The importance of confidence in football – and how to cultivate it
This article is more than 2 years oldPsychologists and players share their tips for staying self-assured – and explain why the trick could be in your left hand
By Ben Welch for The Blizzard
Kepa Arrizabalaga is on his knees, hands on hips, watching Southampton’s Che Adams wheel away to an empty corner of Stamford Bridge. Celebratory screams echo around a vacant stadium haunted by a global pandemic. There are no comforting looks from Kepa’s teammates, no shouts of encouragement, just an awkward air of inevitability. It had happened again. The world’s most expensive goalkeeper had cost his team yet another goal.
“That was a nightmare as far as the goalkeeper and the Chelsea defence were concerned,” observed the BT Sport commentator Ian Darke. This time the young Spaniard had let a poor backpass from Kurt Zouma slip under his leg, before comically sliding into the post as he tried to atone for his error. Adams retrieved the ball and smashed it into the roof of the net to level the scores.
Arrizabalaga’s list of misdemeanours reads like the rap-sheet of a teenage delinquent past the point of no return. Ajax, Valencia, Liverpool, Arsenal, Southampton, Newcastle United – all beneficiaries of his self-sabotage. Recency bias compels pundits and fans to categorise the £71.5m goalkeeper as a flop, forgetting the crucial role he played in Chelsea’s successful Europa League campaign in 2019.
Arrizabalaga is not the only member of the Premier League’s goalkeepers union to find themselves caught in a storm. David De Gea, Jack Butland, Joe Hart and Jordan Pickford have all been weakened by an inexplicable kryptonite. Failure, followed by a surge of unfiltered feedback, is an occupational hazard for any elite footballer, but what turns one isolated mistake into the dreaded “poor run of form”?
Players don’t suddenly forget how to play the game, so this loss of function and confidence must run deeper, emanating from a malfunction in the body’s nerve centre – the brain. As modern football continues to embrace sports science and psychology, players and coaches are integrating these disciplines into their programmes in a bid to hack high performance. But could you eradicate the fear of failure by simply clenching your left fist? And yes, it has to be your left fist. More of that later.
Every player, even Lionel Messi, has experienced a loss of form at some point during their career (he failed to score in eight consecutive La Liga matches during the 2013-14 season). For most, it’s just temporary. Others take a little longer to rediscover their rhythm and for a few unfortunate individuals it’s terminal.
And it’s not just on-pitch performances that can set off a downturn. Injuries and a manager who doesn’t fancy you can also sow a seed of doubt so deep in the brain matter it’s almost impossible to dislodge. After returning from the 2010 World Cup a champion, an injury-plagued Fernando Torres scored just nine goals in 27 games for Liverpool, having managed 72 in his first three seasons at Anfield. A £50m move to Chelsea was meant to kickstart his career, but he never got back to his blistering best.
Before Pep Guardiola arrived in Manchester in 2016, Hart was City and England’s undisputed No 1, playing an integral role in the club’s rise to the top of English football. Unconvinced by Hart’s ability to play out from the back, Guardiola cast him aside, from which the two-time Premier League winner has never recovered. At the age of 33, arguably a goalkeeper’s prime years, Hart found himself warming the bench at White Hart Lane.
The context of Hart’s expulsion could have been the trigger for his chronic loss of self-belief, rather than a momentary lapse in form. “The severity of the situation can make a difference,” explains the sports psychologist, Dan Abrahams, who works with Premier League players and the England rugby team. “Has it cost the team points? Maybe a trophy? Was it on a big stage? Has the manager criticised me in the media? Have I lost my place in the team? There are a range of variables that can impact the ripple effect of a mistake or public fallout. The bigger the perceived problem, the harder it becomes for a player to manage psychologically.”
A player who usually relies on instinct and muscle memory starts to overthink. Cool-headed strikers snatch at chances or take too many touches when a first-time finish would have sufficed. “When you’re going through a bad spell you start to think about what you’re going to do and that can cost you valuable milliseconds,” explains the former Reading, Bolton and Cardiff City striker Adam le Fondre.
“Going into a game I’d normally be thinking, ‘Yeah, I’m going to score,’ but if I haven’t scored for a few weeks I’d be thinking ‘I need to score’ so I’d put more internal pressure on myself than I’d need to. That would have a detrimental impact on my performance.”
