by During Pep Guardiola’s first season as manager of Barcelona, at a time when he was still trying to establish himself as a coach, he kept a close eye on his representatives. Standing on the touchline, he would watch the action on the pitch while also being aware of how the players behind him, the players sitting on the bench, were acting.
Barcelona are said to have missed a great chance to score in a crucial game during that campaign. As revealed in ‘Another Way of Winning’, the Manchester City manager’s biography, Guardiola turned on his heels to see how his representatives responded.
Some of them, he saw, had jumped to their feet in anticipation of a goal. They were ready to celebrate. Not many others, however, had moved or reacted at all. Guardiola took a mental note and, the following summer, made a decisive move. Barcelona sold all those players who still remained in their seats.
That may sound like a bit much, but the message is clear: in the minds of coaches like Guardiola, agreement, unity and emotional investment cannot be put at a price. You’re all-in, or you get out. They cannot be in between.
Only Guardiola and Mikel Arteta can say whether they discussed this particular episode during their three years together at City, although it would be safe to assume they did. Arteta is obsessive about these ideas of chemistry and togetherness. He has also put the word “unity” on a banner often given to Arsenal’s away games and hung on the dressing room walls.
All this is important because of the ongoing debate about celebrations, and Arsenal’s celebrations in particular. Not for the first time in recent seasons, Arteta and his players have been accused of celebrating too much after their win over Liverpool on Sunday. Telegraph Sport columnist Jamie Carragher said on Sky Sports that Arteta’s players should “just get out of the tunnel”. Gary Neville said “immaturity” was on display.
But the point here is not what the outside world thinks of Arsenal’s celebrations. What those celebrations do for the players, coaches and fans is what the club is all about. It’s about the message they send and the impact they have, on the team’s performance and the power of the Emirates Stadium atmosphere.
In short, celebration matters – and we can be almost certain that Arteta knows it. The Arsenal manager is an avid reader, often studying sport and psychology, and it would be surprising if he wasn’t aware of the growing evidence showing the significant performance benefits of hearty celebrations.
Guardiola was just following his instincts when he examined his substitutes all those years ago, but in this case those instincts were backed up by science. In 2008, the year Guardiola took over at Barcelona, a study (by Bornstein and Goldschmidt) showed that teams that celebrated their goals together, with “team-oriented” celebrations, finished higher in league tables than those who did not.
Similarly, in penalty kicks, research shows that enthusiastically celebrating a goal – such as extending both arms, expanding the chest and closing the fists – has a positive effect on your team-mates and your side will win. bigger. The study (by Moll, Jordet and Pepping) also showed that these celebrations had a negative impact on their opponents.
Recent events in the Premier League would suggest that, likewise, the wrong kind of celebration can be combated. If the celebration is becoming the Premier League’s latest battleground, then Brentford’s Neal Maupay made a significant tactical mistake last month. It was his darts celebration, mocking James Maddison, that defeated Tottenham.
Perhaps something similar happened between Manchester United and West Ham this weekend: when Alejandro Garnacho scored United’s second goal in Sunday’s win, he sat on the billboards mimicking the celebration produced by Mohammed Kudus in the goal game earlier this season.
The impact of the celebration is down to “emotional capture” – a transfer of emotion from individuals to team-mates, opponents and apparently, in the example of Arsenal on Sunday, the crowd.
Uninvested observers may not have appreciated seeing Arteta’s players floundering on the Emirates pitch, but the home fans clearly did. Long after the final whistle, Arsenal supporters were still dancing in the stands to ABBA’s ‘Voulez-Vous’, which has been repackaged as a song for Bukayo Saka. It was a party to which everyone was invited in red.
Arteta knows that the emotions of the players on the pitch filter into the stands, and that the emotion in the stands filters back onto the pitch. It flows both ways, and Arteta looks to make his weapon. Ahead of the meeting with Liverpool, the Arsenal manager played a key role in the production of an exciting pre-match video which was shared on the club’s social media accounts, and on his own social media page.
In the days leading up to the game, Arsenal trained at the Emirates. It was during that session that many of the clips for the video were filmed, including close-ups of Arteta. It was all intentional, and there was a purpose to it: to get the crowd up, to build that connection and association. If Arsenal were to score, or even come close to scoring, Arteta – like Guardiola years ago – wanted everyone on their feet.
The Arsenal manager is far from alone in thinking this way. Watch Jurgen Klopp’s famous fist pump to the Kop after a landmark victory. If that celebration is not an attempt to strengthen bonds and build unity? Emotions, science shows, are contagious.
Contact with each other also helps. A 2010 NFA study showed that teams with players who contacted each other more frequently during games (high fives, fist bumps, head slaps etc) had significantly better team performance compared to teams with players who did not. was so despicable. The more hugs, the more pats on the back, the better. The closer they all are, the better they play.
Football is a tactical and physical game. It is also emotional. If it is possible to make even a small difference as Arsenal did on Sunday – and the science suggests it can – then Arteta, and any other football manager, will consider it worth doing. Whether the outside world likes it or not.
