The Socio-Affective Superiority: Messi and Jordi Alba Case Study
On different occasions, I have presented Paco Seirul-lo’s superiorities for developing positional play; numerical, positional, qualitative, and socio-affective. I have written extensively on numerical, positional and qualitative, however, I have never detailed what the socio-affective superiority looks like and how you might approach further developing it. Quite frankly, this is most likely the topic I receive the most questions about: what is socio-affective superiority?
Jordi Alba and Messi
One the most aesthetically satisfying passes in football has to be a diagonal ball over the top, from the right side of the field to the left, from Messi’s magical left foot to a sprinting Jordi Alba, who has timed his run perfectly to be at the right place and time to receive Messi’s lofted pass on his left foot. This doesn’t always end in a goal, but when it does, like it did it on March 6th, 2021 against Osasuna, it’s entrancing.
It’s everything about it; Messi holds the ball, holds the ball, holds the ball, and at the same time you see Jordi Alba start his run from his left back position, move past a defender or two, and you think there’s no way Messi either a) saw Jordi Alba making that run with the sea of defenders between the pair b) can time it right for him not to be offside c) execute with such precision at such speed.
Then, like a solar eclipse forming, everything lines up perfectly. Messi releases the perfectly floated pass into the path of a flying Jordi Alba who doesn’t break his stride to softly control it, and it’s in the back of the net. Just like that.
Messi and Jordi Alba seem to have a connection with one another. In an interview with Catalunya Radio, Messi talked about this connection with Alba, “The signing of Jordi Alba has been magical for me for the simple fact of always having him there. I can play it without looking knowing that he will be there because he understands me perfectly and he knows when I am going to play the pass without me having to look at him. Then he controls the ball and he decides what to do with it.” Jordi Alba said the following about the connection, “In training we always look for each other, both Leo to me and me to Leo.”
On separate occasions, they both make mention of how they both look for each other. These two players understand each other, as Messi puts, to perfection. They know exactly where the other is going to be, always perfectly timed. This is exactly the connection that Paco Seirulo-lo, a pillar with FC Barcelona, has defined as Socio-Affective quality.
Professor Seirul-lo, as he is referred to within La Masia, defines Socio-Affective superiority like so, ‘when we connect those who identify and understand each other well’. This superiority is part of the Sociostructures Paco Seirulo-lo has developed to better define what helps develop athletes, and more specifically athletes of team sports.
Paco Seirul·lo’s Socio-Emotional Structure
Paco Seirul·lo started his career as a track and field coach. When he references this period of his career, you can sense that he’s almost ashamed of it. Not that he’s embarrassed about the sport he coached but about how he would train athletes. He recognized quickly when starting to work within team sports that his almost robotic methodology of training track and field athletes was never going to work in team sports for several reasons, the main one being the failure to see how everything is connected.
In team sports, he saw the feedback loops between player and team, team and player. He noticed that training the ‘physical’, like he did in track and field, overshadowed a huge aspect of team sports; the relationships between teammates. The socio-emotional structure attempted to bring this into his methodology. Simply bearing in mind how players related to each other was revolutionary at this time. It was a time when sports were about how fast you could run and how hard you could kick. Bringing into the fold how players interacted with one another put into motion FC Barcelona’s methodology that would go on to bring them nearly a decade of success.
He said, “Each player involves and optimizes their socio-emotional structure every time they live situations where they are committed emotionally with other individuals with whom they need to cooperate and compete with” In other words, whenever we are interacting with others we are bringing with us our ability to be social and emotional people. Seirul·lo believes this, like any other footballing skill, needs to be developed in the training environment. With better development of this human attribute within a group, we are more likely to achieve socio-affective superiorities.
Above all, this structure should acknowledge each person’s personal desires for playing the game, whether it’s fame, glory, or simply having fun, and then align them to the common goal of the team.
Seirulo·lo says this about the process players go through when shifting from individual to collective, “I compete to win, but I cannot do it alone. I must be a part of a group where we are joined by our interpersonal desires which are continuously changing within me. In a cruel way, I must give up strictly personal reasons with which I had previously used to achieve goals, giving up my competitive personality which I must now alter. The act of giving up my individual being and acquiring a collective one as a member of a team opens a new world of emotional and social necessities with those who I will share team successes and failures with.”
I believe the profundity and elegance of his statement demonstrates how much he believed in the power of the group. This was the bedrock of this philosophy and a belief that I personally share.
The Game is a Team Sport
Law number three in the IFAB’s Laws of the Game tells us everything that we need to know, “A match is played by two teams, each with a maximum of eleven players.” Using this starting point helps us clearly see that the team is always above the individual. The game cannot be played without the team, however, it can be played without a certain player.
