How To Be Creative Like Barcelona
In team sports, everyone understands the importance of being able to perform like a well-oiled machine, knowing your role and being a team player. But is much attention paid to how creative a team is and how it can be developed? Are players like Messi just tactically creative because they were born with it, or is it something that can be taught?
Before I write about the factors that impact creativity and how to develop it, it would be great to know what tactical creativity is and how it differs from tactical intelligence. Tactical creativity in sport refers to the unusualness, innovativeness, statistical rareness, or even uniqueness of solutions to a related sport situation. This differs from tactical intelligence, which is the ability to find ideal solutions to a given problem. You can understand the difference like this, intelligence is being able to find common solutions to a given situation, creativity is finding unusual, unique and innovative solutions to a given situation. Creativity is rare, intelligence is common. Being creative is more than just about an individual's own behaviour, such as how they use skill moves, but it's about how they utilise their teammates to create opportunities to score points. This is like Magic Johnson's famous 'no-look' passes and Messi's ability to read the game and know how to make the most out of his teammates.
What do we know?
Now that's out of the way, what do we know about tactical creativity? Research in tactical creativity is still in its early stages, so most research has simply explored creativity, but less has focused on how to adequately develop creativity in team sports. Research in tactical creativity has mainly focused on team ball sports, especially in offensive situations as these situations provide the athletes with the opportunity to be creative through initiating actions and decision making. Defensive situations aren't focused on in creativity research due to the athlete taking a more reactive stance, where they are responding the actions of the offensive players. So as you read this, remember the principles and tips relate to tactical creativity in offensive team situations.
In 2015, Memmert provided a model of factors that contribute to tactical creativity in team and racket sports. This outlines how creative solutions occur and sums up what we know about tactical creativity.
When we are faced with a situation we initial perceive what's happening and use our working memory to help us understand the situation.
Attention is paid to certain parts of the situation, this is where we extract meaningful information from the environment.
We use this information to formulate and collect a handful of solutions, which is where creativity lies.
Finally, our intelligence is used to go through all the possible creative solutions and select the most appropriate ones. Just because you have a lot of unusual solutions doesn't mean it's the correct one.
Attention and creativity
What's important to understand is an athlete's ability to pay attention and be creative work hand in hand. Creativity is all about being able to attend to various information sources in the environment and use it to formulate an appropriate, yet unique solution to the situation. Being creative doesn't just mean paying attention to obvious information, such as who's in front of you and where the goal is, it includes paying attention to less obvious information, such as a recently unmarked player who presents a new and unlikely pass option that can lead to a goal.
Research has found this ability to pay attention to seemingly less relevant and less obvious information positively related to greater sport-specific creativity. For example, a study found young handball players who were able to notice an unmarked player in an attention test were significantly more likely to formulate more original and flexibly creative solutions to handball match situations, than those who didn’t notice this player.
Developing creativity
Now to the important question, how can tactical creativity be developed?
First of all, if you are looking to develop an athlete’s tactical creativity you want to start as early as you can. Childhood is believed to be the optimal time for learning and developing creativity.
Secondly, since attention is so important for creativity, changing how an athlete pays attention in sport situations is important. For greater creativity, it's suggested having a more broad width of attention (being able to pay attention to multiple sources of information at one time) is helpful for performance. As a coach/teacher the type of instructions you provide can have an impact on the athlete's attention, and therefore their creative performance. A study tried to find out if this was true. They found in more complex sport situations, children who trained under instructions that allowed them to broaden their attention (i.e. only being told the idea and rules of the game being told and no special tactical advice or feedback being given) resulted in an improvement in creative performance in game-test situations. This is also an interesting finding, because as coaches/teachers we may feel that giving athletes constant feedback and instructions would be helpful for their athletic development. However, this research suggests that doing this for young children may actually restrict their ability to attend to more information and prevent them from considering more creative options in tactical tasks. So as a coach, if you want to develop creativity, consider what are the necessary instructions to help the athletes perform the tasks well, but also reduce the use of instructions that would narrow their attention. For example, instead of "I expect you to pass to ONE of your teammates to get past the opponent and score a goal", you could instruct them "Use ALL the information and players available to get past the opponent and score a goal".
Thirdly, letting athletes take part in deliberate play can help develop their creativity. Deliberate play isn't the same as free play, it's not necessarily just letting the athlete play whatever they want and do whatever they want. It is a form of practice that seems unstructured but still contains sport-related goals. This is like going to play a 5 aside football game where strict instructions aren't provided, only a few set of rules are established and players can perform within the constraint of these rules however they like. This type of play, especially at an early age, has been reported by more creative players as something they engaged in more intensely when they were children (before they were 14 years old) than less creative players. In addition to deliberate play, research has found athletes who engaged in one sporting activity found a transference in improved creativity in another sport. In short, let the kids play, let them play a lot!
Finally, and seemingly most obvious, engaging in deliberate practice in sport-specific training is helpful. Deliberate practice is all about developing expertise within a given sport, this is where the 10,000 hour principle comes in. Athletes who were rated by their coaches as being more creative in their main sport reported spending more hours training in their main sport than those who were less creative. This difference wasn't significant in the research, however it was approaching significant levels, which indicates deliberate and effortful training in the main sport may help develop greater creativity within that sport.
Summary:
Aim to develop creativity when athletes are young.
When developing tactical creativity use instructions that don't look to narrow the performers attention.
Let the athlete engage in deliberate play and take part in other sports.
Let the athlete engage in sport-specific training.
Psychological tip:
A benefit of using deliberate play is it may help maintain intrinsic motivation in athletes, meaning they are more likely to engage in training and also develop their performance while maintaining sport enjoyment. Think of ways that incorporate some simple, basic rules within your given sport and how this can be made into a more play-like scenario.
Note: As mentioned before, this area of research is still in its early stages so the research findings and principles should be taken with a pinch of salt. However, this does provide an insight into the possible development of theory and practicality in developing tactical creativity.
Article by Edgar Chekera