Sports teams may lose out from having 'too much talent'

As the FIFA World Cup kicks off, a new research has found that there is such a thing as having 'too much talent' on a sports team.
After a certain point, the addition of more superstar talent to a team can actually be detrimental, resulting in poorer team performance, researchers found.
The study, led by Professor Roderick Swaab from INSEAD, France, showed that the presence of too many individuals with top talent can undermine players' willingness to coordinate, which can compromise effective teamwork and overall team performance.
The findings also showed, however, that most people assume the opposite, believing that piling on more top talent is the key to team success.

"Most people believe that the relationship between talent and team performance is linear - the more their team is packed with talent, the better they will do," said Swaab.
"Yet our latest research documenting a 'too-much-talent effect', reveals that for teams requiring high levels of interdependence, like football and basketball, talent facilitates team performance...But only up to a point.

"Beyond this point, the benefits of adding more top talent will decrease and eventually hurt the team performance because they fail to coordinate their actions," Swaab said.
The research indicates that the too-much-talent effect only emerges in sports that require a high level of interdependence between players.

For more individualistic sports, such as baseball, very high levels of talent do not seem to hurt performance.
"As the FIFA World Cup 2014 draws near, we expect to see plenty of team-sheets boasting impressive lineups with top talented players," said Swaab.
"However, coaches that simply select their side with superstars may, contrary to popular belief, be the ones taking an early exit from Brazil!" Swaab said.
The research was conducted using data from the FIFA World Cup 2010 and 2014 qualifying periods and the 2002-2012 National Basketball Association (NBA) and Major League Baseball (MLB) seasons.
The research identified individual talent using individual elite club affiliations in football, Estimated Wins Added (EWA) in basketball, and Wins Above Replacement (WAR) in baseball.

The findings will be published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.