#199 Potentiality, not talent: why the forest matters more than the trees

You are eleven years old. You love football. This game is yours. Then a piece of paper somewhere, a meeting you were never in, and a word gets attached to your name. Or doesn't.

That word is talent. We have used it for decades like a flashlight, searching young bodies for something hidden inside them, something we could find if we looked hard enough, early enough. Find it, take it, water it. Leave the rest in the dark.

This episode asks what happens under the ground while we are busy looking at the tree. The roots talk to each other down there. Fungus runs between them like nerve and vein, feeding the weak, warning the strong, holding the whole forest together as one breathing thing. Cut that down to save your one good trunk, and the trunk dies too. It was never standing alone.

So we put forward a different word. Potentiality. Something that grows between a child and everyone who ever passed a ball to them, drove them to training, taught them a trick on a summer evening and forgot they ever did it. This one runs close to the bone of what Progressão has always tried to say — that a player is not a tree standing alone in a field, but a forest, and we're counting trees when we should be tending the soil.

The Progressão book is being translated into English. More on that soon.

🌍 More at progressao.fi 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello friends! This is Progress Sala, where we talk about the beautiful but often misunderstood and complex game of football. It's a holistic, skillful, and adaptive journey to better be managed. Welcome back to Progress Sala. I'm your host Janis Sarajarvi. Last week we talked about culture as a methodology, about the idea that the soil, the cosmology, the whole world a player grows up inside is doing more of the development work than any sh session plan ever will. Today I want to follow that thread to a very specific consequence. A word the football world reaches for constantly, often without thinking, and a word I think we should be much more careful with, and the word is talent. I want to argue for a different word, potentiality. And I want to argue that this is not a small semantic swap, it's actually a different, totally different way of seeing what a player is, what development is, learning is, and ultimately what football culture is for. The way we talk about talent in football right now is leading us to make decisions that are scientifically shaky, ethically uncomfortable and especially damaging for smaller football countries. So this is not only a philosophical kind of idea episode about words or such things. This is about practice and about the real human consequences of how we use language. Let us start with the word talent. When football people talk about talent, they usually, not always, but usually means some stable individual property. A capacity that lives inside the person. The talented player shows this capacity early. You can see it, you can spot it. Talent is something you either have or you don't. And you if you have it, the job of the system is to identify you, support you, and accelerate you toward elite performance. That whole picture rests on two assumptions. First, that the capacity is mostly inside the individual. Second, that it expresses itself early enough to be identified. The problem here is that both of these assumptions have been challenged hard in the research literature over the past two decades or so. For example, Joe Baker and colleagues, Damien Farrow, Arne Kulig, many others have made the same basic point in different ways. The predictive validity of talent identification, especially in childhood and early adolescence, is poor, often very poor. Many of the features we use to distinguish talented from not talented at 12 or 14 or even earlier than 12 are simply features of being physically more mature than your peers. They wash out by 18 and they tell us almost nothing about who will become an elite adult performer. Then we have problems with the relative age effect. So we know that people who are born early in the year get advantage, biological maturation. Players who are born in the same year, same date can be in different phases of their maturity in, for example in teenage years. And then we have training age that we don't often talk about. And the training age is how and what did you do before you were, for example, identified. So player is 13. What did the player do from 0 to 13? So there are totally different environments, totally different paths to one point, and but we tend to think this one point as the true kind of telling of what the player is. The research is now quite clear that the markers that actually distinguish elite from sub-elite adult athletes tend to appear late in the adolescence, sometimes even after that. At the moment we cannot reliably tell who is a talent and who is not, but at the same time we are making confident decisions about children with tools we know don't work. The sports scientist Joe Baker has put it most bluntly: the wrong decisions we make in talent identifications are not just inefficient, they are wastage for him. Large numbers of potentially excellent athletes are being lost to the system because we are choosing wrongly, choosing too early, and choosing on the basis of features that do not predict what we claim they predict. So that's the first problem. The empirical foundation under talent is weak. Well there is a second problem, which becomes especially visible from where I am from Finland, Estonia, small countries. Finland has about five and a half million people, Estonia has about one and a third, compared to that to Germany or some other big football countries. In a big country you can run a bad talent ID system and still produce world class players. Sheer numbers carry you. If your funnel is leaky, you still have so many players entering it that some great ones survive almost by accident. The system gets to look competent because the output is good, but most of that goodness is from the volume at the input. In a small country, this doesn't work. Small countries simply don't have the input volume to compensate for a leaky funnel. So if we copy the talent ID logic of bigger countries, we will run a version