As sports science grows more sophisticated by the season, Alberto Uncini Manganelli—executive, author, and former adidas Worldwide leader—argues that the data revolution has a blind spot: the human variables that still separate champions from everyone else.

We can now measure almost everything. Lactate thresholds, sleep cycles, ground contact time, neuromuscular fatigue, and heart rate variability at altitude. The performance data available to elite sports organizations today would have seemed like science fiction a generation ago. And yet, after 22 in-depth conversations with world champions across multiple disciplines, Alberto Uncini Manganelli keeps arriving at the same conclusion: the variable that matters most still can’t be quantified.

Manganelli spent years at the top of the global sports business, including a senior executive role at adidas Worldwide, before turning his attention to documenting what elite performance actually looks like from the inside. His book, Formula of Formulas, draws on conversations with champions from Usain Bolt to José Mourinho—athletes and coaches whose careers span wildly different sports but who share, he has found, a remarkably consistent internal architecture. The surprise, for an industry increasingly fluent in data, is how much of that architecture remains invisible to the tools we’ve built.

“Technology will amplify talent. But mindset will differentiate outcomes. The gap between average and excellent will widen.”

What the Data Misses

The sports performance industry has undergone a quiet revolution over the past decade. Wearables, computer vision, biomechanical modeling, and AI-driven load management have transformed how organizations develop and protect athletes. The best teams in the world now make decisions based on data streams that would have been inaccessible—or simply nonexistent—not long ago.

Manganelli does not dispute the value of any of this. What he raises in Formula of Formulas is a different question: what happens when every team has access to the same tools? When the data infrastructure is table stakes, the differentiator shifts. And in his observation, it shifts back to the same place it has always lived—in the capacity of the individual to sustain effort, absorb failure, and stay oriented toward a goal over long periods of time.

At the elite level, everyone’s biometrics are exceptional. The physical gap between a champion and an almost-ran at the top of any sport is often vanishingly small. What the 22 champions profiled in the book share is not superior hardware. It is something closer to an operating system—a set of mental and behavioral patterns that allow them to extract more from what they have, more consistently, over more time. That operating system does not yet have a sensor.

Pre-Performance Protocols

One of the more technically interesting patterns Manganelli documents in Formula of Formulas is the near-universal use of pre-performance rituals among elite athletes—and what those rituals are actually doing at a functional level. Sprinters making the same number of jumps before the blocks. Football players entering the pitch with the same foot. The precise number of ball bounces before a tennis serve. Across wildly different sports and cultures, the behavior repeats.

These behaviors are easy to dismiss as superstition. Sports psychologists have long understood them differently—as attentional anchors, proprioceptive resets, or arousal regulation mechanisms. What Manganelli adds is the observation that even athletes who claim to have no rituals demonstrably do. The consistency across sports suggests something less like a personal quirk and more like a universal feature of high-performance cognition: a repeatable method for narrowing focus at the moment it matters most.

The implication for performance technology is significant. Current tools are built to capture what happens during competition—split times, force plate data, and GPS heat maps. The pre-performance window, the minutes and seconds in which an athlete transitions from preparation to execution, remains largely unmonitored. If that window is where cognitive state is set, it may also be where competitive outcomes are decided before the clock starts.

The Almost-Champion Problem

Perhaps the most data-relevant concept in Formula of Formulas is the puzzle of why athletes with objectively comparable physical profiles produce such different competitive outcomes over careers. History is full of extraordinary talents—athletes whose numbers were right, whose training was right—who nonetheless fell short, sometimes by margins too small to explain with any physical metric.

The divergence, Manganelli argues, lives in the capacity to prioritize long-term goals over immediate gratification, consistently, over years, under conditions of extreme difficulty. The champions he interviewed—among them Alessandro Del Piero, Kakà, and Roberto Mancini—showed a dedication to their vision that bordered on obsessive. They deferred gratification not occasionally but structurally, as a persistent feature of how they made decisions across an entire career. In behavioral science, this is a form of temporal discounting: the degree to which a person devalues immediate rewards in favor of larger, more distant ones. It is measurable in controlled research settings. It is almost never measured in sport.

That gap represents both a limitation in how elite organizations currently assess athlete potential and an opening for the next generation of performance tools.

Technology’s Real Edge

None of this is an argument against sports technology. Manganelli’s position in Formula of Formulas is more nuanced: the next frontier for performance science may not be more granular physical data, but better frameworks for identifying, developing, and protecting the psychological variables that physical data cannot capture. His time at adidas gave him a long view of how elite organizations use performance infrastructure—and where the persistent gaps remain.

The organizations that sustain competitive advantage, in his observation, are the ones that build mental and behavioral capacity as systematically as they build physical capacity—not leaving resilience, purpose, and conviction to chance or character. The champions he interviewed are not simply better-conditioned athletes. They are differently oriented ones, wired at the level of belief and long-term commitment in ways that compound across careers.

The sports technology sector has done remarkable work making the physical body legible. The next decade will belong to the organizations—and the tools—that learn to read the rest of it.

Formula of Formulas by Alberto Uncini Manganelli is available now on Amazon.