If you are a football fan and especially of Paris Saint-Germain, you probably remember this Champions League final in the month of August.August 2020, PSG faced Bayern Munich, in the 59th minute… Bayern striker Kingsley Coman scored the only goal of the match and won his team against the club, which trained him a few years earlier.
This is a good illustration of this study conducted by researchers from the School of Advanced Studies in Economics in Moscow. Faced with his former club, a professional sportsman is, according to them, even more effective. They thus analyzed the statistics of basketball players, footballers and hockey players, who play in the NBA, NHL and European championships. And according to this data, players tend to score more points, to be more offensive than in a more traditional match.
These better performances are explained by two parameters that must be taken into account. The strategy side, first: the player knows his former team, his strong points, his weak points, the personality of his former teammates. In short, he will be able to counter his opponent’s tactics more easily.
The other parameter is psychology. Facing former teammates can be a source of motivation, even more so if the player was not valued enough with his former club, with little playing time or a lower salary, for example. All of this the researchers incorporated into their analysis. These athletes are somehow driven by the desire to prove to their former coach that he was wrong for not trusting them. This second parameter, psychology, seems even more decisive than knowing the strategy of your former team.
We can even extend these conclusions to the business world. It is even ultimately the objective of this study which was published in a scientific journal specializing in economics. By analyzing the performance of the players, we can draw conclusions on the hiring strategy, on the theories of management. It is enough, in fact, to replace the player by an employee. If you manage to recruit an employee from a competing company, he will want to outdo himself against his former employer.