Chapter 1
The Art of Stable Team Design

“Brazil has Neymar. Argentina has Messi. Portugal has Ronaldo. Germany has a team!” This tweet from a soccer fan flew around the world following Germany’s surprising defeat of host country Brazil 7:1 in the 2014 World Cup semifinals. Germany went on to claim the title of world champions, a success that experts attribute to a football culture based on team spirit and shared long-term goals, a culture that relies on players who fit the team rather than individual superstars.

Germany was far from having the greatest individual players in the world in 2014, but it did have the highest performing team.

As former English footballer Michael Owen stated in The Telegraph^[1] following the match, “I once asked my good friend Didi Hamann what he considered the biggest difference between German and English football. He defined it to me as follows: ‘If an English player is booked in a World Cup semi-final, and it means he can’t play in the final, he starts crying on the pitch (as demonstrated by Paul Gascoigne in 1990),’ said Didi. ‘If it happens to a German, he puts it out of his mind and then scores the winning goal. One player is thinking about himself and the other his team.’”

In defeating Brazil, the German team demonstrated perfectly the triumph of a team mentality over individual needs. This applies to all kinds of teams.