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“Imagine if you're offered a job where you're going to work six days a week, you won’t decide when you take holidays, you're going to have to travel twice every second week at least - spending significant time away from home - and we'll give you a one-year or possibly two-year deal, but you’re going to have to perform every week, and even if you perform…

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Visual awareness. Decision making. Problem solving. Just three of the terms bandied around on a regular basis when it comes to 'training the brain'. But what are athletes and clubs concentrating on when it comes to identifying and honing cognitive skills?

To answer the question, I spoke to Slawomir Morawski, founder of

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“I've talked recently to sports psychologists in high-level positions within professional sports teams who are facing increasing pressure…to try to better objectively test what they're doing with teams.”

Jim Doorley is speaking about an issue that’s affected many of the sport psychologists I’ve talked to over the last half-a-decade.

The US Olympic and Pa…

“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.’”

Questions?

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Previous articles

As a Mind Room Member, you can access all of the website stories - covering everything from AC Milan’s neuroscience lab to the way English rugby teams are embracing ‘shared mental models’ - via the four sections below:

* Theory

* Practice

* Strategy

* Features

Thanks again for reading The Mind Room!

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit themindroom.substack.com/subscribe

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“My job is made easier…because I've got coaches that care about people. That’s why I constantly keep coming back to the leaders of programs or the leaders of the environment and the way they operate. In blunt terms, it either helps or hinders your ability to get some of your messages across.”

Andrea Furst shoots from the hip. Our conversation is nominall…

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It’s a situation that will strike a chord with many sport psychologists. You start working with a team, hear all the right noises before joining, only to discover on day one that your handover notes are essentially a blank piece of paper.

The turnover of staff in elite sport, together with the tendency to focus on short-term goals and over-complicate t…

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Artificial intelligence (AI) helps sports teams with analytics, training plans and recruitment. But is there a space for AI in a psychological context and, if so, what would that look like?

In 2023, Markus Raab, Robert Schinke and Charles A. Maher wrote a paper on how technology and artificial intelligence can shape the future of elite sport performance.…

"You don't win by wanting to win. In sport everybody wants to win; that's the dream. But you win by having a really good strategy for success and having real clarity around what you need to do and how you go about your business."

Sometimes, the power of a statement lies in its simplicity. When I first spoke to Dr Kate Hays in late 2022, I left our interview with her quote ringing in my ears. It was a brilliantly succinct riposte to the soundbites (insert your variation of choice on the 'they just wanted it more' line) which regularly ring around TV studios.

Fast forward just over two years and Hays has laid out her 'How To Win' framework in a new book, explaining the psychological theory and practice that's empowered teams from England's history-making Lionesses to Premiership side Harlequins.

I talked to the former England women's rugby psychologist about the four 'building blocks' - spanning everything from a person's purpose to the mental 'stadium skills' Hays has helped athletes hone - which make up the book.

It's a fascinating insight into how a sport psychologist can work with coaches, players, backroom staff and front office personnel to affect change across elite sports teams.

To listen to our conversation, just use the audio player at the top of this article.

You can also find more details on Hays’ book here: ‘How To Win: Lessons in success from the front line of performance psychology, HarperCollins’

Questions?

If you have any queries about the newsletter, get in touch by emailing [email protected].

Previous articles

As a Mind Room Member, you can access all of the website stories - covering everything from AC Milan’s neuroscience lab to the way English rugby teams are embracing ‘shared mental models’ - via the four sections below:

* Theory

* Practice

* Strategy

* Features

Thanks again for reading The Mind Room!

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit themindroom.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit themindroom.substack.com

In 2018, basketball player DeMar DeRozan wrote a one-line tweet: ‘This depression gets the best of me’. Shortly after the small forward’s post, Kevin Love penned an article revealing he’d suffered a half-time panic attack during a game against the Atlanta Hawks.

