Following Jadon Sancho’s first goal for Borussia Dortmund since returning to the club, his manager made a simple judgement about his performance.
“We know he’s not 100 per cent yet, but we’ll get him there,” said Edin Terzic after Dortmund’s 2-1 victory over Werder Bremen.
In the context of the past 18 months, it is difficult to know whether Terzic’s comments refer to Sancho’s physical or mental fitness after off-field struggles at Manchester United had a tangible impact on his playing time on the pitch.
GO DEEPER
Before hammering Jadon Sancho, think back six weeks to Dele Alli
With advancements in technology, sports science and nutrition, physical performance in football has never been so finely tuned and closely monitored. We are living in a world where data is viewed as the divine truth to assess a player’s qualities.
The technical demands have matched the accelerated physical demands in the modern game, but are we giving the same attention to psychological performance?
Advertisement
Conversations about mental health are growing within football, but psychological support within clubs is not a new phenomenon. Many Premier League clubs employ psychologists as part of their support staff, with academy teams obligated to have a full-time psychologist as part of the Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP). Meanwhile, the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) has long offered mental health workshops as well as providing ongoing care, including a 24/7 helpline that players can call.
Beyond psychological support, the importance of a player’s cognitive performance on the pitch is garnering more attention. Much in the way that we are seeing a growth in specialist coaches at the technical and tactical level — including set-piece coaches and individual striker coaches — specific expertise in this field is increasingly being sought by clubs.
After the World Cup in 2022, Manchester United boss Erik ten Hag brought in Rainier Koers, a senior performance coach — or ‘life coach’ — from the Talent Academy Group to help with individual and team spirit for the second half of the season.
Last year, MLS club Charlotte announced Andrea Cannavacciuolo as the club’s head of mental performance, hired to “bring a holistic focus on mental performance for coaches and players”.
Most recently, Newcastle United brought in a consultant psychologist at the start of the season to help players deal with the raised expectations of Champions League football while maintaining a high level of consistency on the domestic stage.
GO DEEPER
Newcastle's cup odyssey, part 10: Psychologist helping Howe's players handle wildest nights
“We all have days when we cannot be bothered to go to work because we’re human,” says Steve Sallis, a mindset coach who has worked with England Under-15s, AFC Wimbledon, and Cardiff City, and is a mentor to multiple Premier League players.
“A professional player might wake up on a Saturday and feel like a six out of 10, but the fans are expecting them to be 10 out of 10 technically, tactically, physically and psychologically — every week.
Advertisement
“One Premier League player, an England Under-21 international, called me about a performance issue. He’s quite a quiet, introverted person — he’s very rounded, but he needed an edge.
“As an international, you might assume that they already have that edge, but players are the same mix of society — you get your loud ones, your quiet ones, your extroverts, your introverts. So we’ve been working on him being more assertive and that starts in the training ground with conversations and how you engage with your team-mates.”
Sallis has worked with Jude Bellingham, Eberechi Eze and Joe Gomez during their youth careers and it is striking that the simplicity of the messages can often be the most effective in improving performance.
“If players or coaches have not had a great experience educationally, their literacy levels can be low — so we could be looking at something as simple as speaking and listening,” Sallis tells The Athletic.
“More words give you more choice and there can be occasions where players or managers don’t have enough words to express themselves — and that can lead to conflict. So literacy can be crucial to wider performance.”
GO DEEPER
Pep Guardiola, 'kill points' and the importance of body language in football
At Villarreal’s academy, Kris O’Hare will be regularly on the grass with under-17s and under-19s in his role as a psychologist-coach. For him, getting into the minds of the individual players can be crucial to unlocking their peak performance levels.
“You can look at the technical element, but how can you also understand why a player might not be performing a certain action?” O’Hare asks. “I worked with an incredibly skilled player who was scared of shooting because he viewed it as a selfish action — but it wasn’t until I had some short meetings with him that I could understand his behaviour and work on it.
“The head coach might not be aware of why players are performing in a certain way, but it is a huge element of the game. Why is the player not following the instructions? Are they scared? Are they losing the idea of what the overall goal is? All of those things come into play.”
Advertisement
The messages given to players or coaches might be subtle — or at times, obvious — but it is important that the techniques are grounded in clear, evidence-based scientific principles.
Dan Abrahams is a sports psychologist and works with many top European clubs, with previous clients including Bournemouth and West Ham United. Abrahams’ role is wide-reaching, but a key component is using such principles to work alongside coaching staff to inform session design on the training pitch.
“Coaches are constantly having to make decisions and use their judgement around the different components of a player’s technical, tactical, physical and mental performance,” Abrahams tells The Athletic. “It is really about taking a bio-psychosocial approach — so body, mind and world.
“When we are involved in session design, we might be thinking of working on concentration, confidence, self-control, commitment, communication, cooperation, coordination, leadership — all these psychosocial factors that need to be injected into your session design. This proactive approach allows you to address what might arise throughout the season.”
