Mind Games

If confidence was a relatively simple thing for me to manage, it clearly isn’t the same for everyone. When I was coaching the goalkeepers at Bradford City in 2000, we did a survey of the players and asked them to describe how they felt at various times during the course of the matchday: on the way to the game, in the dressing room just before they went on and when they kicked off. Their answers were very different. Some players built themselves up over time, feeling nervous in the morning but pumped and ready by kick-off. Others woke up feeling great, but that ebbed away as kick-off approached. Some needed an early positive piece of action in the game before they felt ready. Others didn’t.

All this probably seems obvious if you actually think about it, but it proved that every player was different. They did whatever they had to do to try to feel as comfortable as possible so that they performed at their best, and no one single approach would have worked for all of them. As coaches we had to understand this, allowing the players a degree of independence to enable them all to be as relaxed and confident as possible. If one goalkeeper needed an early touch of the ball, the defenders might give him a few backpasses to get him into the game. If another suffered from their confidence ebbing away just before the game, one of the coaches might have a one-to-one with them at 2.30pm and offer them encouragement.

Superstitions are often derided or mocked because they seem silly to those who don’t require them. Putting your shin pads on a certain way or the team coming out onto the pitch in a certain order can’t affect the result of the match, these people will say, so you’re just relying on meaningless nonsense. But things like this are about the potential impact they have; they’re done to keep a player within a comfort zone and the right frame of mind to attack the challenge to come. Psychologically, that helps to build confidence and so they become valuable. As long as the superstitions don’t dominate your match preparation, why wouldn’t you do it?

Personally, I didn’t really have any superstitions because for me it was all about physical and mental preparation, but I’d never criticise a player that did. You do whatever it is you need to do to feel good when the match begins. Of course, you can’t solely rely on a superstition as some magical good-luck charm that will sort everything out; but if it helps give you an extra few per cent, then go for it.

There’s also no magic formula for building up confidence. It’s about people, and understanding how they tick. That example of managing confidence on a matchday at Bradford City is just one way in which it makes a difference. If you can put your jigsaw together as a team, understand the nuances of the personalities of the players in that team and allow them to express themselves, you’ve got a good chance. If you’re trying to force players into a system and just expecting them to gel with each other organically, with no micromanagement, you’re onto a loser.

But although this indicates that coaches play a vital role in building – and maintaining – confidence, the best players are the ones who look for solutions on the pitch to problems that present themselves. They obviously also need the talent to execute the solution, but thinking quickly is half the battle. Let’s say I’m a full-back who has been told to switch the play to the opposite flank when I get to the halfway line or pass it into central midfield. That’s fine, but if I also have the awareness to spot that the midfield is cramped and that there’s a space down the right, I’ll exploit that and surge down the wing even if this is not normally my role. The key lies in creating players who have the freedom of expression to solve those micro situations, and that comes from living and learning.

I remember the golfer Lee Trevino; he’d do shots that nobody else could do. It was all about vision, freedom of expression and confidence. He just saw things in a way that others couldn’t and so he practised them, and was therefore able to be confident even when attempting the unusual or risky. Lionel Messi is the best player in the world not just because of his talent but because of his brain. He’s able to see a problem or an opportunity and solve or exploit it better – and more quickly – than anyone else.

Every player at the top level has talent, but it isn’t just about natural talent. It’s about managing the person to get the most out of that talent, to get them feeling confident and allowing them freedom of expression, then fitting together players with slightly different levels of talent that work best together to create the best team.

I really think that it’s getting harder and harder for coaches to do that successfully, because it requires management of the personalities of the players in the team. Managers have far less power over the players than they used to. If a player gets fined a week’s wages for failing to listen to instructions, does it really make as much of a difference when the salaries are so high and their agent will be able to kick up a fuss and cause problems for the club anyway?

So the only way you can do it in the modern age is by creating a philosophy – a team spirit and style of play – that is so attractive to players that you persuade everyone to buy into it, thus creating something close to a universal confidence among the squad. That’s exactly what Howard Kendall did at Everton and what Liverpool have done under Jürgen Klopp. Everyone leaves their ego at the door and is given the freedom to express themselves. They all know that they have the manager’s trust, and this automatically makes them feel confident.

It’s also vital to remember that confidence isn’t just affected by what happens on the pitch, even though that was almost always the case for me. Don’t fall into the trap as a manager of preparing for matchday and forgetting about the players’ lives outside the game. If someone’s kid is ill, or they’re having problems at home, it will obviously affect them on the pitch. It’s the same in every line of work.

