This post might not be as sport-focused as my usual post, but it does explain an area of football by which many players seem to be affected. With Hazard as a current main example, many players are motivated to leave their current clubs and initiate the next "big move" because of what their career trajectory suggests, and by a motivation to leave "the comfort zone". That mentality might be wrong, here's why.

The Career Trajectory

When you look at Alexander Hleb's career trajectory, up until 2010, it makes sense. It's a rising trajectory as he went from the best club in Belarusia's B team to the first team of a club that would win the league after he joined it and would go on to dominate the league. After that, he moved to Stuttgart, not the best club in Germany, but definitely a move up. After that, he moved to an Arsenal team that had just won local titles and would start declining as he moved to an emerging Barcelona that would go on to dominate football for a few years.

When you look at such a trajectory on Wikipedia for example, it means that the player made every right move along the way. We all agree that we should always improve and move up. Barcelona weren't only a move for Hleb but Arsenal and Barcelona do share some common DNA when it comes to play style. However, Hleb was very happy at Arsenal, he was comfortable, and that latter part was somehow twisted to mean a bad thing.

The Sneaky Perception of the Comfort Zone

Being in your comfort zone isn't an absolute, you can't always remain in your comfort zone, and you can't always leave it. Sometimes, it's good to just be in your comfort zone. When to do which is the big question. The concept of the comfort zone is deceptive and sneaky, however, so was the crossroad Hleb was at when he received an offer from Barcelona.

We always imagine crossroads in life the same way:

Pixels.com

You pick one of two roads that are both moving forward, left or right. However, sometimes the crossroad means keeping everything we have or losing it, it means either standing still or going backwards, between a blessing you should keep and a harm from which you need to stay away.

In 2018, when Hleb moved to BATE Borisov for the fifth and final time, an article appeared at Psychcentral discussing this exact situation. In the process, the article asked an important question: Why is the comfort zone considered a bad thing? Why is it always associated with terms like "leaving the comfort" and "revolting against the comfort zone"? Why should we leave situations where we are comfortable?

The Truth About the Comfort Zone

This is the point where a little digging throughout the history of the term takes us to a place that we probably didn't think we'd find ourselves in. This is the point where we realize that despite all the bullshit spoken by motivational speakers, psychologists, and life coaches, the term that we know as the comfort zone is actually an economical term.

Here's an excerpt from the article

The term “comfort zone” was originally coined by Alasdair White, a Business Management Theorist, in 2009.

The main goal of the term was to create an overall look and management style for economic companies and institutions. The White-Fairhurst Performance Hypothesis says the following

All performance will initially trend towards a steady state, particularly after a period of performance uplift, and that steady state will then develop a downward curve leading to a significant performance decline.

According to White and Fairhurst, this state that precedes the decline is the comfort zone from which we need to escape. In terms of business, not a single theory managed to disprove it so far. Indeed, people need to always challenge themselves, never give in to being comfortable, and need to always improve. So, where's the problem?

The problem came when life coaches and motivational speakers took this economic concept aimed to help companies and economic institutions grow and applied it to a fully human level. This confusion of terms and their applications is exactly the crossroad that players like Hleb, Hazerd, Nicolas Pépé, and many others failed to grasp that doesn't apply to them as humans all the time.

What Hleb failed to understand, amidst all this confusion of being at such a crossroad is that the reason he was performing so admirably is because of a coach like Wenger, his teammates, and fans providing with the best emotional support and love that allowed him to perform at the level he was performing. Hleb needed that love and support more than he did sitting at the bench of a better club, and no league or UEFA Champions League title could fix that.

Funny enough, the correct place where the White-Fairhurst Performance Hypothesis was applied correctly is actually in the hands of Pep Guardiola, Hleb's manager at Barcelona. He is a coach who needed his players to never get too comfortable, so having a hungry bench aching to start made his starting players perform at such a great level. So, to an institution like Barcelona's first team, that term applies just fine. But, to Alexander Hleb, as a specific human being, that term doesn't apply.

The hypothesis uses terms like “they are at ease” and “low levels of anxiety.”. Those terms are bad and scary for an institution that only aims to keep the production wheel rolling and keep the profits coming. In football terms, it is important to keep winning and adding titles to your cabinet.

On a personal, football player, human level, this is not enough to sacrifice everything just to have the headline "Insert name moved on to a new challenge". Hleb, much like so many other players, left his comfort zone at the wrong time and more importantly for the wrong reasons. Hleb left Arsenal when he was just turning into a real star there, and left it just to become a bench player at Barcelona. Hleb left his guaranteed, already working plan just to be a cog in the Barcelona machine.

The Biggest Takeaway from Hleb's Story

Alexander Hleb's story isn't an invitation to just be comfortable and lose motivation. It's just an invitation to think deeply when looking at these decisions. It's an invitation to not repeat slogans without fully understanding them just to feel like we are progressing and improving when in fact we are losing.

Alexander Hleb went to Barcelona because he felt it was a reasonable move. Hleb did earn much more money at Barcelona than he did at Arsenal, he also won titles he'd never win at Arsenal. But, after all of that, Hleb discovered that if there was a single person who still remembers him as a talented player, it would be for his time at Arsenal and not for his high wages at Barcelona or the treble he won there. These aren't cliches or empty words, that's what actually happened.

Sources

A tribute to eternal Arsenal cult hero Alex Hleb, an ugly beauty lost in time
Arsenal History: Where Are They Now? Alexander Hleb Edition
Keane & Vieira: Best of Enemies
Alexander Hleb opens up on his one big Arsenal regret and why he cried before joining Barcelona
'I cried when I talked to Arsene' - Hleb still doesn't understand why he left Arsenal for Barcelona
Alexander Hleb: "I regret leaving Arsenal for Barcelona"
Arsene Wenger made me a star - I should never have left Arsenal, admits Alexander Hleb
Hleb sparks Blues fury by requesting an Arsenal shirt in TV interview
Hleb – I still don't understand why I left Arsenal
Comfort Zones: An Alternative Perspective