Since I first read Phil Jackson’s Sacred Hoops, which is his account of how he coached the Chicago Bulls to six basketball championships, I have found myself thinking regularly about this one line from within it: good teams become great ones when the players trust each other to surrender the me for the we.
For Jackson, this meant that even a talent as singular as Michael Jordan could not, on his own, win the Bulls a championship, and, in a move that was controversial at the time, he built the offence around that fact rather than around their MVP. The triangle offence, as it became known, distributed decision making across the floor instead of funnelling it through one scorer. Although Jordan resisted it at first – he is on record calling it a waste of time – once he came round to the idea, those six titles followed.
Good teams become great ones when the players trust each other to surrender the me for the we.
It’s an ideology that we have recently seen aplenty as we’ve enjoyed a summer of sport that has been dominated by the idea of ‘we’. In the Men’s Fifa World Cup this July, France and Argentina, who were predicted by the Opta supercomputer to come first and second respectively, both came to the tournament with obvious star players – for France, who came fourth, this was Kylian Mbappé, who individually took home the top goalscorer award of the Golden Boot; for second-place Argentina, eight-time Ballon d’Or winner Lionel Messi, remained as the team’s talisman and was widely expected to take home the award given to the best player of the tournament, the Golden Ball. Less successfully, Cristiano Ronaldo, at 40 years old, was still the player a talented but underperforming Portugal built their team around, despite many noticing his dwindling impact compared to his career peak. So perhaps it wasn’t surprising that it was Spain who ultimately took home the World Cup for just the second time in its history without a recognisable ‘star player’.
Although the captain and eventual Golden Ball winner Rodri is known to be an exceptional central defensive midfielder – he won the Ballon d’Or in 2024 – he plays in a position that often flies under the radar and is most effective when serving the team rather than dominating headlines. Guiding a team that manager Luis de la Fuente regularly calls a family, his quiet leadership became a reminder of the success that can come when the strongest voice prioritises the team.
A single tournament is one thing, but holding a culture together for twenty-six years, across generations of players is another. As a Manchester United fan myself, I had a front row seat to Sir Alex Ferguson’s historic tenure, where he built on the same conviction that no player, however gifted, was bigger than the club. It showed most clearly in a run of academy graduates, Giggs, Scholes, Beckham and the Neville brothers among them, who were absorbed into one dressing room rather than treated as individual prospects to be managed around, and promoted separately as the future stars they would become. Where Jackson’s version had to survive one player’s scepticism and Spain’s had to survive one summer, Ferguson’s had to survive decades of turnover, and wave after wave of players who could easily have been the exception that the rule bent around.
How did he do this? Famously, just before big-name players were about to hit their peak (like Jaap Stam, Ruud van Nistelrooy and Roy Keane) he would sell them. In his words, this was because, “the moment a player thinks he’s bigger than the club, he needs to go”.
Research from the University of Sussex shows why this works. The study found that the top 20% of teams by strength of identity outperformed the bottom 20% by 53% which was then put into practice using a method known as TRIBE which was built directly from this research. The Great Britain Women’s Hockey team used this method ahead of the Rio 2016 Olympics, and eventually went on to win gold. Some researchers put this down to GB’s stronger team identity compared to the Dutch who took home silver.
With the players and the fans singing together, they embodied the power of ‘we’ with Jude Bellingham summing up the togetherness in a post-tournament Instagram post where he reflected: “When we’re together, we can achieve great things”.
This can be seen even in athletics, which is a sport that often rewards individual performance on both the track and in the field. The European Championships, which were held in Birmingham earlier this month, showed that even individual competitors need to work with a team for success. For example, Amy Hunt became the first athlete in the 92-year history of the competition to win four gold medals at a single championships, but two of those four were relays, and were as much about each team member playing their part to reach gold as they were about Hunt’s personal performance. Without all of the individuals working together, none of them would have gone home with the win.
The effect of a great team doesn’t stop there, because the atmosphere it creates reaches those interacting from the outside too. If we go back to the Men’s Fifa World Cup in July, England’s best finish at the tournament since their historic win in 1966 came from players who were picked to build the team. In years past, every great individual player was squeezed into the squad, even if doing that meant the team didn’t play as well as they would have done if some of those individuals were left at home. This summer, Thomas Tuchel decided to build the best squad rather than choosing the most talented players, and it created a team that created an electric atmosphere. The supporters in the stadium became a twelfth man, adopting Oasis’ Wonderwall as the country’s unofficial anthem. With the players and the fans singing together, they embodied the power of ‘we’ with Jude Bellingham summing up the togetherness in a post-tournament Instagram post where he reflected: “When we’re together, we can achieve great things”.
From coaches to champions, there is something all of these winners have in common – they think in ‘we’ rather than ‘me’. And it is from there, just like Phil Jackson, Sir Alex Ferguson, and Jude Bellingham said, that success inevitably comes.