Let’s say a player has a new baby that has been quite poorly. The player isn’t getting much sleep as a result and is putting far more work in at home than they normally would. This means that they’re more tired, and so training reduces their energy levels more than it usually would. Come matchday, they have less residual energy and so they make mistakes that they normally wouldn’t make. That’s going to kill the confidence of a player. It also puts a greater strain on their home life, because the player has evidence that it has affected his work.

When I was playing, this sort of situation could be very hard for players. You were hardwired to simply plough on through any domestic issues and keep them to yourself. But if off-pitch issues were affecting your performances, you’d quickly be dropped. At the time, an appearance bonus of £200 might make a huge difference to your lifestyle, which would only exacerbate the confidence issue. Perhaps a potential suitor might be put off signing you because of a period of inconsistent form. It’s easy to see how whole careers can be shaped by the minutiae of daily life.

But in some ways, I think players in my day at the top level were a little more resilient. In the 1980s, there was much more variety on matchday. We had to adapt to different pitches, different balls and completely different conditions. Some grounds might be open at the corners, so the wind would whip through. There were plastic pitches, which changed how the ball bounced and how you dived. We might play on what were basically mud baths during the winter. Clubs would choose their own match balls, which moved differently through the air. The atmosphere at some grounds was really intense, at others less so.

All this has largely been lost. Plenty of stadiums look identical to one another, and every match ball is standardised. The pitches are all kept in incredible condition, because that’s what managers and players like; you never get a mud bath these days. And the atmospheres around the country are virtually the same. There’s very few places that would really intimidate a player now.

You hear managers moaning now if they play away in Europe or in the domestic cup competitions and the pitch is bobbly or sandy or muddy, because they’ve grown accustomed to everything being just so. But that variety was useful for players. It taught us to be adaptable, to cope in unexpected and imperfect scenarios.

It also made us resilient. The pitches we played on throughout the winter would sap our energy. The boots we wore would be heavy, caked in mud. But our bodies learnt to cope – they had to. In 1984/85 I played seventy matches for Everton and Wales in ten different countries. In the absence of the physiotherapists, nutritionists and expert medics that clubs use today, that was a long season.

Players now are gym-fit, but I’m not sure that their bodies are as resilient. Of course the pace of the football is more intense, but I think it was more physical when I played and the facilities that players were able to lean on were scarcer. I hear about many more players now complaining of tiredness, but when I played fatigue just wasn’t a thing. Nobody ever asked if you were tired. You just played and played, for better or worse.

One truly positive change in football between then and now is the increased use of sports psychologists and the difference they can make to a player’s confidence. The idea of psychological help didn’t really exist when I was playing, and many people would have scoffed at it. Instead we were subject to a pretty simple process: play well and you could stay in the team and at the club; play badly and you’d be binned. The rest was just noise to be ignored.

In fact, you weren’t ever really expected to talk about anything at all. If you were injured, you didn’t show that you were hurt and just got on with it. If you were going through something, you concentrated on the football and vowed not to let it show. That’s just how it was.

When I started doing the work I do now, it became clear to me very quickly that there were players who could have benefited hugely from getting help. That wasn’t necessarily the senior players, because I probably still don’t know what some of them were going through, but we had quite a few apprentices who didn’t make the grade but might have with a little more guidance and support.

I remember one trainee who was put on a diet because he needed to lose a few pounds. He’d come in every morning and have his breakfast at the training ground, and then have his lunch after training and go home. The club spoke to his family, and it turned out that they were making him sandwiches for the train journey to training in the morning, and after a big tea he’d eat two Mars bars. So he did need to shift some weight.

Two weeks later, the guy was basically only eating two apples a day to try to lose it, and he couldn’t last on the pitch. He had no energy whatsoever. He eventually left the club because he never rediscovered his form. Nobody ever sat down with him and asked why he was eating badly, or if he comfort ate to cope with things or had ever addressed the fact that his solution was so extreme. With a little help, he might have been able to find a balanced solution that also addressed the root cause. But he just lurched from one extreme to the other.

We had another apprentice, and when he came in he looked really good. But on a pre-season training run he got beaten by Jimmy Gabriel, who was the assistant manager and must have been in his mid-fifties by then. We asked how he’d managed to lose to Jimmy and his answer was that he could easily have beaten him but that he just wasn’t that bothered, so he let Jimmy win.

He was a goalkeeper, and one day in training he said that he’d been playing against Manchester United’s youth team on the Saturday and had saved a shot. Saving the shot made him laugh so much that he forgot to get up and save the rebound, and the United striker scored.

