Making history is such an overused phrase in sport. There’s a danger we start to believe it’s easy, expected, nothing special. Or that it just happens by magic in an instant on a golf green or a rugby pitch. We envisage “Henry V speeches” on the eve of battle urging players to make their mark on history moments before stepping into the arena. But at the weekend, two of the finest sports teams in the world demonstrated how months and years of intentional, deep culture-building are necessary to create a team identity to underpin the highest levels of performance.
Although at starkly different ends of the commercial sports world, both the European Ryder Cup team and the England women’s rugby team deliberately cultivated a shared sense of what it meant for each team to create history together. Europe knew they had to defy the odds to win away for the first time since 2012, while the Red Roses hadn’t won the World Cup since 2014, losing in the previous two finals.
Both teams set their ambitions far beyond winning. Luke Donald, the European captain, reaffirmed that they weren’t just playing to win, they were playing for each other, for all those who dreamed of playing for Europe in the future, for something far greater than themselves. Continuing to draw on the work with the performance coach Owen Eastwood that shaped his captaincy and team-building skills two years ago in Rome, Donald commissioned a moving video that featured many of the 37 European men who had won an away Ryder Cup, including current members of the team and himself – a powerful reinforcement of their overarching mission.
Donald knew he needed to invest in both the data and the culture, the quantitative and the qualitative. One vice-captain, Edoardo Molinari, crunched the stats to inform pairings while another, José María Olazábal, captain from the last Europe team to win on foreign soil, brought past inspiration. Donald spent time listening to the players, figuring out how to prepare and set them up to thrive and play their best game at Bethpage Black: creating a shared purpose, connecting them to each other and then giving them autonomy to lead themselves once on the course.
New Zealander John Mitchell, the Red Roses’ head coach, similarly prioritised culture-building since joining in 2023. The Red Roses emulated one of the core team strengths of England’s women footballers by ensuring the team spirit for those among the replacements felt as strong as those on the pitch. They also shared the Lionesses’ ambition to create a lasting positive impact after the tournament through inspiring younger girls watching, the upcoming generation of players, as well as global rugby leaders to see the future potential of the sport.
Both of these glorious sports teams have shown us that the true value of their sporting success lies in the depth of connection to their predecessors, those watching now and future generations to come. Developing a deep and deliberate historical consciousness is becoming a core part of how modern elite sports teams build resilient cultures to take their performance to the next level.
About the Author
