To mark the return of sport, The Athletic is running a series counting down the greatest
comebacks in history. So, we thought we’d explore the science of a comeback.
The Science of a Sports Comeback
With 53 minutes of the 2005 Champions League final played, AC Milan held a 3-0 lead over
Liverpool at the Ataturk Stadium in Istanbul. What followed over the next 6 minutes would
be the basis for the one of the most unlikely triumphs in football history, as Rafael Benitez’s
side enacted a comeback for the ages.
But what happened that night? More specifically, what actually happens to players and teams
to allow comebacks to take place?
From Liverpool’s perspective, it’s easier to explain. According to Moritz Anderten of
the Institute of Psychology at the German Sports University in Cologne, the process
– quite logically – begins with a team’s belief in its own strengths.
To provide further detail, Anderten stresses the relevance of Albert Bandura’s self-efficacy
theory. Bandura, the Canadian-American psychologist, cited four sources crucial to an individual's
ability to succeed in specific situations and in their accomplishment of certain tasks.
Four sources of self-efficacy.
They are – one – mastery experience. That refers to a player’s ability to draw strength
and conviction from moments of excellence or accomplishment in their past.
Two, vicarious experience, which is the belief that what has been achieved before by others
can be replicated.
The third is social persuasion, which refers to the motivating and instructing role of
coaching staff, teammates and supporters, and factors which reinforce belief in capability
and make it more likely that the individual will respond to a task with sustained effort,
regardless of its difficulty.
And, finally, the fourth source: the physiological state of the players themselves, which involves
the visualisation of a successful comeback, which are in turn reinforced by the events
which occur during the process itself.
The foundations of Liverpool’s miracle – and their sources of self-efficacy - are clear.
They had already achieved a remarkable comeback in that season’s Champions League, beating
Olympiakos 3-1 in the group. With neat symmetry, they had also proven themselves capable of
finding three second-half goals in a do-or-die situation.
There was a further harbinger of success that night: As he would in the final, Benitez made
a successful substitution in pursuit of a deficit. At Anfield it was forward Florent
Sinama Pongolle for Djimi Traore. In Istanbul, it was Dietmar Hamann for Steve Finnan.
And Benitez and his players had reason to believe their opposition could be vulnerable.
Five days before the final, Milan had surrendered a 3-1 lead to lowly Palermo at San Siro. It
was the only time all season that they conceded three goals in the league, and – with some
symmetry – two of them were conceded in two minutes.
More broadly, for English clubs in 2005, success in a Champions League final was still wedded
to the notion of the unlikely comeback, following Manchester United’s dramatic victory over
Bayern Munich six years earlier. United and Liverpool may well be deadly rivals, but it
remained an encouraging precedent.
AC Milan’s collapse is harder to define. Not least because Carlo Ancelotti’s 2004-05
team just didn’t concede many goals. That season, their defence was breached just 28
times across a 38-game Serie A season. They also conceded just 3 goals in 6 Champions
League qualifying group games, and only once across the 3, two-legged knockout rounds they
progressed through to reach the final.
With good reason, too. Theirs was a team with foundations built from some of the finest
players in European football’s history – Paolo Maldini and Alessandro Nesta, Cafu and Jaap
Stam. Ahead of them, in midfield, Gennaro Gattuso, Andrea Pirlo, Clarence Seedorf and
Kaka were a unit capable of controlling the ball and dominating any game.
But when presented with a big lead, suggests Moritz Anderten, a team can have two different
emotional responses.
A positive one, in which the team remains aware of any potential danger, their collective
senses remain heightened, and the integrity of their tactical gameplan is preserved.
Or a negative one, in which a reduced state of tension is reflected physically and mentally,
in a lack aggression or declining discipline. There may also be a psychosocial consequence,
too, with communication between different players deteriorating and coaching from the
sidelines becoming less impactful.
At half-time in Istanbul, Steven Gerrard role changed as a result of the Hamann substitution
and, perhaps exploiting Milan’s failure to adapt to that change, he was able to loiter
unmarked in the box before heading in John Arne Riise’s cross.
It began the comeback, but also a sequence of contrasting reactions on the pitch. The
head of the Institute of Psychology at the German sports university in Cologne is Professor
Jens Kleinert and part of his explanation for comebacks suffered in sports is based
on the concept of ‘defensive thinking’.
Prof. Kleinert reasons there to be two types of player: process-orientated and results-orientated.
The process-orientated player accepts any situation as a challenge, regardless of how
hopeless it may be. By contrast, the results-orientated player sees in situations the opportunity
to win or to lose something and in cases when losing is likely this player – quite naturally
– is vulnerable to having his thinking confirmed by negative experience. This is the moment
when the fear of failure arises. In this instance, the negative experience
is Gerrard’s goal and the consequences would show dramatically over the next six minutes.
When a results-orientated player suffers the fear of failure, Prof. Kleinert explains,
the effects can be contagious, spreading quickly through a team and creating dysfunction. When
simultaneously confronted by an attacking team whose optimism is being validated by
within a game, which perpetuate further belief and confidence, the fear of losing intensifies,
the defensive way of thinking increases, and mistakes become inevitable.
Prof. Kleinert and his team stress that this is theory rather than a complete solution,
but it makes sense and the evidence appears overwhelmingly in Milan’s second half performance
following the Gerrard goal.
When Vladimir Smicer scores, it’s from space he’s been afforded by Kaka’s baffling
decision to disengage from the game and adjust the strapping around his shinpads. Liverpool
work the ball across the pitch and, with Kaka unable to recover his position and Clarence
Seedorf scrambling to fill the space, Smicer is able to shoot through goalkeeper Dida,
whose feeble attempt at a save was a further suggestion of trouble ahead.
For goal three, the sequence of Milan mistakes is even more unusual. Jamie Carragher is allowed
to carry the ball deep into their half . Then, he plays a twenty-yard pass to the edge of
the box, which Milan Baros holds and lays off for the onrushing Gerrard . In the first
instance, Pirlo and Maldini fail to block Carragher’s telegraphed ball. Instead, they
back off him, failing to pressure a defender who – in that area of the pitch – is well
outside his comfort zone.
n the second, neither Gattuso nor Cafu respond quickly enough to Gerrard’s run from deep
to prevent a penalty from being conceded. As a sequence it’s extraordinary: four of
the very best players in the world in their position all made mental mistakes at precisely
the wrong moment.
That pattern would remain throughout the rest of the evening, too. Jerzy Dudek would make
a miraculous save from Andriy Shevchenko and Djimi Traore would make a critical goalline
clearance. Even after Liverpool had levelled the game at 3-3, their moments of validation
kept coming.
Conversely, Milan were broken. Serginho’s wild penalty in the shootout would set its
tone, with Shevchenko’s final, feeble Panenka – and his pained, defeated expression – becoming
the unwitting emblem of the night.
He, like his teammates, was among the very best in the world at the time, and yet all
his quality had been claimed by the nebulous science of the comeback.