'Poisonous' Locker Room Cliques

by Stuart James

“When it comes to dressing-room dynamics, one of the major issues you’ve got is that there’s no other industry in the world where, on the most important day of the week, over 50% of the workforce isn’t used for the big moment,” a Premier League coach tells The Athletic.

“So you’ve got 25 players in a Premier League squad and for the big moment of that week, which the whole organization is geared towards, only 11 of the 25 players are chosen. This sort of situation immediately creates instability. Top footballers are basically getting a form of rejection.

“In some cases, there are mitigating circumstances — injury or illness. But there will be a few that feel hard done by and their behavior can potentially suffer. And then they get another person who’s also feeling resentful, and then you’ve got a mate to moan with. That can be a starting point.”

We are talking about dressing-room cliques: why they form, what damage they can do, and how managers can try to prevent divides and schisms from creating bigger problems. To put it another way, avoiding the sort of situation that Manchester United find themselves in at the moment.

Tight or closely connected groups of one description or another are inevitable in football and in the majority of cases, harmless. Naturally, players will gravitate towards others with similar characteristics, whether that be age, family or interests outside of the game, such as something as simple as golf or playing Call of Duty on the Xbox. More commonly in the cosmopolitan world of elite football, relationships are formed along cultural and language lines.

It could be as innocent as Mousa Dembele, Jan Vertonghen, Toby Alderweireld and Nacer Chadli playing the board game Settlers of Catan when the four Belgians were all at Tottenham Hotspur, or the fact that Luis Suarez, Sebastian Coates, Lucas Leiva and Philippe Coutinho — four South Americans — had their own WhatsApp group while at Liverpool and liked to hang out together. English players, of course, are no different — James Milner, Gareth Barry and Joe Hart were particularly close at Manchester City. The list goes on and nobody should expect anything different.

Where the problems start to surface is when what happens behind closed doors within smaller groups starts to mirror what happens on the pitch, and players who are disconnected away from the training ground or even in the same canteen look just as fragmented when they’re all wearing the same shirt. Throw in some underwhelming results and the divides soon widen.

“I didn’t think we were all there together,” Luke Shaw said following Manchester United’s defeat against Wolverhampton Wanderers. A week earlier, Gary Neville looked at the body language of the United players during their 1-1 draw against Newcastle United and described them as “a bunch of whinge-bags”.

Speaking more broadly to managers, coaches, players and psychologists about cliques in football highlights a complex issue full of fascinating tales. One established Premier League player was alienated by his team-mates and labelled “busy” for being overly professional until a psychologist carried out an exercise that opened everyone’s eyes to the realization that his behavior made him a leader rather than a pariah.

Another Premier League footballer tells a story that brings to mind the comments that Olivier Giroud made about his France teammates not passing the ball to him at the European Championship last summer, and in doing so highlights the extent to which off-the-field feuds can continue even after players step over the white line.

“The higher you go up, the more there are cliques,” the Premier League player tells The Athletic. “Players from different nationalities — Portuguese, Spanish, French — they always stick together and rightly so. Their families and friends socialize together and it makes them feel at home if they’ve got people speaking the same language.

“But the one thing I will say is that when results aren’t great, and there’s conflict in the squad, and the team is going through a bad moment, it can become poisonous. And then it’s a big problem.

“You wouldn’t believe it at this level, but at times, players will only pass to certain players. Fans wouldn’t necessarily see that, nor would the media. But it does happen. And it can be tough because a lot of the time these are your best players, the players that you need. But they’re quite poisonous for the group.”

“The biggest example I can give of the cliques versus the non-cliques is the England senior men’s team,” Jobi McAnuff, who played for Watford, Crystal Palace and Reading among others, tells The Athletic. “The ‘golden generation’ group of players that never got near winning anything had, I think everyone would say, a far better group of individuals — Steven Gerrard, Paul Scholes, Frank Lampard, Rio Ferdinand etc — versus this current group.

