at choosing WHEN to make that play and was the best in the capacity to choose WHEN as pressure increased. The more pressure there was, the more important the match, the more his ability to use the WHEN multiplied by a thousand. Most humans under that moment’s pressure would end up choosing the moment poorly (or even worse than under normal conditions).

Anyway, exceptional players like Jordan (or Messi) cannot explain everything with these two WHENS; a third one is needed. With just the emotional WHEN (knowing how to manage pressure, because otherwise there wouldn’t be any) it does not explain what he could do. The third WHEN (the SUPERNATURAL WHEN), by necessity, must mean that time was different for him than for the rest of his opponents.

When a player is capable of correctly deciding the WHEN under pressure, with extremely low error rates, many times and over many years… that is no longer just knowing how to decide under pressure; it is something beyond.

This level of accuracy under pressure means that all opponents know you will do it, all opposing coaches know you will do it, all the spectators know you will do it, all the opponents’ training sessions are arranged so that you don’t do it… and yet you do it. It goes beyond merely playing under pressure. Everyone is against you… and you do it.

It is the same WHEN that some say is present in certain musicians and painters… or probably in people like Einstein or other geniuses in their respective fields. A special WHEN where everything goes slowly and you can see and analyze things with a clarity that others cannot. This allows them to see the WHEN with surgical precision, impossible to anticipate for most mortals. They are people who know they see things as if they were outside the action, in slow motion, when everyone else is at 160 beats per minute. That allows them to play with extremely high confidence.

That third WHEN we can almost disregard, because it only affects 1 or 2 players per generation.

Therefore, for those who value a player, especially when they are in their early years, by what THEY DO, by what they see THAT THEY DO... to be at ease, to enjoy the player and think that there is still more to see about HOW and WHEN he does it... and many times only the great specialists or time itself, as the opponents demand it, can see that. Time is the best ally to eventually demonstrate (or not) that the HOW and the WHEN will also be used by that kid as he matures.

For me, the importance I would assign to each parameter is as follows:

WHAT (10%)

HOW (40%)

WHEN (50%)

I haven’t conducted any study but my feeling is that it goes like this.

I have seen thousands of athletes who did incredible things at young ages and then disappeared. IF what THEY DO were as important as HOW or WHEN, all these players I speak of would have become professionals. Because they really were incredible at 10 or 11 years old.

THE WHAT, the HOW and the WHEN. The three pillars of a player’s talent. And each one is more important than the previous. Not every concept carries the same weight.

Below, I have produced a video showing 3 examples demonstrating that WHEN is the key in high-performance sports.