Arsenal fans might remember Mikel Arteta’s attempt to maximise his players’ concentration by pumping You’ll Never Walk Alone into their training sessions before a trip to face Liverpool at Anfield.
Technical performance notwithstanding, Arteta’s attempt to address his players’ ‘pajara’, or collapse, was purely mental.
For Mark Bowden, who is a ‘mental performance coach’ for multiple Premier League players, training this cognitive performance under realistic, match-like situations is crucial.
“It’s not just about understanding something, it’s about conditioning it,” says Bowden. “Players are starting to realise that everything starts and stops with the brain — if that falls, everything else falls with it.”
Advertisement
The physical and technical skills of a Premier League player are indisputable, with a first touch, passing ability and fitness profile that are beyond elite. Surely, with that level of talent, players should rarely drop out of form?
Under the high-stress demands of professional football, Bowden outlines how emotional responses in the brain can often step on the toes of trained ability.
“Whenever players are overthinking or having self-doubt, there is a tangible chemical response happening in the brain and body,” says Bowden. “These electrical signals are firing in the brain and it has an effect from a physical point of view.”
Through mental performance training, players can condition their brains and behaviours to maintain their optimal performance and positively channel their emotional responses — but repetition is crucial.
“The brain is malleable,” continues Bowden, “so if we do something consistently we can build new neural pathways and physically change the brain. Your amygdala is the emotional processing centre in your brain, but if we proactively condition it in the right way during stress, we can reduce the size and strength of this ‘red brain’ response.
“At the same time, we can increase the size of the prefrontal cortex — which is a major part of your brain involved in higher-order cognitions like decision making — that we want to be in control all the time.”
In a generation where the tactical demands placed on a player can appear rather complex, providing individuals with greater autonomy on the pitch is a key theme that emerges when looking to maximise peak mental performance.
“When I work with players, I say, ‘Can we be more clever than the opposition?’, and will base a session around critical thinking,” said Sallis.
“Sometimes, under-coaching players can create intellectual freedom and allow them to make decisions based on what they see — for example, a quick free kick rather than a trained routine. More critical thinking creates more ideas, which then could be the difference between winning a match and not winning a match.”
For Abrahams, this message must come from the manager and coaching staff, who must create the environment for players to thrive beyond the specific tactical instructions.
“I’ve recently worked with coaches on being less authoritarian and more player-centred,” Abrahams says. “To develop leaders, you need to give players opportunities to experience leadership, and that comes from good session design by exploiting huddles between activities, water breaks, getting players to talk more on the training pitch and asking them to find solutions to the tasks you have set them in your activities.”
Advertisement
O’Hare’s view aligns with Sallis and Abrahams, with a particular focus on cultivating these socio-psychological skills from a young age to encourage players to stand out when they are looking to break into senior football
“Modern-day academies can be quite robotic, and the share of players who make it to the first team is extremely low. They might be physically superior in different stages of their development, but that alone is not enough to get to that next level,” said O’Hare.
“Empowering players to identify different situations is crucial. An example exercise could be building out with a three and springing forward when there is a numerical overload.
“What that exercise is doing is asking players to identify themselves when they progress forward. You’re then getting into personality development, and how players demonstrate their knowledge and communication with each other on the pitch.”
In contrast to a data-led approach, determining change in a player’s psychological performance can be difficult to objectively quantify. So, for the experts working within the game, what might constitute success in this space?
For Abrahams, the output can be identified more subtly by working with video analysts and coaches to identify the behavioural differences in a player’s actions.
“I was sitting with an assistant coach and a defender last week, talking about positive gestures and communication to hold the defensive line better because it was looking a bit creaky,” Abrahams explains.
“We discussed his body language, his gestures, and had a good conversation about his mindset — what is he paying attention to? Is he struggling to shift tasks in the moment? We brought this into the player’s mental framework, and we can then see look to see how this the pitch.”
By focusing on the process, Bowden does look to the numbers when referring to the change observed from his time working with Arsenal’s Reiss Nelson in 2022.
Advertisement
“I started working with Reiss when he was at Feyenoord. Before we started working together in February, he had one assist and one goal. From March until the end of the season, he registered six assists, scored three goals, got a new contract with Arsenal, and was one of the big reasons Feyenoord got to the final of the Europa Conference League that season.”
However you might measure success, the importance of psychological performance is gaining more traction within the professional game — but specialised roles are still in their infancy in the wider football landscape.
“In the modern game, you will have a set-piece coach, a defensive coach, an attacking coach — all these different specialised roles for the different physical aspects,” says Bowden. “But that mental aspect still has a long way to go on the performance side.”
While we may be living in a world dominated by data and objectivity, the subjective factors influencing performance are as crucial as they have ever been.
(Header design: John Bradford, photos: Getty Images)
