How do you build trust and secure performance in just a few weeks?

Every Season’s Challenge: Forming a New Team in No Time

When a coaching team enters a new season, the challenge goes far beyond physical preparation. Each season brings significant changes: the signing of new top players, other key players leaving the team, and sometimes even a new coaching staff taking charge. The question becomes more complex: how does a coaching team prepare a group of elite players who have never played together before, especially when the coach himself is meeting the team for the first time? Success depends on more than training sessions; it requires rapidly building mental readiness and synchronizing individuals into a single functioning unit under intense time pressure.

This is a challenge every top-level football club faces.⚽A great example for the new season is Bayer Leverkusen, where the transfer window brought a lot of changes, including a new coaching staff. With Erik ten Hag (Dutch coach) as head coach, five top players leaving the club, the team had to quickly adapt and function at its best within days.

Neuroscience Insights for Accelerating Trust

From a neuroscience perspective 🧠, we want to share some input that coaching teams can actively use to accelerate trust and cohesion among their players:

1. Predictability lowers threat. When uncertainty is high, the brain defaults to scanning for risks. As a coach you can counter this by providing stability: clear roles, consistent communication, and reliable routines. The faster players know what to expect, the faster they can trust and focus on performance.

2. Novelty can fuel focus when structured. A new coach or new line-up means everything feels fresh. This sparks dopamine, which boosts curiosity and motivation, but it can also scatter attention if unmanaged. By framing new approaches as structured opportunities to discover and learn together, coaches can turn novelty into a positive driver rather than a distraction.

3. Pressure challenges the brain’s control center. Under stress and time pressure, parts of the prefrontal cortex—responsible for decision-making and self-regulation—can falter. Coaches who normalize mistakes, frame errors as part of the process, and protect players from fear of judgment, help keep decision-making sharp even under pressure.

4. Oxytocin accelerates bonding. Small rituals: team talks, shared tasks, or celebrating early successes trigger this “trust hormone.” These actions speed up cohesion and help new groups feel like a team faster.

5. Competition vs. shared purpose. Rivalries can sharpen skills, but unchecked they can fracture trust. Coaches who link individual ambitions to collective goals keep the benefits of competition while strengthening unity.

And then, of course, there’s the factor of cognitive diversity and the question of how to handle different-ticking brains on the pitch. 🧠

Making Use of Cognitive Diversity the Right Way

Besides understanding each player’s unique cognitive profile and the individual talent that comes with it, football is a team sport, and you want to align these brains so they perform together. Especially at the start of a season, when the team is being reshaped, coaches often “test and see” how a new line-up works. Cognitive data changes that: it can already show how players complement each other before the first test match.

Two central players might both be exceptional, but the true art lies in balancing their skills so they interact in the most efficient way. A defender who excels in responsive, one-on-one duels but lacks spatial awareness needs a teammate who has exceptional working memory and perception to ensure that the team's defensive gaps are filled. This synergy of different cognitive strengths enhances overall performance and adaptability, allowing the team to overcome challenges that a single player's skill set might not be able to address alone.

Building a ‘Collective Brain’

Every season, this challenge repeats across the professional football circus and the clock is ticking toward the first match. Building trust, accelerating cohesion, and aligning diverse cognitive strengths are not optional, but essential for peak performance under pressure. For the coaching team, the task goes beyond selecting the right profiles, it’s about integrating them so that the team’s ‘collective brain’ functions as a single, high-performing unit from day one.

Your Turn

💭How do you see trust shaping performance in football or in leadership?