The Paradox of Choice: Coaching with Option Making
“Playing football is a constant decision making process. The more options you have in each situation, the longer your decision making will take. So we decrease the players’ options so they can make quicker and better decisions.”
By now everyone is familiar with Barry Schwartz’s idea proposed in his 2004 book “The Paradox of Choice”. The idea is simple when given too many choices people may experience sensations of anxiety and even decision paralysis, which means they are incapable of making a decision. These findings were concluded in several studies where consumers are confronted with the following:
Shoppers who confront a display of 30 jams or varieties of gourmet chocolate are less likely to purchase any than when they encounter a display of six.
Students given 30 topics from which to choose to write an extra-credit essay are less likely to write one than those give six.
The more funds employers offer their employees in401(k) retirement plans the less likely the employees are to invest in any, even though failing to do so costs them employer matching funds.
Schwartz even looks to the dating world. With the introduction of apps like Tinder and Bumble where users are given hundreds and hundreds of possible love interests to choose from, users are not more likely to find a match than without the use of these apps.
These findings have been replicated in many contexts and ultimately find the same thing; when consumers are given too many choices, they become frozen with the decision in front of them.
Where else have we seen something similar? I have seen that face of panic elsewhere.
Looking out onto the youth football pitches on Saturday mornings, that stare that embodies decision panic is seen on children all over the world. For the same reason, they have too many choices.
Wait a minute! Aren’t I always told that I must let the kids play and let them make their own decisions?!
Yes, you should. But let’s go back to Barry Schwartz:
“Unconstrained freedom leads to paralysis. It is self-determination within significant constraints—within “rules” of some sort—that leads to well-being, to optimal functioning.”
It is here that we find our happy middle, our Goldilocks zone, where we find success in providing opportunities for players to make decisions while avoiding decision paralysis. We want to find that perfect balance to achieve ‘optimal functioning’.
Now, let me add one more variable to consider in the decision making process as it applies to coaching and football. Again, I will use a metaphor.
You are standing in the pasta sauce aisle and before you is a wall of all kinds of pasta sauces. Countless sauces of all kinds, flavours, ingredients, prices, brands, etc. However, you know exactly what you are looking for because you are making lasagna. So immediately you can turn your attention away from the pesto sauces, the béchamels, the alfredo, and look towards the tomato pasta sauces. Now, you know that you like a specific brand, Francesco Rinaldi’s. So you can now turn your attention away from anything that isn’t that brand. You are looking for a plain tomato without too many additional herbs and spices. You now land on two sauces with minimal ingredients. Your decision is now between these two and all the other sauces you can ignore. They become a background for your decision. If you were making pasta to complement a vegetable from your garden, you would choose a different sauce which would change what you were looking for. When placed with constraints, we learn to focus our attention on what matters in terms of making that decision.
In order to make correct decisions, one must master the skill of knowing where to look and what to pay attention to in order to satisfy the constraint or objective.
When we combine these two ideas, we arrive at an effective (and efficient) way to improve players’ decision making process; option making.
When speaking about this topic with Chris Bentley, a colleague at Colorado Rapids Youth Soccer, he introduced me to this idea of option making instead of decision making. Essentially, it is the same thing but we present it to players in a different way.
In order to successfully, implement this concept into your training, you will first need a clear and concise game model. You need to have clear game principles in place, whether they are established by your club or they are your personal game principles. These game principles must be appropriate for the level and stage of the players with language that is unambiguous. This is key because without the use of game principles we fail to create the language that players will communicate (verbal and non-verbal) with.
Option making consists of limiting the decisions that players have to make.
Let’s work with an example. When working with a young centre-back playing out of the back, we would design a session where we would re-create this situation for them. Our game principle in attack is to create a +1 scenario in the midfield (ie. one more player in the midfield than the opposing team). When we pair down the options the centre-back has in order to accomplish this game principle, we arrive at the following:
Dribble into the midfield to create the +1
Pass into midfield to create the +1
Pass backward to goalkeeper or other centre-back when the possibility of +1 is unlikely
Just like with the pasta sauce metaphor, the player must learn to know where to look in each scenario in order to accomplish the objective or satisfy the constraint. With option one, the centre-back must see that all of his teammates in the midfield are covered, therefore he is unmarked. In this case, he can simply dribble into midfield until a different player becomes unmarked. In option two, the centre-back must see that he is about to be pressured, however there is one teammate in the midfield who is not covered. In option three, the centre-back sees that he is about to be pressured and all of his teammates in the midfield are covered. In this case, the best option is to maintain possession and attempt to create a +1 in the midfield with the other centre-back.
As you can see, when you lay out the options to the player in this way, you are creating a set of constraints that they are working with. These options help the player by minimising where he has to look in order to be successful. He can divert his attention to the teammates in front of him and their respective defensive coverage. Metaphorically speaking, you have told him what recipe you are making and what pasta sauce he needs to look for.
I want to emphasise that this process is not as simple as this article make it sounds. There is a difference between describing something and then actually executing it. I mean this for both the coach’s role as well as what the player has to attempt to do. Football is a game of infinitesimal moments that result in either a successful or unsuccessful outcome. In order to better prepare a player for these moments, a coach must provide opportunities to ‘search for the sauce for a recipe’. That is exactly what tactical scenarios provide.
You often hear that teams want players who can make decisions. This loosely translates to intelligent players. Often we think intelligence just “happens” or players born with it, and that they are able to make decisions naturally. This is not the case, just like anything in life you get better through repetition. In this case, repetition is the process of knowing where to look when confronted with options in front of you.
This ability also manifests itself in players being creative. In reality, these creative players have just become really good at finding solutions by the constraints placed upon them (over the course of many years).
I will finish this with some words from someone wiser and with much more experience than myself. In my interview with Flemming Pedersen, FC Nordsjælland’s First Team Manager and previous Technical Director, he says, “It’s an advantage to constrain players because without structure it is very difficult to develop creativity. When they are young we create drills with two or three options because then we make sure the players get the right amount of repetitions because like anything in life, if you want to improve no matter what, you need to have repetitions. And that’s the trick, if you play a game with 20 different options all the time, then maybe after an hour one of the options you have done twice, or you have done all the options twice. So you have not really been good at anything because you haven’t had the amount of repetitions so you have been training one hour but it has been a waste of time.”
Be efficient and don’t waste time.
“Unconstrained freedom leads to paralysis. It is self-determination within significant constraints—within “rules” of some sort—that leads to well-being, to optimal functioning.”