“They (the golden generation) have been so vocal about it (the divide). I was so surprised when I heard Rio saying, ‘When I went there I wouldn’t talk to Steven Gerrard’. I was amazed. That was my era playing, and you could see something wasn’t right, and a lot of the time that got put on the managers for not picking the right teams, which was true as well. But at the same time, when you look back, you’re like, ‘That’s it, that’s exactly it’.

“What Gareth Southgate (England’s manager) has done is broken down all those barriers. He has made a point of saying if you’re from Manchester United, Manchester City, Liverpool, this is our team, we are together. And you can see that on the pitch. There’s a unity that we didn’t have for a long time.”

In theory, it should be easier to create togetherness at club level because of the amount of time that the players spend together. On the flip side, an eclectic dressing room presents challenges, and all the more so when you are dealing with egos and strong personalities.

When Mesut Ozil, Shkodran Mustafi and Sead Kolasinac were at Arsenal together, there were coaches at the club who perceived them as a bad influence on one another as much as others, so much so that it got to the stage where it was felt that their performances improved if one or two of them were not around.

Trying to create a more inclusive and harmonious environment leads to all sorts of actions away from the pitch, from knocking down changing room walls at the training ground to prevent players from hiding around corners, to arranging the tables in the canteen in a way that everyone faces each other.

In his first spell as manager at Real Madrid, Carlo Ancelotti would gradually change the seating arrangements at dinner to try to get different nationalities talking to one another off the field. “Cliques are unacceptable,” Ancelotti writes in his book Quiet Leadership. “Eventually you will have to break them, so make it clear from the outset that integration is the only way to win.”

In some cases, a player, or players, may do that kind of job for a manager. At United, Roy Keane took on that sort of responsibility for years. United had a few Spanish speakers in the squad by 2004 and those players decided to sit together during a post-match meal on a pre-season tour in the US. Keane picked up on it, walked over to the table and moved the Spanish contingent around, ensuring they were mixing with the rest of the players.

The alternative — allowing a them-and-us scenario to develop — can be dangerous, especially when results turn, the blame game starts and a few individuals start to strike a negative tone, often privately but occasionally brazenly in the team WhatsApp group. In fact, it has never been easier to snipe, or, for that matter, to remove yourself from the group (literally), which brings to mind that quote from Casey Stengel, the former New York Yankees manager, who said, “The secret of managing is to keep the guys who hate you away from the guys who are undecided’.”

Coaches, teammates and psychologists will all have their own description for the dissenting voices that undermine the manager and the team environment — “cultural assassins”, “terrorists”, “grenades” are terms that were used by the people that we spoke to for this article — and often there is only one solution. “You’ve got to get rid,” one former Premier League manager tells The Athletic.

“That’s the be-all and end-all. Because changing rooms nowadays, a lot of them aren’t strong enough to take care of stuff in-house, so you’ve really got to be the one who takes control of it. The mentality of most players now is that they want to be liked, and they can’t even joke with each other. You can come in at half-time and it’s dead silent. You literally have to say everything. Some groups will be different. But I’ve been at clubs where senior lads have been useless.”

In his mind, Ancelotti divides dressing room leaders into two groups — personality leaders and technical leaders. The former lead through their strength of character (he cites John Terry and Zlatan Ibrahimovic as examples) and the latter via the way that they play and train rather than their voice (he places Cristiano Ronaldo in that group). Occasionally, leaders tick both of those boxes (Ancelotti mentions Paolo Maldini).

Ronaldo is a fascinating case. After Keane ridiculed Harry Maguire’s cliched talk of “staying together” last week, it would be interesting to know what the former United captain made of Ronaldo’s frank and brutally honest interview this week. Frustrated with United’s direction this season and in particular the mentality of some of his team-mates, Ronaldo implied that younger players were resistant to criticism and reluctant to take advice. As much as anything, Ronaldo made it clear that standards needed to be raised.

Interestingly, the Premier League coach we spoke to was dismissive of the idea that Mike Phelan could, as has been reported, be expected to take on the task of unifying the dressing room at Old Trafford. Phelan, he says, “will have respect but no authority” because of how he’s been marginalized at United.

