The Best

The inside track on how champions are made, written by one of the world's top sports scientists and an award-winning sports journalist.

Insightful, thoughtful, and altogether wonderful: The authors have given us a guided tour of athletic greatness, brimming with revelatory science and deep understanding.

For any coach that wants to learn and then coach better, this book is a must read. Developing elite athletes is an intricate process and this book will help you achieve the right balance of coaching.

An engrossing guidebook for youth athletes, parents, coaches and perhaps even fantasy-league fans looking for a little insight.

Fascinating and insightful... The Best isn't a one size fits all, it's a highly thought out, well-researched and accessible book that gives recommendations based on context and sport.

The Best takes you on an epic journey of discovery and learning while also highlighting some of the nuances and pitfalls around developing elite athletes.

Answers the big questions about how stars are made, in lucid, jargon-free prose. Takes our understanding of elite sport to a new level and deepens the enjoyment of watching. A major addition to sporting literature.

The Best takes a classic question posed by sport - what made them so good? - and interrogates it with genuine intellectual sparkle.

A great read for anyone interested in excellence using a compelling mix of narrative interviews with the best athletes interwoven with cutting edge science.

This crisply written and enthralling book is a study of high achievement in sports. But it is much more than that because of the richness of the human interest stories it tells and of how it uses data to explain its conclusions. It achieves that rare feat: making you look at the world in a new way.

The Best is an enthralling read that combines the latest research along with interesting anecdotes that bring to life how the world's best athletes are made. Whether a casual reader or professional working in athlete development The Best is a great read.

The authors delve deep into the minds of great athletes, making tangible the intangible, bringing reason to the unexplained, and order to the chaos surrounding the creation of elite sportsmen and women.

Taking the complexity of cutting edge research and mixing it with the insights from expert performers in elite sport, T he Best stands out in offering a glimpse of the characteristics of greatness and highlighting the many factors that lead individuals to sporting triumph.

The Best provides a perfect balance between evidence-based and anecdotal writing. It is easy to read, yet insightful and thought-provoking. It provides a good framework to understand the multifactorial and random aspects involved in human talent. The Best is a great resource for anyone interested in skill learning, talent identification and expert performance in sport.

The authors have created a piece of work that encapsulates everything we should know about identifying and developing champions. This book is a must for any coach, Sporting Director, teacher or mentor; in fact, anyone involved in finding talent and creating opportunity for potential to become reality. In this one book, the authors cover the full spectrum of requirements for elite athletes to become the best they can be and provide the tools for others to help them.

A must read for any coach who wants to optimize and facilitate athlete development. The book highlights how talent develops by creating realistic practice situations and empowering athletes. The book, amongst other things, has the athlete and sport at its core, while bestowing on the coach a crucial role as the facilitator of sporting greatness.

The Best is simply an essential read. It takes us on a rollercoaster tour of the journeys of some of the world's most celebrated athletes and explains how they achieved sporting greatness.

In The Best , the authors' vast scientific expertise and real-world experience from the trenches of elite sport results in a fascinating, informative, and immediately relevant read. I devoured it in a weekend and immediately shared it with my National Team coaches and performance staff.

A comprehensive book, which thoroughly covers, using science and interviews with successful athletes, the key factors that impact on a prosperous career in sport. For those involved in this domain, this is a very important read that helps improve understanding of the nuances that exist along the pathway to sporting excellence.

The Best: How Elite Athletes Are Made combines relevant anecdotal support and sound academic research to better describe the rocky journey to sporting success that many of our athletes take. This book is a good reminder for sports scientists that high performance sport in its purest sense is multi-faceted and that athletes require incredible resilience to succeed in ever-increasing competitive and complex environments.

Excellent.

Matthew Syed is one of the UK's most influential thinkers on mindset, performance, and culture. A former Olympic table tennis player turned award-winning journalist and bestselling author, his seven books - including Black Box Thinking, Rebel Ideas, and the groundbreaking You Are Awesome series for children - have sold over two million copies worldwide, been translated into more than 30 languages, and earned widespread acclaim for their accessible insight and compelling storytelling. A sought-after speaker and founder of Matthew Syed Consulting, he advises leading organisations - from global businesses to national sports teams - on building high-performance cultures. He also presents BBC Radio 4's Sideways, which has been downloaded over 15 million times, and writes for The Times and The Sunday Times. He has featured on top podcasts including The Diary of a CEO and High Performance. With a unique blend of sporting excellence, psychological insight, and sharp journalistic storytelling, Syed continues to challenge conventional thinking and inspire change across sectors. Matthew Syed is one of the UK's most influential thinkers on mindset, performance, and culture. A former Olympic table tennis player turned award-winning journalist and bestselling author, his seven books - including Black Box Thinking, Rebel Ideas, and the groundbreaking You Are Awesome series for children - have sold over two million copies worldwide, been translated into more than 30 languages, and earned widespread acclaim for their accessible insight and compelling storytelling. A sought-after speaker and founder of Matthew Syed Consulting, he advises leading organisations - from global businesses to national sports teams - on building high-performance cultures. He also presents BBC Radio 4's Sideways, which has been downloaded over 15 million times, and writes for The Times and The Sunday Times. He has featured on top podcasts including The Diary of a CEO and High Performance. With a unique blend of sporting excellence, psychological insight, and sharp journalistic storytelling, Syed continues to challenge conventional thinking and inspire change across sectors.