of the same system with 1/20th the numbers, and we will lose a lot of potential along the way. And that's because the strategy is fundamentally wrong for our scale. And I would argue that it's wrong for the bigger country scale also. This is in game theory terms a strategic question. We shouldn't be competing with bigger countries by doing what they do, but only smaller. We should be doing something different, something that fits our actual situation, that takes seriously how few of us there are, and that builds on the fact that every single player matters. At the same time, in some countries, there is actually in football conversation a slow shift happening from the word talent to the word potentiality. I have been part of pushing this shift and I would like to be careful about it because there is a pattern going on. So we change the word, but the old logic comes with us. We start talking about potentiality identification. We build tests, batteries, algorithms to identify potentiality. So we start asking which young players have the most potentiality so that we can prioritize them and then we start ranking them. And if you listen carefully to this, the only thing that has changed is the noun. We have replaced talent with potentiality and kept everything else. Same individual focus, same early identification mindset, same filtering logic, same wastage actually, but just in a more, you know, nicer vocabulary. This is the coast of talent. We are in the close of potentiality. The problem in this is a big problem and potential also, is that real potentiality thinking doesn't lead to better identification. It leads us out of the identification game altogether. Let me try to explain why. Potentiality is a richer word than talent for a simple reason. It doesn't locate the capacity inside the individual. It locates it in the relationship between the individual and the environment over time. So from a property inside a person to a process between a person and their world, unfolding over years and decades. To see why this is such a big move, picture two things in your head at once. Picture one, a single twelve year old boy or girl on a pitch. Sharp first touch, scores goals, runs well, everything's good. The talent picture says, look at this child, the capacity is there. Our job is to find them, support them, advance them. We can identify talent when they are young. Picture two. That same child but now also the family they were born into. The street or backyard they kick the ball in. The older cousin who taught them tricks, the friend group that valued playing, the local club, the coaches, the parents driving them around, the school's attitude to sport, the country's football cultures, the language available to talk about the game, the weather, the food, the sleep, the broader sense of meaning the game has in their community. The hundreds of small encounters with the game over thousands of days. The talent picture sees only the child. The potentiality picture sees the entire system because the child cannot be separated from it. The child's capacities are not just in them, they are in the long ongoing dance between this person and this world. If you accept this, then the question who has the most talent stops actually making sense. Because the capacity is not a thing inside the person you can just read off. It's a relationship that is still unfolding. And the question shifts from who has it to what kind of soil are we creating and what is it allowing to grow? So we go to forest. Because where the ecological image starts to work better and it's actually more than a metaphor. It is closer to how biology actually works. If you walk into a forest, your eye goes to the street. Some are tall, some short, some are thriving, some are struggling. The reductionist mind looks at the tall ones and asks, What is special about that tree? Its genes, its luck with sunlight, the talent question in forest. But for the last thirty years, ecologists like Susan Simard have been showing us something that completely reframes that question. So under the forest floor, the trees are not separate at all. They are joined by vast networks of micorrhizal fungi, thread like structures called musellium that link the root systems of different trees, often across many species over enormous areas. And through these networks, trees share carbon, water, nitrogen and even chemical warning signals about pests and disease. Older trees, what Simard calls mother trees, channel resources to seedlings, including seedlings that are not their own kin. And when a tree dies, its nutrients flow through the network to others. The forest is not a collection of competing individuals. It's something closer to a single distributed organism with the fungal network as its connective tissue. So if you look at the forest and the individual trees, you will very easily miss almost all of what is actually going on. The tall tree is tall in significant part because of the network underneath, because of the mother trees that supported it, because of the species diversity around it, because of the soil microbiome that took centuries to develop. The tree didn't grow tall despite the other trees, it grew tall because of them. Let's go back to football. The talented player, the one we identify at twelve, the one we sent to the academy, the one we celebrate at twenty. Talent thinking says that player is the tall tree. The job is to find the tall trees and water them, the rest of the forest is just background. But potentiality thinking says that player is the tall tree. Yes, but they are tall because of the mycellum under the pitch, because of the older players who taught them, because of the parents who drove them, because of the dozens of teammates whose presence shaped their play. Because of the coaches who tended the soil for a decade before this player even appeared, and because of the cultural network underneath the one we talked about last week. You cannot grow that one tall tree by focusing on it alone. The forest grows the tree. If you cut the forest down to concentrate resources on the one promising trunk, you kill the muscle that was making the tree possible in the first place. And this is a serious description of what we now know about how complex living systems work. Players