I remember telling him that he had to go away over the summer and maintain his fitness and work on improving by himself, and I gave him loads of drills to practise. He came back for pre-season training and he could barely do a press-up. He was so weak physically that it was obvious that he hadn’t done a minute of exercise over the entire break.

Now those two were good kids, and good players too. They could have made it, but they were never going to because both needed support from within the club and within the game to give them that edge. One needed support to talk through his eating and extreme diet, and the other needed to discuss why he didn’t have the will to improve or better himself. Perhaps a sports psychologist wouldn’t have solved the issue, but the pair of them didn’t even get that chance. There was nobody for either of them to turn to; they had to work it all out themselves.

Every player goes through things, because they’re human beings and that’s the reality of being human. It’s sometimes extremely hard to work through problems without any outside help, and if you do have to work through them on your own, it takes time. But in that apprentice environment, you got very little time because there was always someone ready to take your place and you were being judged all the while. Without the support network, those who had problems were starting from behind the line – and they ended up getting lost.

Some stuff you can work out yourself, but sometimes you just need someone to talk to. I don’t even think that every time it requires a trained psychologist; a pair of ears will do just fine. Someone to listen, who won’t judge you, who won’t say too much to you and won’t share what you’ve told them in confidence, but just hears what you’ve got to say. Sometimes when you talk through something or write it down, you identify the issues and can solve the problem. But nobody did that with those apprentices – or with us as players. I’m lucky that I was able to process things pretty well myself, but it would still have been good to have someone that did that. Someone independent who just listened to you.

It all comes down to fate. Those apprentices could have met people along the way, outside the club, who gave them that time and space to work through things, who could have helped them and set them on a different path. In some respects, the lack of such people defined their lives.

I think that’s where I can help people. I don’t claim to be a qualified counsellor, but I am prepared to listen to people and give them time. I’m prepared to hear what they have to say, and I try to come up with potential solutions. Maybe the lack of that support when I played football has made me better at that.

The most important aspect of confidence is its infectious nature. You can tell immediately when a club is in great form and the mood is high by looking at the training-ground car park in the morning. It will be packed half an hour before players are due in, because everyone wants to impress and become an integral part of something successful. When things are going badly, however, while some players will still stay longer at the end of training, others will want to leave immediately. Although they know they have to be there, they might want to escape if there’s a negative atmosphere around the club.

The notion of self-fulfilling confidence can be really useful. If you have the total respect of a squad that has bought into your philosophy, you might want to allow them to have a few days off – tell them to go away and do some light fitness work by themselves, but mainly just have a few days in the sun and relax. They won’t do anything foolish to undermine morale and will come back refreshed, having spent some time with their families and feeling buoyed by the fact that the manager clearly trusts them.

I don’t think we see enough of that micromanagement in other industries. It’s perhaps because people just don’t have the time or the budgets to commit the resources to it, but its absence creates a workplace culture in which people can become incredibly dispirited. You have people who work their arses off in their jobs, and occasionally it would be clever if the people above them could recognise that and make a gesture.

Little things make a huge difference. One day, if a manager approached someone and said, ‘Look, you’ve had a banging headache all day, just go home half an hour early,’ how much would that motivate someone? You’d get far more than your thirty minutes back from them because they’d feel energised by it. It sends them the message that they aren’t just a drone working without recognition.

Say somebody has had a crap time at home for one reason or another. Find out what their favourite flowers are, or what kind of chocolate bar or sandwich they like, and bring them something in. You can do so much for that person’s wellbeing with a single gesture. They’ll feel valued and cared for, and will repay you in the same way.

People often don’t do this kind of thing, because they feel – not unreasonably – that they’re too busy to think about it. But every kid that comes into our school is given an individual learning package, and with that we can tailor their education to their needs. Yet we don’t seem to ever do that in later life. It all just gets lost in the noise.

It’s odd, because not doing it is also so counter-productive. If you feel that people above you care about you, you’ll be predisposed to give them more and be confident about yourself. You’re sure that others have your back. You’ll also become more likely to express yourself because you believe that they know you well enough to realise that any mistake wasn’t intentional, and you’ll feel better about being able to rectify it anyway. It’s so much easier to be confident in yourself if you have faith that others are confident in you.

I’m a firm believer that you have to learn to take the rough with the smooth. That doesn’t just apply to football or other sports but to all areas of life. People who can appreciate the good times but not get carried away by success are more likely to be happy. And people who can cling on to the memories and the lessons of those good times and use them to help them through a rough patch are far more likely to be able to come through the other side better for the experience.