With each poor display, anxiety builds. Players develop something akin to a neurosis, focusing on the perception of their ability rather than the technical failings of their game. If the team is losing and the media and fans are flooding timelines with criticism and abuse, the problem escalates.
“The worst thing you can do is think of the consequence – what’s going to happen? Am I going to let my team down? Will I let my family down? Am I going to lose my place in the team?” says the Bournemouth goalkeeper Asmir Begovic. “That pressure crippled me at times. You fear the reaction of the fans and the media and that doesn’t allow you to focus on what really matters – playing the game.”
When faced with a test, players enter a challenge-and-threat state, a psychophysiological framework for how they respond to perceived demands. A study published in February 2020 found that athletes categorise a task using a four-tier system: high challenge, low challenge, low threat and high threat. Once fear has hijacked a player’s thought process, every situation is classified as high threat. When they assess what’s at stake, they catastrophise – for example, a goalkeeper who is receiving a backpass with strikers charging towards them visualises a mistake leading to a goal.
As a result, the heart beats faster and harder, but arteries constrict and less blood is pumped around the body. The sympathetic nervous system – the network responsible for a fight or flight response – takes longer to kick into gear. Hormones that boost alertness never make it out of the gate. The extra blood your muscles need to take decisive action fails to reach its destination. With less oxygen feeding the brain, movement, decision-making and focus all suffer.
Researchers found that athletes who enter a high threat response have low levels of neuropeptide Y, an amino acid that deals with stress, and oxytocin, a neuropeptide that plays an important role in positive behaviour. Like a computer infected with a virus, the player’s operating system shuts down. To counter this, players need the software to heal their system and restore to factory settings.
For Begovic, nothing beats the process. “I’m on a hamster wheel,” he explains. “No matter what happens in training or on gameday, I just focus on my craft every single day. I came to England in 2003 and the world has changed a lot. The attention is so intense that the more you can detach yourself the better. If you let yourself get distracted by all the noise it can become a psychological problem.”
Reps on the training pitch are mandatory, but a little ego boost always helps. Le Fondre likes to activate his mind’s eye and fire up YouTube so he can watch some of his 228 career goals. “I do a bit of visualisation before a game,” he says. “I run through certain scenarios in my head of me scoring, how I’m going to get my chances, how I’m going to score them. I do a lot of practice and repetition during the week, working on different types of finishing, trying to improve all the time. I also like to watch my goals before a game and look at the things I did.”
So did Kevin Phillips. Whenever the former European Golden Shoe winner found himself in a barren spell he would reach for a DVD and watch himself at his predatory best. Compact discs have been confined to landfill, but the technique hasn’t. “I tell young players to watch their goals on YouTube in the dressing room before a game, because it might spark something inside them,” says the player-turned-coach.
Unwittingly, Phillips has said something loaded with scientific accuracy. Recalling moments of glory actually sparks the formation of connections in the brain, activating value areas in the striatum and prefrontal cortex. “All of these techniques described by Adam have been shown to activate your reward circuits and release dopamine, a mood booster,” says the neuroscientist Dr Stacie Grossman Bloom.
“Our brains are made up of specialised cells called neurons and those neurons communicate with each other via synapses, the connections between them. Part of our brains are plastic, so they can be modified and shaped by our actions. We can overcome our negative inner voice by reinforcing our confidence and creating synaptic connections. To overcome a loss of confidence, players can imagine themselves scoring a goal, making a great play or calling upon a memory when they did so. Just like mastering any other discipline, boosting confidence requires repetition and time.”
By visualising success and basking in former glories, Le Fondre is silencing the self-doubt creeping into the brain with a surge of positive neurotransmitters. However, negative thoughts can be so deeply embedded that an influx of neurotransmitters isn’t able to penetrate the self-destructive patterns. Players need an exorcism and that’s where Abrahams comes in.
The psychologist tries to neutralise catastrophic thinking with rational emotive behaviour therapy – a form of psychotherapy that identifies self-defeating thoughts and feelings, challenges the rationality of those feelings and replaces them with healthier, more productive beliefs. “If we have a goalkeeper who thinks, ‘Everybody says I can’t play with my feet and I’ve lost my place in the team because of that’ they’re going to find themselves in a threat state,” he explains.
“A player then gets stuck in a stressed and anxious state so they can’t even work on improving in training. They need to think: I love my strengths, I work with them, I acknowledge the areas I want to improve and I’m going to work on them every day.” Abraham’s methods were able to transform the fortunes of the former West Ham United striker Carlton Cole.
