When Suddenly Nothing Works Anymore Within a Team – Causes of Collective Sport Team Collapse

Abstract

Collective team collapse occurs when multiple players of a sport team experience a sudden and extreme underperformance within a game. To date, minimal research has been conducted on the causes of collective team collapse. Thus, goals of this study were to explore perceived causes of collective team collapse in different sports and to define team collapse in contrast to negative momentum. To investigate factors causing and maintaining collective sport team collapse, an inductive, exploratory qualitative analysis of individual interviews was conducted. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with 10 athletes of professional German teams of various sports playing in between first and fourth division. Participants were interviewed about a team collapse event they had experienced with their team during the past year. Data were collected and analyzed using a grounded theory methodology. Collective team collapse appeared to be induced by a temporal cascade of causes rather than by single triggers. This cascade included antecedents, which represent factors that make the occurrence of a team collapse more likely; critical events, which include specific events within the game that trigger a team collapse; as well as affective, cognitive, and behavioral outcomes that foster a maintenance of the collapse. Within this theoretical framework, social factors, such as decreased performance contagion or emotional contagion, played crucial roles in causing a team collapse. These results illustrate that collective team collapse is more than the sum of individual choking of multiple players at the same time. In conclusion, a new definition, differentiating team collapse from negative momentum, is introduced. Furthermore, a process model of causes of collective team collapse is proposed. The results provide first insights into causes of collective collapse in a variety of team sports. The developed model is supposed to help future research to better connect to practice and to support athletes, coaches, and sport psychologists.

When You Watch Your Team Fall Apart – Coaches’ and Sport Psychologists’ Perceptions on Causes of Collective Sport Team Collapse

“…Wergin et al.’s (2018) finding provides first insights into causes of collective collapse and some clarity for the differentiation between the terms collective team collapse and negative momentum. One restriction of Wergin et al.’s (2018) study, however, is that only athletes’ perspectives were included. In order to gain a more global view of the phenomenon, other observers’ (e.g., coaches, sport psychologists, or officials) perceptions of the team collapse event should also be considered.…”

“…Their sudden underperformance is often referred to as a collective team collapse, since they led 28-3 during the second half of the game but eventually lost 28-34. Collective team collapse can be defined as “a sudden, collective, and extreme underperformance of a team within a competition, which is triggered by a critical situation that interferes with the team’s interplay, a loss of control of the game, and ultimately the inability of the team to regain their previous performance level within the game.” (Wergin et al., 2018, p. 15).…”

“…Especially, negative momentum is a term widely used in sport psychology research (e.g., Crust and Nesti, 2006; Den Hartigh et al., 2014; Moritmer and Burt, 2014) to describe shifts in a team’s performance. In order to distinguish between the terms of negative momentum and collective team collapse and to gain first insights into causes of collective team collapse of different teams in various sport, Wergin et al. (2018) conducted a qualitative study.…”

“…These findings were compiled in a process model of collective sport team collapse (Figure 1). Based on these results, Wergin et al. (2018) distinguished collective team collapse from the term negative momentum: Collective team collapse is described to be chronic and more extreme than negative momentum.…”

“…Coaches and sport psychologists would offer two different observational perspectives of the phenomenon of collective sport team collapse and would enhance our understanding of the phenomenon. A second goal was to qualitatively compare coaches’ and sport psychologists’ perspectives to athletes’ perceptions reported by Wergin et al. (2018).…”