like trees are not standalone individuals. They are notes in a meshwork. Related to meshwork we have talked about Tim Ingold on this podcast before and his thinking corresponds very nicely here. So Ingold has spent a career arguing against the picture of organisms as discrete dots that occasionally interact and in favour of organisms as lines, a trajectory unfolding over time, a flow, a process. In Ingold's view, an organism is not really separable for its environment. They are not two things that meet. Instead they are one ongoing process. And in this Ingold uses the image of a meshwork, many lines, many trajectories waving together, responding to each other, growing together, and none of these lines makes sense on its own. Each one becomes what it becomes in the company of the others. Ingold has a phrase, very nice phrase related to all this discussion on talent and potential. His own philosophical journey, he says, move from talking about being to becoming with and finally to becoming alongside. And these are actually big shifts in worldview. Becoming alongside is the philosophical position that I think football needs. A player doesn't just exist with talent. A player becomes alongside their teammates, their opponents, coaches, family, culture, language, generation, in time. And none of these can be subtracted without changing the player. This is the same point as the muscelium in different language. Ingol's meshwork is the forest's fungal network. The player's lines are the trees' roots, and both pictures are telling us the same thing. The individual property model is wrong about how living systems develop. Capacity is relational and processual, not internal and static. And the question is, if that is true biologically and philosophically, why are we still using a vocabulary that pretends the opposite when we talk about football? So what should we then do? Peak. Let's stop talent idea, let's move to potentiality, but how do we do it? And this is a very practical question. Good question. What is left if we stop trying to identify talent and we also stop trying to identify potentiality? And the answer I think is that we shift the entire focus of the work from the individual upwards to the system around them, from the trees to the forest. So we invest in environments, we build clubs where football is dense in the air, you know, cosmology. We build clubs where football is valued, football culture is strong, where children can play without being filtered too early, at least where the older players are present in the lives of the younger ones, where the coaches are themselves embedded in a culture they understand. We invest in the soil, knowing that the soil will grow many different kinds of kinds of trees, and that we cannot tell in advance which ones will be the tallest. We accept diversity. A monoculture forest is a fragile forest. One disease can wipe it out. Football monocultures where every club trains the same way, every player is shaped to the same template are fragile in the same way. A football culture that has many different kinds of environments producing many different kinds of players is more resilient and is more likely to produce surprising kinds of excellence too. We stop selecting early is the football equivalent of cutting down most of the forest to concentrate on a few trunks. And then finally we get serious about the design of environments. Last week's episode was about culture as a methodology. This week's is the same thought from another angle. The environment is the curriculum. Tent the environment and the players will tent themselves. There is also ethical weight on this whole discussion. If we keep doing talent ID, we are not just being scientifically wrong, we are doing something ethically heavier than the football world usually admits. Imagine you are 11 years old, you love football, you play with your friends, and then in the space of one season an adult tells you that you are not part of the talent group. You will not be invited to the regional training, you will not be in the development squad, the mark goes onto your file, and the mark is red, and it goes into your head too. So what does the player hear? They do not hear your current performance is not at the threshold we are using right now and may change later. They hear, I am not the kind of person who is good at this thing I love. So heavy messages. And this is the moral weight of the talent system. We are picking out a small number of children and telling the rest in effect that they do not matter often we do like this. At the same time, something else happens. Let's think about who actually carries a football culture, for example. It's carried by the coaches in the small clubs who decided to give back to the game that gave them so much and they raise the next generation of players. It's carried by parents who grew up loving football and now pay the kid fees and drive the children to training. It is carried by the small or bigger business owner who sponsors the local club because football was important to them as a kid. It's carried by the journalists, referees, the volunteers, everybody around the club. Very easily the talent system cuts some of these people off from the game. It tells them early that they do not belong or their kids don't belong. And then we wonder why the parents who never played don't know how to support their children in the sport, and we wonder why the football culture feels light. It's because of us, we did it. So if you take one thing from this episode, take this. Potentiality is not a better word for talent. It's a different concept entirely. It moves the focus from a property inside a person to a relationship between a person and their world over time. It moves the work from identifying individuals to tending environments. It moves the moral position from selecting a few to honoring all. And this message is important for all football cultures. We have to keep every child in the forest because every tree, fungus, every patch of moss is doing work. The tall ones will emerge. The rest of the forest is what makes them possible. In the end, one quick note the Progresal book is being translated into English. More on that in the future. Have a thoughtful week. Walk through the forest. Until next time.