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The last decade or so we have certainly seen an increase in the interest of the game of soccer
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or football if you are someone from Europe or another part of the world and that has drawn a
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lot of attention on how the game is played but how the athletes perform and the different dynamics
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that are in play that allow them to do the type of work that they do. Some research several years ago
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takes a look at the athlete and how they perform and a pleasure to be joined by Michael Platt who
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is a professor here at the Wharton School who was a part of the research and the lead on it
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and he joins us right now. Michael, great to talk to you again. How are you, sir? I'm great. How are
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you doing, Dan? I'm doing very well. All right, so this was from a few years ago. Obviously with
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the World Cup this year this is going to draw even more attention but let's go back in time
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and talk a little bit about what was it that drove you to want to learn about how athletes perform.
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Yeah, so this is just a passion of mine in general. I mean, I'm a former, you know, athlete, football,
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wrestling, baseball and just, you know, it's just I'm a junkie for all kinds of sports
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but, you know, in addition we believe that sports, that sort of high intensity, high pressure,
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you know, time is of the essence, you know, the kinds of decisions that you have to make.
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That is a really good petri dish for understanding more about how all of us do those kinds of things
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whether that's your business leader, you know, working under pressure, under urgency, you know,
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feeling like, you know, things are uncertain and difficult or just, you know, somebody who's
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trying to navigate their day and, you know, deal with their kids and, you know, make lots of
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decisions, you know, under pressure. So, it's, you know, the other thing about soccer and sports
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in general is that, you know, everything's quantified. So, you know, whereas, you know,
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business outcomes often there's a, you know, an indirect and sometimes nebulous path from the
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individual to the outcome that matters and in sports, you know, it's like, okay, how fast did
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you run? You know, was your kick on target or not? How good were your passes? And so, from your work that you've done over the years, you focus on the brain and the science of
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the brain. And when you're thinking about, at least with this study with athletics, there is
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probably quite a few components at play here in trying to understand how the brain functions and
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how that relates to the on-field performance. Yeah, absolutely. And that's really the, you know,
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untapped, unmeasured, hidden signal, really. So, think about it from the perspective of American
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football. So, you know, one of the, I think, the best kind of case studies is Tom Brady, right? So,
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he falls to 199th in the draft, right? And arguably, you know, maybe the best quarterback
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of all time. So, you know, why did that happen? Can we identify signals and traits that actually
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help us to do selection better, more scientifically, more quantitatively, and also then
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use that as a benchmark, if you will, or to help inform the training and development process?
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How important then, right now, is that part of the science to the athletic performance
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in kind of sports in general right now? It seems like that teams look for more ways to better
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understand their athletes and their performance than ever before. Absolutely. I mean, you know,
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going back to Moneyball, you know, which has had a, you know, major impact on baseball and other
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sports, you know, there's just this, I think, recognition that, you know, there is a science
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to this and quantitative, you know, data-driven approaches have been incredibly effective. But
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it is an arms race, you know, between teams. Yes. And we get a little advantage from bringing in
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some of these analytics and, you know, another team does the same thing. So the way, you know,
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kind of the perspective that we take is at this point, often it's the case that everything from
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the neck down is optimized, right? And pretty straightforward to measure. And so the differentiator
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is what's going on between the years. So how fast do you process information? You know, how good are
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under pressure? How well do you recover from fatigue? You know, what's your degree of focus?
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And the beauty of it is that now we can measure those things quite readily without really being
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a burden on the athlete or on the team. And we understand what they mean. And, you know,
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what we've done in that study and in others that we can talk about is to connect the dots. Okay.
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And so we've uncovered what we will call three readiness signals in the brain
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that predict performance on the pitch, on the wrestling mat, on the baseball diamond, right?
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So a lot of these translate across sports. And many of those also translate into other kinds of
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jobs like cybersecurity. That was going to be my next question is because I'm sure that this
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is research that probably has multiple layers to it in terms of where it can also be implemented
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in the business community as well. Absolutely. And we take it as a model. Now, you know,
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I feel pretty confident that the signals that we identified in the brain, as well as correlates
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that we can measure in sort of gamified assessments. So we've created a bunch of
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different little games that assess like, you know, how well you manage risk and return,
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or how good you are at kind of getting the gist of how many other players might be there,
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you know, within your vicinity, or how good you are at strategic thinking, getting inside the
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head of your opponent. So through a combination of those, we've been able to, yeah, absolutely
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demonstrate that, you know, what's true for a defender in soccer is true for a defender in
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cybersecurity and cyber ops in the military. And that's great. What I also found interesting
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from the study, and as you've kind of alluded to already, is that there is the component of
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how the business reacts to this. And in the course of this study, it was the recommendations you gave
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to the Coventry City coaching staff and team in how they can kind of optimize this. And that's
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kind of the component that so many businesses are going through right now. Absolutely. So with Coventry, it was Coventry City Football Club, which is a really interesting
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team because it's a mid-market to sort of low, you know, low revenue team. So pretty much what
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they serve as is a development team for the big, you know, for the big guys. And so once they've
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got it, you know, a young player who shows a lot of talent, then they end up selling them,
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you know, on the market. And that's kind of how they keep going. So for them,
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it's really important to be able to identify talent before anybody else does. So somebody
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who's got the brain makeup, the mind makeup, that otherwise doesn't appear through the eye test,
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right? So like, you know, which is sort of the most common approach that coaches and scouts take.
