Making history is such an overused phrase in sport. There’s a danger we start to believe it’s easy, expected, nothing special. Or that it just happens by magic in an instant on a golf green or a rugby pitch. We envisage “Henry V speeches” on the eve of battle urging players to make their mark on history moments before stepping into the arena. But at the weekend, two of the finest sports teams in the world demonstrated how months and years of intentional, deep culture-building are necessary to create a team identity to underpin the highest levels of performance.
Although at starkly different ends of the commercial sports world, both the European Ryder Cup team and the England women’s rugby team deliberately cultivated a shared sense of what it meant for each team to create history together. Europe knew they had to defy the odds to win away for the first time since 2012, while the Red Roses hadn’t won the World Cup since 2014, losing in the previous two finals.
