Sky Sports' Johnny Phillips: Team spirit a vital factor for any side

It is that indefinable factor that makes such a difference, from Premier League to Sunday League. There are so many analysts, sports scientists, physiotherapists, psychologists and more working on improving performance by the smallest percentages, looking for those “marginal gains”, as Sir Dave Brailsford refers to them in the sport of cycling.

The right environment can also be created to help team spirit grow, but there is no definitive science behind it. For most elite professional teams it is something that comes from within. And – we’ll come to this later – us mere mortals performing on a different stage struggle to keep it.

This all sprung to mind when speaking to Burnley’s Johann Berg Gudmondsson for Soccer Saturday this week – an unremarkable player yet someone who is in a better place than almost anyone else to talk about team spirit, given what has happened at his club and country in the last couple of years.

He was attending Blessed Trinity College, a stone’s throw from Turf Moor, as part of this year’s Playstation Schools’ Cup, lending his support to the school team taking part in the competition and taking in a question and answer session with pupils not involved in the game.

Predictably, they asked him to organise a Viking Thunderclap. It was the iconic image from Euro 2016 and will follow Iceland’s players around for the rest of their lives. Nothing represented the team spirit of a team at those championships more than that thunderclap.

“It’s nice to have something that belongs to us, something that makes us a bit special,” he said.

“We’re doing so well as a country and people are noticing what we are doing. When we play abroad we see some other countries doing it along with us and that’s great as well. Icelandic football has been fantastic, we are a nation of 320,000 people and to do what we have done has been amazing and that thunderclap has gone with us.”

The Iceland team is greater than the sum of its parts. And the same can be said of Burnley, who last season finished seventh in the Premier League.

“You’ve got players who are willing to fight for each other and run for each other, it is similar at Burnley to Iceland. We have a really good group at Burnley who are willing to work for each other and they’re all on the same page. You need to have that in this sport. When things aren’t going well you need to be able to stick together. Team spirit needs to be high.”

It is in defeat that this is most important. Burnley have just come off the back of a 5-0 loss at Manchester City and a 4-0 reverse at home to Chelsea. Playing in such games is nobody’s idea of fun, yet Burnley’s players have stayed tight as a group.

“You have to park it, we knew those games were tough, but obviously we have to learn from the mistakes too. It comes from the manager as well, how he wants us to play and what we do on the training ground. He’s a massive influence in the group and his training sessions are really good, everybody is on it one hundred percent. It’s a lot of things that go together that you need to be successful in this sport.”

So when team spirit is high, does it genuinely raise performance levels?

“I think so, yes,” Gudmondsson continued. “The whole camp is really positive, that showed last season. I’m not saying you have to get along with everybody, you don’t all have to be friends, but as long as everybody is going in the same direction that is a massive part of it.”

Strength of mind is so important. It was reassuring to listen to Gudmondsson speak about team spirit because it transcends all levels of sport. My under-performing, overweight Sunday League team, the Heroes of Waterloo, have been muddling along in the London leagues for more than 20 years. Team spirit was a factor long before I joined them and it continues to this day. Yet, as none of us possess the strength of mind of elite sportsmen, it is both amusing and depressing to witness how easily we lose it and crumble in the bad times.

The baggage our team takes into most games includes hangovers, hamstring injuries, children playing up at home, Tinder dates gone wrong and an inability to read a Satnav correctly. Thus, unlike Gudmondsson and co, we cannot “park it” when we go 2-0 down. Bickering and sulking combine with doubt, fear and self-preservation.

Yet, the friendships endure and there is a mutual acceptance of our failings. There has to be, given how poor we are. In the less frequent good days, when it is all going to plan, the team spirit remains strong and we spur each other on. Ours could best be described as a ‘fluid’ team spirit, influenced by external factors taking place outside the pitch and a fragile confidence on it.

Gudmondsson is in a place, for both his club and his country, where team spirit is rock solid.

More than that, it is enhancing performance levels and acting as a buffer when results are poor. It is a priceless commodity and it should be bottled up and preserved forever.