Professional footballers work under the watchful eye of cameras. The viewers follow their every move and report their failures mercilessly. How does this affect them? Should a footballer have specific mental predispositions to play football professionally? Dr. Zuzanna Gazdowska, a sports psychologist, explains for MedTvoiLokona.
- Euro 2020 takes place a year later. The players learned relatively late that the tournament would not be held on the scheduled date. It could be a source of stress for them
- The work of a professional footballer is associated with a high mental burden on a daily basis. Especially when it comes to a personal defeat – for example in the case of an own goal
- The mental condition of the player in such a situation depends on how the coach and the team react
- More information can be found on the Onet homepage.
Agnieszka Mazur-Puchała, Medonet: The championship has been postponed for a whole year, which is an unprecedented situation. What’s more, the decisions were made relatively late, so the players were getting ready for the tournament almost until the last moment. How could this situation affect them?
Dr Zuzanna Gazdowska, sports psychologist, owner of the Kart Athlete brand: This subject can only be guessed at, but it is not worth assuming that it is definitely only negative. Depending on the adopted perspective, the players could perceive this situation as uncomfortable, unfavorable and aggravating. They could also treat it as an additional challenge, but also a chance to polish those elements of psychomotor preparation, for which under standard conditions there would not be enough time.
Let’s talk about failures. When their team loses, fans are flooded with tears. And what does a player who lost a match feel? Do they employ any mechanisms that allow them to deal with failure easily?
For every athlete, the losing situation will be a difficult and burdensome experience. It is important to give yourself time to experience a defeat and not hide behind the chant “Poles, nothing happened”. It sounds like minimizing the importance of a given match and its result, and yet each team counts on a win. After working through the difficult emotions associated with losing, it’s time to draw conclusions, analyze strengths and what did not work. Formulating task goals, that is defining specific elements to be worked through, can be very helpful, because relying solely on result goals (eg “I will win”) leads to nowhere, especially in a losing situation. Then the motivation and enthusiasm to return to training drops. Having task goals, we can see exactly how our development process is going and we see that a match or competition is not only the end result, but also all the hard work and skills used.
Sometimes there are situations when a team loses by one man’s mistake. The defender missed the goal, the goalkeeper missed the ball, someone scored an own goal. Does it leave a mark on the athlete’s psyche? The whole world is watching, remembering … How are the players dealing with it?
That is why, in each team, the coach should take care to build an appropriate motivational climate, coherence and integration, so that the team operates in accordance with the principle of “one for all, all for one” and that such events do not end up stigmatizing one person from the team.
It is worse when the fans and the media do not leave a dry thread on the player and do not allow the error to be forgotten. I think that the support of the team, staff, but also close people can be very valuable for the player in such moments.
Do the players have stage fright? They have to sweat in front of the entire stadium, cameras catch everything they do …
They certainly do, but I would rather describe this state as such “positive stress” called eustress in psychology. It is adrenaline, a thrill that motivates and drives us to act. The longer a player plays, the more matches he has already participated in, the less negative experiences associated with it, because the situation becomes more and more familiar and comfortable.
Do you have to have a specific personality type to be a footballer? Do introverts also go high, or do you have to be an ambitious extrovert to find yourself in this situation?
In fact, there are psychological studies that confirm that, in general, traits such as extraversion and conscientiousness can predispose people to higher athletic performance (Musculus & Lobinger, 2018; Webbe & Ochs, 2007). We should remember, however, that most measurement tools in psychology are based on self-description, and thus, they are susceptible to distortions on the part of the respondents. I would therefore be very careful in deciding which personality traits will “create” the ideal conditions for being a footballer. Research shows that engagement and the so-called resilience (not giving up in the face of difficulties) are very strong predictors of development in football (Gledhill et al., 2017).
Do footballers have to undergo any psychological tests to play professionally?
In many football academies, the development of young players is also monitored psychologically. These are tests, observations conducted by mental support specialists. However, these procedures are carried out in order to be able to adjust the training process to the players in the best possible way.
Let’s get back to those crying fans. Why do we experience so much what is happening on the pitch? After all, as people who don’t like football say, it’s just 22 guys running after a piece of cloth …
Who likes what, some experience sports struggles, while others follow the fate of TV series heroes. If fans are involved in following the results of subsequent matches, support a given team, strong emotions are associated with it, perhaps also with patriotic motives. Therefore, when we watch a match, we experience what we see on the pitch.
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