In the coach’s eyes, players always need to be given, as well as take, responsibility for their actions and behavior — he references the fact that Pep Guardiola trusts his Manchester City players so much that he allows them to pick the captain — but the manager has to be the one who establishes the environment and the culture in the first place.

In Jurgen Klopp’s first meeting with the Liverpool players, he spelt out the word “TEAM” at the front of the room and broke down what that looked like letter by letter. Crucially, Klopp had the personality, respect and emotional intelligence to get the players to buy into his messages around the team and the environment.

Indeed, without absolving the United players of blame for their part in the team’s malaise — there is no getting away from how poorly many of them have performed — you wonder how different things would look if Klopp, or Guardiola, were in charge of the same group.

“It’s foolish to overcomplicate the game, and I don’t think that is where the best managers excel,” the Premier League coach adds. “What they do well is they lead well. The environment is good. That doesn’t mean it’s happy all the time. But it’s a strong, healthy and competitive environment. Klopp and Guardiola are two great examples of it.

“One thing, and I know it’s only a small thing, but this has really impressed me with Klopp. In the last year, Sadio Mane and Mohamed Salah have both had moments where they’ve dismissively not shaken his hand after being brought off in a game. Klopp doesn’t care. It’s almost that the environment is so strong, and he’s so secure, that the players know they belong, almost like a child in a family. They’re allowed to have that little space to be human, to be petulant, a bit emotional, and he doesn’t create anything more than he needs to out of it. That’s an incredible quality because we’re almost programmed to ‘shake my hand, show me respect, I’m your leader’.”

A few years back, Professor Damian Hughes was asked to go into a struggling Premier League club and assist the staff by helping players to set behavioral standards around matches and breaking down the cliques that had formed in the dressing room.

For some background, Hughes is an organizational psychology consultant, host of the High Performance Podcast with Jake Humphrey and a bestselling author who has worked across elite sport.

In this particular case, the Premier League club that employed Hughes was fighting relegation and had not long changed manager to try to stimulate an upturn in results.

“The first question I asked the players was, ‘What are the non-negotiables?’,” Hughes tells The Athletic.

To answer that question, the players used their best performance of the season, when they won away against one of the top teams in the Premier League, as a reference point. “In this case, we identified our non-negotiables as hard work, resilience, and that they stuck together,” Hughes recalls. “My question was, ‘If we demonstrate those behaviors consistently, do you think we’ll get out of the relegation places?’. Their answer was, ‘We’d never be in it if that’s what we’d been doing consistently’.

“One of the exercises I then got the players to do was vote for who were their top characters who role-modelled those behaviors. Out of the six names we got from the players, the coaches could have identified five of them beforehand. But there was one name that nobody (on the coaching staff) had given me.

“Interestingly, that player had joined the club from a lower-league club, and he’d done what a sensible lad would do if he got in that environment — think that he could make a good career, so became the uber professional. He was early for training, he stayed on to do extra, his diet was great, he was really diligent. But he was isolated from the rest of the group — they had this horrible phrase of describing him as being ‘busy’. So he was very much an outsider.

“Yet when we did this exercise not based on, ‘Do you like him?’ or, ‘Is he the best player?’, but based on, ‘Who role models these behaviors of hard work, resilience and putting the team first’, he came quite high in the rankings. I remember speaking to one of the players about it and they made that distinction, ‘You didn’t ask if we liked him, you asked who role-modelled the behaviors’.

“So, first of all, we could present the evidence to that (isolated) player, because he was thinking, ‘They don’t like me’. We could say, ‘Maybe they don’t like you. But there are 13 guys out of the 23 in that dressing room that do respect you for what you’re doing’.

“What it also allowed us to do was give the leaders in that dressing room permission to lead, it’s almost like they’ve got a manifesto — ‘We’ve got the evidence that you’ve been voted as having credibility’. And we found all of that helped them have the courage to call out behaviors when unacceptable stuff was going on, as well as calling in and recognizing when acceptable behaviors were happening, and that’s how we started to break down the cliques and divisions.”

