Ep 299: A First Chat on Virtuous and Vicious Cycles in Football

The following is a free flowing discussion I had with Terry on virtuous and vicious cycles.

Now if you haven’t heard of these terms before, let me provide a quick rundown of the concept.

Generally, these cycles referred to a chain of events that reinforce themselves through a feedback loop. So for example, suppose we look at a virtuous cycle involving innovation.

An innovative product generates cash flows that allow a company to fund new research and development, which then leads to more innovation. That new innovation generates more cash flow. That again, allows the company to fund new research and development. Which then leads yet to more innovation.

And round and round we go.

This is obviously a virtuous cycle. This is something you definitely want.

By contrast, a vicious cycle is the bad kind of feedback loop you don’t want to get into.

For example, let’s take something we can all relate to.

Let’s say you get distracted from the important work you need to get done. That might mean you check your emails, then hop on over to social media, do a couple of easy and insignificant chores. Then back to emails and social media again, et cetera.

Next thing you know, you get this feeling of not having enough time to do the important work. And so you get frustrated. That frustration then compels you to distract yourself again with all the insignificant stuff.

And round and round you go.

That’s a vicious cycle.

As you may have guessed, there are both virtuous and vicious cycles when it comes to football. We can look at clubs as the subject of these cycles, or players, or coaches, or media, or any entity really.

We’ve personally seen them and lived them. But we’ve never tried to crystallize them, let alone communicate them to the outside world.

So this episode is my first ever attempt in trying to communicate some of these things. Please be merciful, guys. Because over time, I’ll be working to sculpt these crude expressions into smooth and clear ones.

My other hope here is that the episode serves to raise your antenna a bit to detect such cycles from your direct experiences with the football environment.

That way, when you detect these things. If it’s a vicious cycle that you’re identifying, maybe you can intervene and do something about that, and break that cycle. And if it’s a virtuous one. Well, you want more of that. And you can figure out how to do it.