What a game!
It was historical 113th minute, Mario Goetze scored and Germany won their fourth Cup in history.
For Argentina it was a disappointment, also because it was their best game in Brazilian finals. But it was not enough for Germany, which – to be honest – did not have another “wow” match, similar to ones with Portugal or Brazil.
It was also a interesting game for us at CayenneApps. We were wondering, whether the assumptions we made when we did our World Cup Final SWOT were correct or not. Interestingly we were not so far from truth
Here you can find more detailed description of conducting SWOT for World Cup: Germany vs Argentina – SWOT analysis.
Story of Argentina
Why Argentina lost – was it tactics or just lack of luck? Let’s take a look at SWOT. We suggested that Argentina should take aggressive strategy meaning:
Use your internal strengths to gain an advantage.
And for Argentina their biggest asset, identified on analysis were attacking abilities. Features which included Messi and other attackers involved over 50% percent of all points calculated for aggressive strategy. Yet they did not managed to overcome Germans.
What is important, they have their chances: Higuain had one after getting gift from Kroos in a first half and Palacio had his chance in second half. Argentina actually played more offensively than in other games and when they did Germans seem somehow lost.
But why this attacking power did not have impact on overall score? Let’s take another look at our analysis and check out impact statistic.
Impact shows which features have biggest impact on all strategies, not only the one with the biggest overall score. There we can see that their weakness:
Efficiency. Argentina scores little and when Messi is not scoring, they score even less. With Germany they can have only few situation to score the goals and they must make use of them.”
has impact equal to almost 40% which is actually more than impact assigned to their biggest asset Messi (which is 24%).
When we compare it to the situations they had it occurs that the insights included in SWOT were quite right: their biggest weakness was their lack of efficacy.
They had two or more opportunities but did not manage to use them. When we look close enough we can that the impact of weaknesses on opportunities (limiting) or threats (intensifying) was also significant – that is great example of showing that when analysing it good to overview all features we have, not only the ones connected to recommended strategy.
Story of Germany
Now let’s take a look at the strategy of winning team. We suggested defensive strategy, which means:
avoid threats and try to eliminate weaknesses which has biggest impact.
The biggest weakness we identified was their counter-attack vulnerability. Matches with Ghana and Algeria showed that this kind of assumption has solid grounds, but in final Germany did not put much more effort on defense, than in other games and yet they won. But this does not necessarily mean that defensive strategy was not good fit. Actually game ended after 120 minutes, with rather modest score 1:0.
Germany did not dominate Argentina, they did not flood their goal with thousands of shots. From this perspective their strategy was rather inefficient. For Argentina it was only 7 more minutes to penalties and what could have happen in such a lottery is different story.
Let’ take a look at the at the situation Palacio had in the second half. Long pass flies over Hummels and Argentine attacker has his one-on-one with Neuer, he misses but the opportunity was excellent. Now take a look at SWOT again: second biggest influence on defensive strategy for Germany is…
Long passes. Germany vs Algeria showed that German defense is quite fragile when the ball flies behind their backs. Nice!
When we analyze other recommended strategies we see that second biggest score (not so far from the winner) has Diversification strategy which mean that: strengths overcome threats.
The biggest strengths of Germany team were: midfielders and coach. Khedira did not play, but Schweinsteiger and surprisingly Oezil had really good game. As for the coach: is there a better decision to put guy on the field, who scores 20 minutes later deciding goal?
Summary
Some of our team support Germany, some Argentina, so there are no winners here. The best thing that happened is that we showed that SWOT is not only limited to marketing, sales or business tasks.
It can be also applied to sports, politics or personal decision. It can be also really convenient and fun way to support decision making. One of my friends told me yesterday, that he is doing SWOT for buying new car – great stuff!
We encourage you to do the same. Take a look at: CayenneApps SWOT and try creating your own SWOT. If you think that you made something fun and interesting, please share it with us. We can take your work and allow you to share with everyone, just like we did it with World Cup Final. Where do you think SWOT may be applied – if you have some interesting applications, please leave a comment!
To learn more about SWOT and strategies, stay tuned. It will be the topic of our next posts.
