Summer of Soccer Thinking: A rush of blood to the head, DC United edition

I've had season tickets to DC United from the beginning. Team legend (and current Houston Dynamo coach Ben Olsen) is a friend. I've been friends with others who were part of the team's glory years. Ben wrote the forward to Soccer Thinking for Management Success and I quote former team owner and general manager Kevin Payne in making the case for bringing soccer thinking to organizations. I helped run a fan-led effort to keep the team from leaving town. I say all this to establish my bona fides as a fan.

The team is bad, and has been for a while. My season tickets increasingly feel like a charitable contribution. For about a decade the best part of going to a game has been the pupusas (which are very good).

Last Saturday marked Olsen's first return to DC United since taking over at Houston. A friend gave me his pitch side seat. It was going to be great. DC lost 4-1. They had two players sent off, and ended the game playing 9 v 11. I was glad I let my regular seats sit empty rather than give them to a friend. It was bad.

Christian Benteke was one of the two players DC United had sent off. In an important moment, he lost his cool . Benteke is lethal in the air. He leads Major League Soccer in every category that involves a head. He was a star in England and is a former member of the Belgian national team. DC United's primary approach to the season appears to be "aim the ball at Benteke's head." Not a great approach, but you go with what you've got.

As Thomas Floyd write in the Washington Post :

United’s hopes of salvaging a result plummeted when Benteke got tossed. After drawing a yellow card for recklessly crashing into Houston defender Griffin Dorsey, the league’s second-leading scorer heatedly confronted Ford, who didn’t hesitate to pull a red card from his back pocket.

I don't blame Benteke for being frustrated. It's not a lot of fun to play bad teams (speaking from experience here). It was hot and humid. Not a great way to spend a Saturday night.

We've all felt like Benteke at one point or another. We want to snap at a colleague or manager. It's been a long quarter or reporting period, something doesn't go our way in a meeting or pitch, we're not feeling well, and we just want to shout or storm out. Usually, we don't. Because acting on that rush of blood - that heated confrontation - comes at a cost. In soccer it's pretty straightforward. Benteke watched the rest of the game from the locker room, and he'll watch the next game from the stands. Then it's back on the field. If it happens again, however, he might be asked to consider playing options somewhere closer to his home in Belgium (or at least further from Washington, DC).

The same is true in organizations. One blow up might be forgiven (if rarely forgotten). More than one blow up, and suddenly you have a reputation.

We praise people who keep their cool under pressure, who never seem to snap. We want to work with those people. No one praises the colleague who responds to pressure by lashing out. And no one wants to work with someone whose response to stress is to shout at their colleagues or people with power over the outcome of the project.

The best staff and managers avoid the temptation to lash out. They know their value is being in the game, not watching it from the locker room.

In addition to this being a good way for me to think out loud and attempt to justify the absurd amount of time I'm spending watching soccer, it's a way to plug my 2018 book, Soccer Thinking for Management Success: Lessons for organizations from the worlds game . Some of the people I quote have moved on - Ben Olsen now coaches the Houston Dynamo and not DC United, Michael Williamson went from Inter Milan, to Miami FC, to Wrexham (seriously). But I think the lessons hold up.