SNA: How to improve competitiveness in Real Madrid

Background

Historically there has been a huge rivalry between the biggest football clubs in every country. Spain, where Real Madrid and Barcelona are the most important teams, is not an exception. During the last one hundred years these teams won the most important competitions, had the best players and the biggest number of followers.

In 2010 Real Madrid was facing a difficulty: its rival had won five out of the six competitions played during the last season. Because of that reason Real Madrid decided to invest heavily in players of well-known reputation from other teams. And that is how they got the name of “galactic team”. In spite of this the results did not improve by that time, the fans were angrier and angrier and the atmosphere around the club was not comfortable.

A lot of hypotheses were done trying to explain the lack of success from the galactics but none of them was clearly proven.

Objective

Use Social Network Analysis in order to explain some of the reasons of the failure of such a big investment.

Procedure

First of all they should have considered how players that were stars in their teams felt playing as only one more member of the team in Real Madrid. Second of all it should be taken into account that everyone needs time to adapt to a new environment, new colleagues, ways to approach the work and get used to it.

Because of this a lot of trust and team building activities should be done. But first it would be important to determine if the hypotheses were right. Through meetings with the players or simply fulfilling a survey it would be possible. The most important questions addressed there will be:

-          Number of years as a professional

-          Number of years in Real Madrid

-          Three most important persons in the team (including trainer and other employees)

-          Three most important persons in the team (including just players)

-    Three most important persons outside the professional activities (including trainer and other employees)

With this information it would be possible to start analyzing who are the most influential people: the leaders. Starting with them, there should be performed activities in order to create trust and a team environment, trying to align the goals of everybody and set the players as a group.

Analyzing a graph with all the relations could be interesting as well. It would be possible isolating just the regular players to observe how they trust their colleagues.

Conclusion

Through SNA it is possible to analyze and look for solutions to improve the atmosphere and relationships of Real Madrid and hence recover its high performance level. Sometimes people forget about the fact that humans are a social animal. And because of that human relationships should be an important aspect never forgotten. The networks created by human resources could be a problem they have to consider but also a great source of advantage for a company.