Want to Win Like Leicester City? Try Culinary Team Building!

By now, everyone knows that the Leicester City soccer team pulled off one of the most amazing upsets in the recent history of sports. They won the vaunted English Premier League championship over the likes of Manchester United, Arsenal and other traditional powerhouses. In fact, Leicester was such long odds that British bookmakers, like Ladbrokes and William Hill, offered odds of 5,000-1 for them at the start of the season. Neither bookmaker had ever paid out on such long odds. Leicester’s championship resulted in the largest payout in British sporting history.

How did they do it? Well, in addition to a new coach and some great players, we like to think it had something to do with culinary team building.

That’s right! Culinary team building.

Last October, early in their championship season, new coach Claudio Ranieri, got the team together for a pizza making session. Making pizzas from scratch can be a challenge for anybody. But these young men, untrained in the culinary arts, worked together, elbow to elbow, struggling through crusts with holes in them and runny sauce.

The culinary bonding helped them achieve their short term goal: make a wonderful meal. In the long run, it may have helped them come together as a team–to win a championship.

This article in the Daily Mail, tells the complete story of how they came together over pizza.

A team is more than people who work together.  A team trusts each other.

If you’d like to enhance your team’s performance, you should consider culinary team building too. At Team Building with Taste, we offer a range of programs from simple team building bites (like making tapas) to more comprehensive five course meals. In fact, speaking of teams, we’ve even had the Atlanta Falcons and Dallas Cowboys through our program.