A Soccer Analogy

PRODUCTIVITY

… or Why midfielders are the most important part of a team

As a lifelong fan of the beautiful game of football (for my American readers, football = soccer), and having almost equally long involvement in software development, can’t help seeing some parallels between the two. In the following story, I’ll try to elaborate on those similarities.

The game of football is a world phenomenon. Save for the US and few other places, it is by far the most popular sporting game on the planet. It transcends the national boundaries and can be called a truly global sport. The fans are true fanatics: they “live and die” with their favorite team, and their individual/group mood (for weeks, months, even years, and decades) closely correlate with their team’s results and performance.

A great coach (manager) has to intimately know each of the players and utilize the squad to create the best possible team for a particular game (project). The current form of players, injuries, matchups, etc. play a big role in coach’s decision-making while picking the team.

The coaches, in order to be successful at their job, have to fulfill several roles with the team:

The strategy of the game of football is always two-fold: the first one is to defend, as a unit, and to conceive the least amount of goals possible (preferably, none — aka “clean sheet”). The second one is to attack, and to score as many goals as possible (at least one more than the opposing team). There are other strategies out there, but these two would suffice for our analogy.

Some examples of failed tactics in football:

Defense, as is the case with the attack, starts with “holding midfielders”. Those are the players who are generally good with the ball at their feet, who understand the game best, and who know how to approach it, at given points of the game. They know when is the time to hold the ball, when to attack, when to move it back.

It is too bad that most of the devs (and teams) that I’m aware of are not inclined towards sports, to say the least. If they were, they could’ve learned valuable lessons on organizing and functioning better, as a team.

To extend our analogy further onto dev teams:

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