Science versus Hope
The Science of What Is. The Art of What Could Be.
A Premier League academy striker had gone weeks without scoring. The club’s coaching staff had worked hard on the problem, going back through videos of his movement, his positioning, his technique, finding things to correct and working on them in training. They had been thorough and diligent. None of it had made any difference.
When I sat down with him, I didn’t open a laptop. I asked him one question: what was the best goal he’d scored that season? He described it without much prompting, and you could hear the change in his voice as he did.
I asked him to close his eyes, to put himself back in that moment completely, to feel the run and the contact and the ball crossing the line. Then, from that feeling, I moved him forward into an imaginary future where he scored freely, everything felt natural and easy.
That process is what the 7 Skills framework calls HPI. He scored a hat-trick in his next match.
This is the gap between science and performance that nobody in elite sport talks about enough. Science is concerned with what can be measured and proven. It is, by definition, a record of what has already happened, of what has already been shown to be possible.
But great performances are rarely explained by what the data said was likely. The stories that stay with us are the ones where someone did something the numbers couldn’t have predicted.
That gap has a name. It’s called hope.
Hope is a perception, a belief that what’s possible extends beyond what can currently be evidenced. It empowers athletes and releases the spontaneity and creativity that data has no way of capturing in advance.
It’s why so many young athletes burst onto the scene with performances that surprise everyone, including themselves. Their talent has been allowed to find its own level, unrestrained by an informed assessment of their ceiling.
The Elevate Formula works in exactly this way. It transforms a challenge that looks overwhelming and unending into a temporary problem, after which success is waiting. It creates the belief that the person facing it has the qualities needed to get through. It moves someone from despair toward possibility.
It is, in the plainest sense, a hope formula.
Science, handled well, has no quarrel with hope. The problem arrives when data starts doing the job that belief should be doing, when a recovery score shapes how hard someone tries, when a training load metric makes a player feel he isn’t capable of what he is about to attempt.
Research is starting to put numbers on this irony. A recent systematic review on the nocebo effect in sport found that negative expectations about performance can impair athletic output by roughly twice the margin that positive expectations improve it.
In sprint trials, athletes told their supplement would harm their performance ran measurably slower than controls who were told nothing. In one study, the negative belief group ran nearly three per cent slower.
The data, in other words, had become the obstacle. The numbers had shaped the performance they were supposed to be measuring.
There is a broader pattern here that a Bath University study examined in some depth. Its findings described what happens when strict data-led training regimes are applied without care: they undermine trust, stifle creativity and dampen players’ natural enthusiasm for the game.
The researchers called it a “machine mentality.” Players were being asked to perform as if they were systems to be optimised rather than people with instincts, imagination and a capacity to surprise themselves.
The contrast with what happened to England’s cricket team from 2022 onwards is illuminating in this context. When Brendon McCullum and Ben Stokes took over, England had been producing exactly the kind of cautious, data-compliant, expectations-matching cricket the researchers described. Players were performing to expectation because expectation had become the thing they were playing for.
McCullum’s first act was essentially to remove the data as a psychological authority. He told players he wasn’t interested in what the metrics said they could do. He wanted them to play without fear, to back themselves, to find out what happened when they stopped trying to perform within their known range. His phrase for it was simple: he wanted to take away the fear of failure.
The results were extraordinary. England won eleven of their first thirteen Tests under the new regime, including a comeback series win over New Zealand that had seemed impossible at 0-1 down.
They scored at rates that had no historical precedent. Players who had looked like moderate international cricketers suddenly looked like match-winners. The players were unchanged. What had shifted was what they believed about themselves.
The story doesn’t end there, though. In the 2025-26 Ashes, England lost heavily to Australia and the approach that had produced such remarkable results began to look like its own kind of problem.
McCullum acknowledged afterwards that the team had “got in our own way,” that in chasing the feeling of freedom they had tipped past it into something undisciplined and self-defeating.
Hope without structure had become recklessness. The very thing that had liberated England’s cricketers had, when taken too far and applied without judgment, started to work against them.
Sir Geoffrey Boycott’s verdict was blunt: hubris had replaced common sense. Belief still needs a frame around it. Hope without structure, as England showed, is just another way of getting in your own way.
The best coaches seem to understand this intuitively. Their work is not to manage known quantities, but to create the conditions in which people discover things about themselves they did not previously know. At the same time, they keep enough structure in place for belief to translate into performance rather than chaos.
Jürgen Klopp, asked about how he had turned Liverpool’s fortunes around, put it as plainly as anyone has:
“I didn’t make them believe. I reminded them that it helps when you believe.”
The change from a doubter to a believer, he said, was the thing that mattered. Not systems, not metrics. The interior shift.
Unai Emery, building Aston Villa into a team capable of competing in the Champions League with a fraction of the resources of the clubs around them, describes his core challenge in similar terms.
“His potential is there,” he said of one of his players.
“It is in his body, in his hunger, in his mentality. My responsibility, my challenge, is to exploit it.”
And when asked about how he gets more from his squad overall:
“They have to feel the coach’s belief in them. It is more than tactical.”
It is more than tactical. That phrase is significant from Emery, one of the most detail-obsessed, preparation-driven coaches in the game. The data work never stops. And he knows none of it reaches the pitch unless the player believes it can.
This is something I’ve seen consistently across the different environments I’ve worked in, with teams, individual athletes, executives, parents and young people.
When the conditions are right, when a person’s IDQ, their sense of who they are and what they’re capable of under pressure, is working in their favour and the challenge has been framed with care, they consistently perform beyond what anyone expected of them.
The data catches up afterwards. But it cannot, by its nature, lead the way.
The challenge for modern sport is not whether to use science. Of course it should. The challenge is understanding where science’s authority ends and where something else needs to take over.
Science can tell you what has happened. It can identify patterns, measure probabilities and sharpen preparation. What it cannot do is set the ceiling of a performance that hasn’t yet been attempted.
Young athletes understand this before they are taught otherwise. Before a training load algorithm decides what they can handle and a recovery score frames their morning, they simply go and play.
The unfettered expression of talent in a child who hasn’t yet been told what to expect of themselves is closer to real performance than anything a dataset can produce.
This applies well beyond sport. The parent who tells their child they can do something they have never done before, the leader who backs someone for a role they have not quite grown into yet, and the person who decides, after a long run of near-misses, to try once more, are all doing the same thing.
They are doing what McCullum did in that dressing room, what Emery does in his one-to-ones, and what happened in that session with a striker who had not scored in weeks.
They are reaching past the evidence of what has already happened and insisting on a different future.
Hope can lead us to possibilities that the data cannot yet see.
Thanks for reading,
Mark
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