Leadership groups are fairly common in football, albeit generally not formed in such a democratic way. Often it is the manager who will choose the players, usually with an eye not so much on seniority but on ensuring that he has covered all bases by involving the most influential figure in each demographic group — that way all the key messages get through. Whether everybody then wants to take those messages on board is another matter.

In 2019, Eddie Jones, the England rugby coach, also brought in a psychologist to help deal with cliques and divisions. In this instance, Corinne Reid, a conflict psychologist, held a group session that encouraged the players and staff to speak candidly, and without fear of any repercussions, in front of one another. In other words, it was a chance to get anything and everything off their chest, and England players have spoken since about how beneficial that experience was for them.

When the Premier League player who spoke to The Athletic for this article was asked whether he had ever done anything like that in his career, he gave an interesting reply. “Everyone has had honest conversations, normally in times of adversity. But now, in today’s game, the biggest risk with that (approach) is that players are a lot more sensitive. Players would refuse to play, or would not want to put themselves on the line as much, if things weren’t going their way. Basically, they would sulk.

“The so-called poisonous players, more often than not they know they’re the best players. They know that they’re your ‘wow’ players that you kind of need. So they know they can get away with it. So when you challenge them, more often than not it has a worse effect, because you need them. If that player does it on a weekend… sometimes you just have to bite your tongue.”

In Phil Jackson’s book Eleven Rings, the legendary NBA coach tells a story about the “social bullseye”, which was his favourite psychological tool and created a picture of how players saw themselves in relation to the group.

On a long road trip, Jackson would hand out a sheet of paper to each player. On the paper was a three-ring bullseye, and Jackson asked the players to position themselves based on how connected they felt to the team. The starters normally positioned themselves near the centre, and the back-ups would typically go for the second or third rings.

“One year, back-up forward Stacey King, a fast-talking, stylishly dressed player who made everyone laugh, drew himself hovering far outside the third ring,” Jackson writes. “When I asked him why, he said, ‘I don’t get any playing time, Coach’. Which wasn’t true, but it was how he felt. On the surface, Stacey seemed confident and gregarious, but inside he felt like an outsider struggling for recognition. I don’t think I ever figured out how to heal that wound.”

Jackson figured out plenty of other things during his distinguished career, not least how to win NBA Championships. The former Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers coach recognized the importance of talent, creativity, intelligence, toughness and, at times, luck. “But if a team doesn’t have the most essential ingredient — love — none of those factors matters.”

Creating that bond is a lot easier said than done. After all, it is only natural that a footballer, or a sportsperson in any team, will spend a lot of time thinking about themselves. “I talk about the three Ms when it comes to players’ mentalities: money, minutes and me,” the Premier League coach adds. “That’s a bit of a cynical view of it. But, ultimately, it’s about a job — they’ll be thinking about the money they can earn from it. The minutes on the pitch is what defines their happiness a lot of the time. And it’s about them — how they’re feeling and their career.”

Team bonding would have taken place down the pub or on a night out years ago, but those days are long gone. A mid-season break is an alternative — an early FA Cup exit is probably the only way that a Premier League club can squeeze that sort of trip into the fixture calendar — or something as simple as a meal out.

“You can sometimes manipulate it,” McAnuffs replies when asked whether any staged team-bonding exercises really work. “It might be go-karting, it might be paint-balling. They’re helpful things to try to do, but you don’t want to do it where it’s too contrived.”

McAnuff sighs and raises an interesting point about the modern player. “It’s changed. I’ve had events where lads don’t want to go sometimes. ‘Do we have to do that?’. A lot of this is because there’s so much outside of football that lads want to do now. It could be as simple as the boys want to get home and get on the computer. That’s a little clique with the younger players — they’ll come in for training, they’ve got their own little WhatsApp group for Call of Duty, or FIFA, or Fortnite, whatever they’re playing now, and that’s the conversation in the morning.”

As if the subject of cliques was not complicated enough already, there are now concerns that divides will form around vaccination status within clubs. In a way, that merely confirms what the Premier League coach said at the very start of our conversation.

“Cliques are built out of fear, really.”