The Trademark Game
Chase a repeatable floor of effort and control, not brilliance every week
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 82%
Jones's answer to pressure and expectation is to lower the target on purpose. A 'trademark game' is defined as the absolute minimum standard a player must always deliver — but played with absolute effort and absolute control. Instead of asking players to be brilliant, he asks them to reliably reproduce this baseline, because brilliance chased directly creates pressure and inconsistency. The mechanism is a deliberate shift of attention from uncontrollable outcomes (scoring, winning, being spectacular) to controllable inputs (effort and emotion). His working estimate: if 75% of the squad hits their trademark game, the team wins most matches, and the standout performances then arrive as a by-product. It reframes consistency as the goal and brilliance as the occasional bonus that solid foundations eventually produce.
Origin
Jones developed the trademark-game concept with the England squad as a way to help players handle the rising external and internal expectation ahead of a World Cup, by anchoring them to controllables rather than outcomes.
Core principles
- 01Pressure comes from chasing brilliance every time; consistency comes from a defined floor
- 02Control your effort and your emotion; release everything you can't control
- 03Solid and repeatable beats spectacular and occasional
- 04Brilliance is a by-product of a reliable baseline, not a target you aim at directly
How to run it
- 1
Define the trademark floor
Specify the minimum standard each performer must always deliver — the baseline of effort and control that, if repeated, is enough to win most of the time.
Pro tip Frame it as 'the minimum you play at, done with maximum effort and control' — a floor, not a ceiling.
- 2
Shift focus to the controllables
Redirect attention away from outcomes toward what the performer can actually govern: their effort and their emotion. Everything else is released.
Watch out Chasing outcomes directly — goals, brilliance, results — manufactures the very pressure that degrades performance.
- 3
Practise the trademark every week
Treat the baseline as a skill to be drilled, not a mood to hope for. Players work at getting brilliant at the trademark game itself.
Pro tip Make the floor the thing you rehearse, so it becomes automatic under stress.
- 4
Permit fluctuation above the line
Explicitly allow output to vary. As long as the floor of effort and control is met, a quieter game is acceptable — the better performances arrive on their own.
Watch out Without this permission, one great early game becomes a standard the performer then chases and cracks under.
In the wild
A player arrived from strong club form, played a couple of games for England and did brilliant things immediately. He then kept chasing that brilliance rather than simply playing hard and controlling his emotions. Because he was measuring himself against his own peak and against an expectation to score, he manufactured further pressure — when the fix was to return to the trademark floor and let the standout moments come.
→ Illustrates how a single brilliant outing becomes a trap when it replaces the trademark baseline as the target.
Jones points to fly-half Dan Carter, whose reputation was built on occasional brilliant plays. But in Jones's reading, Carter's real brilliance was his solidity — a very high, very reliable floor game after game. The spectacular moments arrived because the baseline was so consistently strong, not because he was hunting them.
→ A model of the trademark game: brilliance as the by-product of relentless solidity.
Common mistakes
Aiming for brilliance every time
Setting your best-ever performance as the new standard to beat manufactures pressure and makes output more volatile rather than more reliable.
Focusing on outcomes you can't control
Fixating on scoring or winning rather than effort and emotion pulls attention onto the uncontrollable, which degrades the very performance you want.
Is it for you?
Best for
Teams and individuals facing high expectation who need reliable performance under pressure.
Not ideal for
Solo, low-stakes contexts where occasional peak output matters more than week-to-week reliability.
From the transcript
“a trademark game is a game where you play at the absolute minimum you have to play but you play with absolute effort and absolute…”
“if we have 75% of our players playing at that then we'll win we'll win most games”
“they don't have to aspire to be brilliant every week, because that's where I think the pressure comes from”
From the episode
Lessons In Elite Leadership - Eddie Jones - #411
Eddie Jones