You just have to treat both extremes as similarly as possible and stay on an even keel. Allow yourself to get carried away when things are going well and you risk taking your eye off the ball. Allow yourself to become too dispirited when things aren’t going so well and you harm your own chances of them improving quickly. How you behave in one extreme affects your behaviour in the other extreme.

I suppose my reaction to winning trophies was considered a little odd, but it all played into that principle. Most players – at Everton and other clubs – celebrated raucously, and I totally understood why they did so. For them, winning a trophy was a concrete recognition of their hard work and what they’d achieved. It was why all the long hours were worth it.

But for me it was all a bit awkward. I was never happy receiving adoration or being the centre of attention. After we won the FA Cup Final in 1984, the first trophy of my senior career, I was overcome by a wave of embarrassment. I wanted to get my medal but didn’t enjoy going up to the Royal Box, and I frankly found the lap of honour a bit much, even though I knew the supporters expected it.

I went to the post-match celebration at the Royal Lancaster Hotel. It wasn’t my thing at all, and I rarely went to those events after we won trophies. But my parents had come down for the final and they really wanted to go, so of course I took them along. I would have been happier going back to the hotel and watching TV on the bed with a nice cup of tea. That was much more my thing.

I felt exactly the same in 1995, when we beat Manchester United in the final. I’d played really well in the match to stop United scoring, and in doing so I became the most decorated player in Everton’s history. All of the players headed off to the party in the evening, but this time I felt no obligation to go. My then wife Eryl and daughter Samantha had come down for the game, but they’d gone back home after the match and I had no interest in hanging around longer than I needed to. I drove home, got in at 10.30pm and went to bed. On the way home, I kept seeing cars full of Everton supporters driving back to Liverpool with smiles on their faces after winning the cup. That was all the recognition I ever needed, knowing that I had helped make every single one of them happy that day.

I also saw a car that had broken down by the side of the road, and the people standing by it had Manchester United shirts on. I stopped to pick them up and took them to a garage nearby. I’m sure the last thing that they expected was for Everton’s goalkeeper to help them out on the evening of the final. It might have been different if we’d lost the game!

That wasn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy winning finals; of course I did. But the adoration I received for just doing my job always made me feel very awkward. If you go to work in any other field of employment and do the job to the best of your ability, nobody jumps around and celebrates and tells you that you’re brilliant. We’d only done what we were supposed to do and knew we were capable of doing: winning.

My reaction was exactly the same when I won individual honours. It seemed odd for an individual player to be heralded in a team sport, when nothing would have been possible without the help of my teammates. I felt pretty uneasy to be given so many plaudits when the people around me had done so much of the work.

In a purely footballing context, confidence can be drained in a huge variety of ways but it will always be expressed on the pitch, because that’s the main stage. So talk to players individually, sit down with them and get them to open up. Ask them if everything is all right at home, and if they’re sleeping properly. There’s no excuse anymore, with the rise in awareness of mental health issues and the use of sports psychologists. But I don’t think managers always do it. Some are far too hands-off, and it sends the wrong message.

That’s why you have to admire what Klopp has done – and what Kendall did before him. Everyone sees the great football that Klopp’s team plays, and the shots of him hugging and smiling with the players, but he also prides himself on knowing each one of them inside out. They know that they can come to him with any problems, and he knows that he can give them constructive criticism without denting their confidence. It’s a two-way street. So they’re motivated to look after themselves off the pitch, work hard in training and prepare properly for matches. That’s all down to maintaining their confidence.

Footballers express themselves more when they’re confident, because human beings express themselves more when they’re confident. And losing confidence means a lack of ability to be yourself, or a lack of faith in being yourself. That can be incredibly hard to deal with mentally.

Imagine a cross-dresser, a man whose family doesn’t know about his cross-dressing. Let’s say they all go out for a family lunch, and he’s aware that his family might want to come back to his house afterwards. Imagine being worried about them finding female clothes and therefore needing to hide them. How would that lunch feel for this person, being constantly fearful about his relatives discovering something that he wasn’t yet ready to share with them? Could he eat his food and enjoy the meal as normal, or would he have something in the back of his mind, nagging away? Now extend that to every day of his life.

It’s exactly the same principle for a footballer. If you have any baggage or any doubts in your mind, it’s more than likely that they’ll affect you more on the pitch than elsewhere. Allow the situation to continue unaddressed, and careers and lives can be destroyed. Forget that a footballer is a human being, even for one minute, and you’re leaving them open to mental health issues.

Confidence

by Anne-Marie Silbiger

In all of us lies the urge

to be confident

with our friends