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Are they kind of the dynamics that athletes show? Are they fairly universal across athletes? Or
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are there dynamics that are maybe slightly different depending on the person, you know, who may be being scouted by a team? Yeah. I mean, what we found is that these hidden
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signals in the brain, which the three that are most important that we've identified are focus,
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I'll just call it focus. Yeah. Another being confidence. So that's, you know, this is sort
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of data storytelling, but it's, it's, it's your brain state of wanting to move forward to go
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through that brick wall versus I don't want to be here. And then neural fatigue. So kind of how,
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how tired you are mentally. And, you know, it's often the case that people are unaware
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of their brain states, that's pretty common, or they have difficulty verbalizing it,
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or they don't want to tell you, or they don't want to tell themselves. Like they're like,
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you know, the pitcher on the mound in the ninth inning, you know, who, you know, he says like,
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you know, I want to finish this game. You know, I've been in the whole game, but maybe his brain
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is actually, you know, a bit tired out. His focus is waning and maybe overstating exactly how,
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how ready he is to continue. As we move forward and the interest in and around the world of sports
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being so large right now, that makes me think that these are components that not only can be
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looked at and looked for at the professional level, but probably even in younger athletes as well.
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And I'm wondering if this is something that, are these traits that are intrinsic within people,
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or are they developed or, or how is it that you see this play out? That is, that is, that is a
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million dollar, a hundred million dollar question. So we haven't really tested, you know,
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youth sports yet, although in the Coventry study, their team included guys who were 16 on up to 35.
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So we were capturing actually a pretty significant window since the brain doesn't stop developing
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until you're around 25 years old. So half those guys were still in that developmental window.
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Um, I think that these are a combination of trait and state. So, and the reason I say that is that
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everything else we know about the brain and behavior, kind of like how you're wired is about
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50, 50 nature and nurture. So what you're born with, what you got from your parents and then
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your experiences and then how you develop. So we don't want to necessarily say you can't be that.
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Right. But for some players, you know, for a specific position, let's say the gap between
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where they are now, how they're wired and where they need to be to actually play an elite level
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might be too far. I mean, it might be better suited to something else. Well, and, and thinking about the world of soccer, there's a very big difference between
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how players play as an attack or an offensive player in comparison to how they play as a
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defender. Same, probably in the game of hockey and probably as you kind of alluded to with
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some dynamics of different jobs within companies as well. Exactly. That is one of the, I think one of the really interesting,
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one of our most interesting findings from the Coventry study is that the kind of mental factors, the brain factors that make for a good defender are not exactly
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the same as what makes for a good attacker. Especially for defenders, the most important
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feature of how their brains process information is actually focused. So how, how good they are at attending to, you know, what's in front of them and maintaining that focus.
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And we actually used a measure, a derived measure that is, I wouldn't say it's diagnostic,
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but it's prognostic. So it can, it's, it's a, it kind of helps physicians inform, you know,
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understand whether somebody might have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, ADHD.
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And some of the players that, I mean, there was a linear, just a smack dab linear relationship
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between this metric and actual, you know, defenders performance on the field. And that
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performance was a measure is a composite of every single thing they do. So it's not just like,
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you know, steals and tackles, but positioning, you know, and, and so it's, it's a metric that's
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made up of many dozens of different measures. So that's, that I think is some of those guys
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probably would qualify for pharmacological treatment, you know, in so far as that's
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actually allowed on sport. Even though this was a few years ago, what did you take from
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doing this research and how have you seen kind of the results you came to several years ago,
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kind of play out and develop over the last handful of years? Well, there's a few responses to that.
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I mean, one is, you know, after we did our neuro profiling study and we gave the coaches
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our report and recommendations, then Coventry won their league and then they were promoted
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to premier. Of course, then they were relegated. So we'll take full credit for that. No, I'm
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just joking. I mean, one of the things that we found is that, so of course, right after that,
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it was the pandemic. And so that kind of, kind of slowed things down quite a bit.
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Uh, there's a lot of interest, you know, in the part of various, um, sports, but they're very
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cautious. And the other thing I would say is that, um, the, the market has kind of been spoiled by a
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lot of people selling snake oil. So saying that this is neuroscience, right? When there's no
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neuroscience in it and that it's in a work and it's going to deliver and it's going to be magic.
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So I spend a lot of my time kind of trying to rectify that, right. To inform the market and
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say, Hey, this is real science, right? We developed it in the lab. We demonstrate that it
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works on the pitch. And now we've, you know, we've, we've, uh, we've done that with baseball.
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We've done that with, um, with hockey, uh, you know, and, and wrestling. And we're actually,
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so, so, so I think there's building momentum and we're really excited because actually my, um,
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my startup Cogware, which is, uh, which is actually the technology that we used to, uh, to measure
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simple athletic headband that, um, excuse me, that, uh, measures with clinical grade accuracy,
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uh, brain activity. So we have a, a partnership are assigned with the WBC world boxing Congress
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Muay Thai. Uh, so, um, we are going to be going in actually in, in three weeks to the great Muay Thai
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festival in Bangkok, the fighters. I mean, this was going to be initially a pilot, uh,
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to measure these same hidden signals and then try to reverse engineer, not so much for selection,
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but for training. So then when you go back and, uh, look at, you know, training regimen, um,
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how many days off rest did you have hydration weight, what are you eating? And in that way,
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once we kind of connect all those dots, help each fighter to understand, like, how do I make sure
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that my brain is in the best state possible, uh, for fight. And, you know, not only is that really
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important for performance, but for safety as well. So if you go into that fight and you're,
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you're, you know, you've got mental fatigue or you're lacking confidence, you know, you could
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actually be injured. Michael, always great to talk to you about your research. Thanks very much
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for a few moments today. Yeah, it's been a pleasure, Dan. As always Michael Platt,
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Wharton professor joining us here on the show.