In August 2007, Cole turned to the psychologist looking for a mindset makeover. He was fourth-choice striker at Upton Park, languishing in the reserves and bereft of confidence. Fast forward 18 months and multiple sessions with Abrahams and Cole was winning his first England cap.
“He’s 6ft 2in, but he felt 5ft 2in when he went out on the pitch,” explains Abrahams. “We wanted him to feel like he was a monster so we came up with a game face of ‘aggressive monster’. He would try to be aggressive with every action, not fouling, but aggressive. He was practising this and doing it in every Premier League game. During one period he scored six goals in seven games under Gianfranco Zola, prompting Fabio Capello to pick him for England. When he made his debut for England he came on for the last 15 minutes and his No1 job was to be an aggressive monster. Be it, do it, act it. That became his narrative.”
While this is an effective tool in unlocking a player’s dormant powers, it alone won’t act as an antidote. There are other outside forces that can empower a player to break free from the shackles of poor form. Or entrench them further in a cloud of doom and gloom. The mood of the dressing room is contagious. “When you’re playing in a team that’s full of confidence you know you’re going to get opportunities,” explains Phillips. “On the flip side, I’ve played for struggling teams and you feel like you’re beaten before you go on to the pitch. A lack of confidence makes you feel weak and timid. When you do get your chance, you’re anxious and snatch at it because you’re so desperate to get your team out of the situation they’re in.”
There are other ways to manipulate the brain and amplify confidence under pressure. Like clenching your left hand. Scientists from the Technical University of Munich, writing in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, believe clenching the left fist can help athletes perform under pressure. The left-hand side of the body is wired to the right hemisphere of the brain – the side that controls automated rather than conscious behaviour. As part of the study, 30 semi-professional footballers took six penalties during training. The next day, they attempted to take the same penalties in an auditorium full of more than 300 university students waiting to see a televised match between Germany and Austria.
The players who squeezed a ball with their left hand performed as well under pressure as they did during training, while players who squeezed a ball in their right hand missed more shots in front of the students. “Rumination can interfere with concentration and performance of motor tasks. Athletes usually perform better when they trust their bodies rather than thinking too much about their own actions or what their coaches told them during practice,” said the lead researcher Dr Jürgen Beckmann, chair of sport psychology at the Technical University of Munich.
While no player should seek failure or resign themselves to an inescapable decline, the lessons learned from such an experience can help build resilience. Diego Forlán struggled to settle at Manchester United, scoring just 17 goals in two-and-a-half seasons at Old Trafford. Primarily used as an impact sub, it took him 27 matches to score his first goal for the club. He was labelled a waste of money, a flop, a player out of his depth.
Then, in 2004, the Uruguayan signed for Villarreal and went on to become one of the best strikers in the world, winning the Golden Ball at the 2010 World Cup and claiming two European Golden Shoes while in Spain. “Goals made me happy and I was never happy until I scored, so there were frustrations in Manchester,” he told the Athletic. “Playing alongside great players at United gave me knowledge, experience and maturity, which I would use after.”
Coping with criticism and a subsequent loss of confidence is often the acid test for any player hoping to establish themselves at the top level. If you don’t have the resilience or strategies to navigate testing times, your poor run of form will become untreatable. “There are always more people wanting you to fail than wanting you to succeed – that’s just the nature of the world we live in,” says Begović. “That’s something you learn as you go through the ranks and some people, unfortunately, fall by the wayside because of that. Others learn to deal with it and they make it. It’s self-belief, not confidence, because confidence can go up and down, but that self-belief can never go down. You can never doubt your ability.”
Arrizabalaga should take note. As he reflects on his recent downturn, Kepa is probably struggling to sleep, replaying every mistake over and over again in his mind, with every toxic tweet and former striker’s critique of his positioning ringing in his ears. Firstly, he needs to examine the facts: he was not solely responsible for Chelsea’s poor start to the season and he’s not the first goalkeeper to endure tough times.
Eric Steele, Manchester United’s goalkeeper coach, said De Gea’s first six months at the club were “horrendous”. The Spaniard recovered and went on to win the club’s player of the year award four seasons on the bounce. It might not feel like it right now, but time on the bench is just what Arrizabalaga needs. Time to replay his heroics against Eintracht Frankfurt on YouTube and rekindle those synaptic connections.
This article was published first on The Blizzard
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