Fast forward seven years and around a third of teams in the NBA employ a full-time mental h…

 ‘Players were telling us that they felt more resilient, more confident and had better communication skills, just over one season, and some of these players can be in academy systems for 10 years, so there's a lot of time to develop them.’

Tom Mitchell’s words are striking. The Doncaster Rovers academy psychology lead is talking about the impact of a programme he’s spearheaded at the English League Two club, focused on harnessing ‘psycho-social’ skills and characteristics (PSCs).

The terminology might sound clunky, but the theory is relatively simple. By defining, monitoring and fine-tuning a player’s mental traits, from confidence to focus, and developing skills such as communication and leadership, coaches can improve an athlete’s performance on the pitch - and help them become well-rounded people off the field of play. As James Barraclough, a sport performance consultant who has also examined the development of PSCs, puts it:

 “It's not just about developing the player: it's about developing the person.

“The vast majority of players in academy football aren't going to go on to play at a professional level, so it's making sure that the 95 percent or so who don't make it aren't just treated as collateral damage.

 “When they transition out of football and into everyday life, they can hopefully use these employability and soft skills to make the academy experience a beneficial one.”

Barraclough and Mitchell’s recent research puts the theory to the test, examining the impact of a personalised approach to honing PSCs within an English football club’s academy.

It’s a project which takes its cue from Mitchell’s two stints with Doncaster, the latest of which has seen him oversee the establishment of a PSC programme. Based on a set of eight ‘pillars’ - covering  commitment, communication, concentration, control and confidence (better known as the ‘five Cs’), plus resilience, self awareness, and presence - the initiative runs across the club's academy.

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Coaches are asked to monitor players’ progress across the eight areas, providing a common language for assessing the academy intake and providing appropriate support. The programme focuses on one pillar per month (with a facet like self-awareness saved to the backend of season, when that skill might come in handy) and couples assessment with practical suggestions on how coaches can work on areas of improvement (such as ‘overloading’ a session to increase a player’s confidence).

The results are encouraging, with players reporting a significant improvement across six of the eight pillars, and Mitchell has managed to circumnavigate the challenges that can come with rolling out an academy-wide programme.

 “It's just about speaking to stakeholders like the academy manager and the head of coaching, and reminding them that definitions of coaching effectiveness include knowledge of personal and social development,” he says.

“If you look at Cote and Gilbert's 2009 coaching effectiveness model, they talk about how a coach needs those things for coaching excellence.

“So I said, ‘Well, if we really want to be excellent, we should have an idea of of young people's development and we should be trying to develop those people. That gives you a little bit of leverage.

“Then you just have to speak to people within clubs to see players don't often get released from academies because they can't play football, especially at the older end.

“They're all excellent players, but usually the things make the difference are the psychosocial things.”

Mitchell and Barraclough's latest project takes the Doncaster model a stage further, homing in on an individual’s ‘super strengths’ and potential areas for improvement - based on the observable behaviours defined in Rovers’ programme - and designing specific sessions (in which a player might be limited to a certain number of touches, for example) focused on both.

The trial showed that this kind of tailored intervention can help improve a player’s ability to self-evaluate and reguate emotions, to name just two of the areas in which the programme proved effective. Whilst Mitchell and Barraclough acknowledge the time constraints and stakeholder politics that can make implementing PSC initiatives tricky, for the Leeds Beckett lecturer doing so is a point of princple:

“We've got a moral responsibility to develop people and that's becoming increasingly mandated as well.

“We need aftercare programs, we try and follow where players go and what they do. So there's all these good reasons to do it and at Doncaster, they're great, they're on board with that.”

Questions?

If you have any queries about the newsletter, get in touch by emailing [email protected].

Previous articles

As a Mind Room Member, you can access all of the website stories - covering everything from AC Milan’s neuroscience lab to the way English rugby teams are embracing ‘shared mental models’ - via the four sections below:

* Theory

* Practice

* Strategy

* Features

Thanks again for reading The Mind Room!

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit themindroom.substack.com/subscribe