Chapter 7
Exploring team cohesion in sport: a critical
perspective
Lions tours are about bonding together. As a touring side you are always up against it.
Success depends on whether you come together or you split into factions... There were
times with this Lions squad when we felt invincible—that we could take on the whole
world and beat them. (Former British and Irish Lions rugby player, Jeremy Guscott, cited
in Guscott, 1997, p. 153)
In previous squads we would see players sitting down to meals and staying within
their club groups. A Munich table here, a Cologne table there. This year, it has been
different. Everyone mixes in and it makes for a better team. (Franz Beckenbauer, coach
of the West German soccer team that won the World Cup in 1990, cited in Miller, 1997,
p. 107)
The importance of team spirit is a hobby-horse of mine...it is probably in team-sports
like football that the advantages of the right group dynamics or chemistry may be seen
most clearly. (Alan Hansen, former Liverpool and Scotland soccer player, 1999, pp. 135–
136)
The creation of team spirit and the building of “the good team” is therefore one of the
coach’s most important jobs. (England soccer manager, Sven-Göran Eriksson, 2002, p.
116)
I am only there to finish the job of the team. (Thierry Henry, Arsenal and French
international footballer, quoted in Winter, 2002b, p. 21)
IntroductionFew athletes compete alone in their sports. Instead, most of them interact either with or
against other athletes collectively. Indeed, even in individual sports such as golf or
tennis, competitive action is often assessed or aggregated as a team-game (e.g., the Ryder
Cup in golf or the Davis Cup in tennis). But what exactly is a “team”? Are Jeremy
Guscott, Sven-Göran Eriksson and Thierry Henry correct in believing that “team spirit”
or unity is essential for the achievement of sporting excellence? If so, do team-building
exercises really work? More generally, is it true that young people’s involvement in
school sports builds their “character” and imbues them with a sense of team spirit? In this
regard, the Duke of Wellington is alleged to have remarked that the battle of Waterloo
“was won on the playing fields of Eton” (Knowles, 1999, p. 810). In order to answer the
preceding questions, the present chapter is organised as follows.
To begin with, I shall explore how psychologists define “groups”, “teams” and “group
dynamics”. In the next section, I shall introduce the concept of team spirit which has been
defined operationally by sport psychologists as “cohesion” (also known as