KU Business research examines leadership under pressure on soccer’s biggest stage

Game Plan is a Q&A series highlighting how KU School of Business research connects to the challenges and opportunities of hosting a global event. As the Kansas City and Lawrence areas welcome World Cup visitors, these conversations explore topics that affect travel, business operations, consumer behavior, and daily life across the region. 

Vince Barker, Edmund P. Learned Professor, studies how top managers’ backgrounds, experiences and perspectives shape strategic decision-making. In this installment of Game Plan, Barker discusses how those dynamics play out in coaching decisions during high-pressure environments like the World Cup.

The World Cup puts teams and their leaders under intense global scrutiny. From your research, what does that kind of pressure tend to do to decision‑making at the top? 

The stakes of World Cup matches are very high, especially for teams that have a realistic chance of going very far into the knockout rounds. The pressure on the coach is to maximize the team’s performance given the talent that can be put on the pitch. The fact that the team represents the hopes and passions of a nation ups the expectations of what the team may be able to accomplish. 

You study how leaders interpret their situations under pressure. Why do high‑stakes environments like the World Cup often lead to very different decisions than leaders might make under normal conditions? 

Quite a bit of research has shown that an inverted U-shaped relationship exists between the level of pressure and decision-maker performance. Indeed, we all actually perform better as decision-makers under some amount of pressure. We are not the best decision-makers when we are disinterested or bored with a situation. Under some pressure, our minds are activated and decision-makers can apply their knowledge and ideas most effectively. As pressure becomes very intense or super-high pressure, we tend to choose our most-learned responses to solve problems and lose much of our ability to be creative. This often causes mistakes in decision-making in pressure-packed situations. 

Where such pressure can easily affect coaches is making decisions late in games in response to unplanned situations. Coaches plan for certain situations such as choosing which players take penalty kicks before games to avoid having to make these types of important decisions on the spot under pressure. However, not all situations can be anticipated, so expect coaches to sometimes make less creative or innovative decisions when faced with novel problems under pressure-intense situations such as being behind or tied late in a game. 

Your research shows that coaching decisions aren’t based on performance alone. How do expectations and perceptions shape how coaches are evaluated during high‑profile tournaments like the World Cup?  

Coaches are hired by national soccer federations that are in charge of putting together a national team, building facilities and hiring support staff for the team. These federations have their own expectations that reflect their funding and expectations of the fans. Where fans have high expectations, as in soccer-power countries like France, Brazil, Spain, England or Argentina, their federations generally have high expectations, which means the coach is under extreme pressure to win. Under such pressure, many decisions by the coach get second-guessed and mistakes get magnified into possibly being fired when more than a few happen. 

Performance of the coach may matter less if the country’s fans and federation have unrealistic expectations. A coach may actually overperform given the talent of his or her team, but if the federation expects to win the World Cup, the coach will be fired. 

Why can a single win or loss feel so decisive to fans, but matter less to leadership decisions when a team is either clearly struggling or clearly successful? 

In the World Cup, once you enter the knockout stage, the team is out with a loss. It does destroy fans’ hopes if it happens earlier than expectations. For a team like the USA or South Korea, a loss in the semifinals of the 2026 World Cup would clearly devastate fans, but such a finish would represent great play by the team and an excellent coaching job. It would represent good leadership by both the federation and the coach. 

How does a coach’s reputation or experience change how much pressure they face when outcomes don’t meet expectations? 

Coaches who have won the World Cup or a major international tournament are more secure in their jobs, so they are free to take more risks. While the pressure objectively still exists, the career consequences for those coaches are less for any World Cup mistakes, and they can make decisions with a freer mind. 

In global events like the World Cup, pressure comes not just from owners or organizations, but from media and fans. How does that added visibility influence leadership decisions behind the scenes? 

Everyone in the world is watching the same players and teams. When you coach a club team like Sporting Kansas City, your audience is the national MLS fans. The audience in the World Cup is every person following across the globe, which amplifies the number of people appraising your decisions by a giant magnitude. 

Your research looks at power that comes from both position and prestige. How does that kind of power affect whether leaders are given time to adjust or are quickly replaced under pressure? 

Prestigious coaches are usually coaches who have been successful. Fans, players and the media are less likely to question the decisions or strategies of successful coaches. That is a form of power in that players will try to follow a successful coach’s tactics even if they are unfamiliar or not what their club team employs when they are not playing in the World Cup. 

What can organizations outside of sports learn from how teams make leadership decisions during events like the World Cup? 

Most organizations do not plan well for high-pressure situations or crisis, especially if they have been successful for much of their existence. Soccer coaches deal with the elevated pressure through planning for unanticipated and difficult situations. For example, knowing which players are going to take penalty kicks and in what order, means that they do not have to think through the situation too much if a game goes to penalty kicks.  

Repetitive practicing of difficult situations enables their players to exhibit high performance when those situations arise. A parallel would be a corporation preparing through practice or simulation for a malware attack that tries to wipe out their computer systems and processes. Even though such an attack might be rare, preparation means that fewer high-stakes decisions will need to be made in a real malware attack than haven’t already been  considered by employees. Practice of high-pressure decision situations will lead to better decisions if those rare events occur.  

Why are extreme situations like international tournaments especially useful for understanding leadership behavior more broadly? 

They allow you to see which leaders (i.e, coaches) are able to get the best performance out of the talent of their teams. In business, we see the same effect happening. Some leaders know how to organize, utilize and motivate their employees to greater performance for both the employees and the firm. In soccer tournaments, the results are more finite: wins or losses. However, wins and losses exist on many levels in business too. 

If there’s one insight from your research that helps explain why coaching decisions can seem sudden or surprising, what would it be? 

Coaches, like CEOs, come from different backgrounds, training and management systems. Also, they may have very different personalities; many types of people with distinct styles can be successful CEOs or coaches. This variety of backgrounds and beliefs makes decisions both unpredictable and creative. I often try to understand coaching decisions in sporting events based on where the coach was trained, who mentored them and how they performed as a player. It adds another dimension to watching an worldwide sporting event like the World Cup.