“What makes this club different, for me, is how they embrace and welcome sports psychology and see it in the same way as the tactical, physical and technical stuff. A decision was taken some years ago where they said, ‘This is important and we need to implement it as well as we can’, and that's very special in football.”
Troels Thorsteinsson speaks from experience. The University of Copenhagen Associate Professor draws on almost two decades of working with elite football, fencing and handball sides, in addition to his current spell with Danish top flight team FC Nordsjaelland.
The club has attracted headlines for, in Thorsteinsson’s words, being the ‘only club in the world owned by an academy’. Whilst that might be a slight stretch (Nordsjaelland are part of the Right to Dream Group, a collection of academies and clubs born from a Ghana-based community project launched in 1999), there’s no doubt that the ownership model is a world away from the type of structure governing most of Nordsjaelland’s European rivals.
Thorsteinsson is part of a team of five psychologists employed by the Danish side, with two of his colleagues assigned to the club’s women’s teams and three members of the unit embedded with male sides from academy to first-team level. It means that players progressing from youth to senior sides are effectively shadowed by a sport psychologist throughout their career.
“The biggest benefit is that from an early age, sports psychology is super integrated into their life,” says Thorsteinsson.
“It's part of training, it's part of the environment.”
This is reflected in the common language that creeps into conversations across the training ground. One of Thorsteinsson’s first acts after joining the club in 2022 was to replace the commonly-used call for players to show ‘aggression’: instead, the word now banded about by Nordsjaelland’s squad, coaching and backroom staff is ‘intensity’.
“Instead of saying to the players, ‘Now we need to be more aggressive’, they will now say, ‘We need to be more intense’, and they know this is about alertness, quick reactions, being locked in, focus and concentration,” says Thorsteinsson.
The Dane is quick to point out that this approach extends to more than one word, with part of his brief being to help coaches define messages they’re looking to land in team talks.
Thorsteinsson’s close connection with the coaching staff highlights a challenge constantly faced by sport psychologists: the need to balance cross-disciplinary integration with client confidentiality. Cue the club’s carefully constructed culture.
“There are very few things that we cannot share because I think we have succeeded in building a culture where it's okay to have a bad day, it's okay to make mistakes, it’s okay to think something is difficult, and we know that one of the most effective way of coping is to share (your problem) with somebody,” explains Thorsteinsson.
“We have a lot of staff here, so if a player is worried about body image, for example, there is a guy like me, we have a nutritionist and we have a lot of physical coaches: we have a lot of people in house that can help out.
“We’re trying to create an environment…where vulnerability is actually courage, you can put up your hand and say, ‘Hey, I think this is difficult, I need help’, and then I can talk to a player, I can learn about what's going on, and then I can refer them or I can take the talk myself, if it’s something I can help with.”
Thorteinsson’s is acutely aware of the challenges associated with realising this ambition. In common with counterparts from across Europe, the Team Denmark consultant still encounters a degree of caution when dealing with players.
“As soon as you mention a psychologist, especially to a young male, they can be a little bit defensive, especially in men's team sports,” he says.
“I have a close connection to colleagues in the Premier League and other European football clubs, who come and visits us here and learn about how we do things, and they say it’s almost impossible to do this in either Germany and England because the macho culture is still there and everybody is protecting themselves a lot.
“I actually talked to a coach in Germany, and he said, ‘I want a guy like you in my club, but I need another name: I cannot call him a sports psychologist’, so instead he hired a psychologist and called him a team coach.”
It’s an eye-opening example of just how far football has to go to alleviate the stigma surrounding psychology. Thorteinsson believes that the profession is making progress, but playing catch-up in comparison to other disciplines.
“In Denmark, my guess would be that half the teams in the Superliga have a sports psychologist on the staff, and only a few have it as a full-time job,” he says.
“We are 10-15 years behind physical coaches because they came in, helping football coaches put together better training sessions, 10-15 years earlier than we did.”
Whilst Thorsteinsson continues to watchout for signs of encouragement across the sport, he is doubling down on an approach rooted in concepts that might seem alien to a lot of clubs.
“ We have love, trust, compassion, and joy as our four values,” he says.
“You could easily say that these are actually four quite soft values for a high performing team, but I think that no matter how you interpret those four values, it's in a pretty positive light.
“I had sessions with the team about love and compassion, and just starting the session is fun because you can imagine 25 guys sitting in front of you and saying, ‘Let's talk about love’, but it’s also a very important conversation.
“Just bringing the awareness that we must, and we will, talk about a lot of soft stuff and then combine this with me being here every day, being a symbol of sports psychology, hopefully means it becomes normal to say, ‘Hey, remember to be a good teammate, remember to ask for feedback, remember to dare to open yourself up if you need to.’”
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