Now, law number 10 tells us, “The team scoring the greater number of goals is the winner.” Therefore, those 11 players must work together to achieve that objective. If the team wants to succeed in this pursuit, each player must contribute towards the team objective. We are now getting to why having a Socio-Affective superiority helps you when trying to win games. The aim is to more effectively and efficiently contribute to the objective of scoring more goals. Socio-affective superiority means more coordinated actions between players, a better understanding of how to mesh each other’s actions together. When this happens, it seems as though players are reading each other’s minds; they are speaking the same language.
Speaking the Same Football Language
Socio-affective superiorities are a result of players speaking the same footballing language. Now, I don’t literally mean the same language (although this does help). What I mean by footballing language is how players are conditioned to solve football problems through the repetition of football situations.
For example, let’s go back to Messi and Jordi Alba. They both grew up in Barça's famed youth academy, La Masia. Having had the same footballing upbringing, with consistent game philosophy, game principles, methodology, and style of play, they experienced thousands of football situations where the environment subliminally aligned their actions to solve those football situations.
On the other hand, when Messi went to PSG, he did not share the pitch with players who grew up with the same football language, and this can be seen in matches.
Using Game Principles
The legendary Dutch coach, Rinus Michels, explains this superiority with a great analogy:
“You can compare it to traffic rules, whereby the individual behavior on the road is 'steered' via the guidelines in relation to the other road-users, to prevent traffic chaos. This conduct through experience becomes automatic. You no longer have to think about it."
You’ll notice two things here;
1) Michels introduces the concept of guidelines to align actions
2) He describes the inevitability of this understanding between players becoming unconscious.
Let’s tackle his ‘guidelines’ first. The development of this requires an intentional top-down guidance through the use of ‘guidelines’ or ‘principles’ that will align individual actions. These principles are what help players and coaches determine the quality of the football action in relation to the team.
For example, if the team principle is to exploit space behind the opposition backline but whenever the center-back is on the ball they pass it to the outside back without ever looking at the space behind the back line, then their action is not line with the principle that the team adheres to when trying to solve the problem of building up.
Team principles give an actual blueprint for players’ decision making. Over the course of many years of using consistent team principles as well as playing with the same teammates, those actions become ingrained in the person’s unconscious.
Unconscious is good because it’s automatic and hundredths of seconds faster than conscious decision making. In an action sport where space and time are constraints, hundredths of a second faster is the difference between Champions League and third-tier English football. Better than that is collective unconscious behavior solving football situations, like Jordi Alba and Messi.
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Game Situation Specific Training
The practicality of this comes to life in how we train. Training sessions need to re-create those game situations as they will be experienced in the game.
One of the most common mistakes I see in relation to creating socio-affective superioties is in how coaches approach scoring. There’s a misconception that the final action of scoring should be left up to the players. It’s said that scoring requires ‘creativity’ and individual ability therefore it must be left to the players. Coaches work diligently to have their teams build up in an organized fashion only to leave scoring to chance. There is rarely an organization about how the team is going to score. Players rarely experience the scoring moment of the game in training in the same way they experience other moments of the game. The scoring moment of the game typically lacks the clarity and direction that other moments are given.
Let’s go back to Jordi Alba and Messi for an example of a practical application. It’s not by accident that these two players seem to have always found each other to create scoring situations. They trained for many years together but more specifically they were given the opportunity to learn from each other in training games that replicate scoring moments.
Firstly, Barça’s model from academy to first team follows a positional play philosophy around the possession of the ball, which practically means that they minimize the risk of losing possession by using shorter passes. This results in a high number of attacking sequences where the opponent is protecting their goal with lots of numbers. The solution to this is moving the back line back and exploiting the space between the opposition backline and midline.
This is where the Alba-Messi solution to scoring originates from. By creating training situations where there are lots of defenders around the goal, Alba and Messi’s solution was moving defenders back and momentarily exploiting the space in front of them. This solution isn’t novel but the players involved (Messi and Alba) must experience this TOGETHER in order to learn about and from each other. This is the only way.
Football is one of the greatest expressions of contributing to something bigger than yourself. It's a perfect reflection of what it’s like to be a human contributing to society. This is the most powerful thing a person can do. Paco Seirul·lo understood this and thus aligned his methodology to this aspect of football. He knew that through the right methods he could use this power to amplify a football team and so we got Socio-Affective Superiority.
So what is socio-affective superiority? To play better football because we understand each other better than the opposition.
