Will We Lose If We Lose You? Players’ Absence, Teams’ Performance and the Overlapping of Competitions

It is common for elite players to represent their respective countries in international competitions. However, there is a potential cost to the club team derived from that situation (risk of injury, fatigue, psychological momentum, etc.). This paper evaluates the impact of players’ absence on European football teams’ performance by focusing on the Africa Cup of Nations as the case study. The results indicate that the sending of players to the African tournament has a relatively small negative impact on teams’ performance. But this cannot be generalized to all the leagues and loses significance when corrected by players’ abilities.

The Effect of Psychological Momentum on Performance Expectations Versus Performance Outcomes

People believe that momentum is a force that accounts for success, but does the power of momentum reside mostly in performers’ minds? Field data from an Ultimate Frisbee tournament (N = 519) and six experiments (n = 2,533) examined the effects of experiencing psychological momentum on players’ beliefs about their performance as well as their actual performance. In Experiments 1a-d, individuals who completed a competitive task that became progressively easier perceived that they had more psychological momentum and believed that they were more likely to win, but did not win more often. In Experiment 2, individuals who experienced positive momentum were more likely to incorrectly predict that they would win a competition, whereas participants who experienced negative momentum were more likely to incorrectly predict that they would lose. These discrepancies in predicted and actual outcomes occurred despite financial incentives to make accurate predictions and to win the competition, and with full knowledge of the competition task. Finally, individuals in Experiment 3 who experienced positive momentum were more likely to bet on their future performance, yet they did not perform better. Experiment 3 further examines two possible moderators of the effect of momentum on expected performance: players’ growth mindset about their skills, and whether they were an underdog in the competition. These results indicate that psychological momentum may influence performance expectations more than it influences performance outcomes.