Jamie Vardy and Danny Drinkwater
Leicester City is the tiny club that won British football’s most important trophy last week. They started the season as insignificant 5000 to 1 outsiders but saw off all the top clubs. It’s as if a fox took on a pack of wolves and beat them. It should just never happen.
But it did and it’s the talking point in every pub in the land.
Leicester City’s manager is an Italian, Claudio Ranieri. Unlike his better-funded rivals, Claudio had no money to spend on big players. The club’s owners are Thai businessmen and they had no interest in sinking money into a club that wasn’t going to win anything.
That meant that Claudio would have to do things differently. No money, no problem. He would build a team by choosing unfancied players who could actually play together. So he carefully researched the pool of talent available to him in the lower leagues and built a star team, not a team of stars.
“My team is like an orchestra,” he says. “To play the symphony correctly I need some of the boom boom boom, but I also need some tweet and sometimes the tweet and boom go well together.
Sometimes all you can hear is the boom, sometimes only the tweet. That is not good music.”
Claudio did not use Method Teaming to build his squad. But he did use the principles of Method Teaming. He looked at attitudes and talents and mental suitability. He discounted ego. He instinctively selected players that would knit together and genuinely work for each other, on the pitch and off. It worked. Leicester City’s players even go for pizza together. Not because they have to but because they want to. They’re a team for real, not just a bunch of footballers who march onto the field together.
Claudio relied on instinct to build his team. You don’t have to. To build your organisation’s top team you can rely on science. Method Teaming is the science behind the selection of star teams. With Method Teaming, your team can be the star at next year’s company awards. And the year after. And the year after that.
