Mind Games

That’s the horrible side of football. The money isn’t good, the inequality is bad too. But the lack of patience and the lack of senior professionals helping out younger kids on the pitch and making things easier for them is awful. That’s cheating. That’s not doing your job.

Managers are more fearful for their jobs than they’ve ever been, and that pressure will always be passed down to the players. Nowadays, I don’t think that a manager should have to do anything other than organising the first team. The club should have an identity, and everyone should know what that identity is. The academy should produce players to match the identity of the club and its philosophy. And then you pick the manager to fit that philosophy.

But they don’t. Despite managers having more pressure on them, we’ve actually given them more to do and less time in which to do it. Clubs lurch between one philosophy and the next. One manager gets sacked, another comes in – and everything shifts. They have to say, ‘We are this club and this is how we do things.’ The philosophy should be set in stone and everything should be built around that.

You look at West Ham: from Slaven Bilić to David Moyes to Manuel Pellegrini and back to Moyes again. Where is the philosophy there? At Everton, Sam Allardyce came in – but it was never going to work because certain managers just don’t fit at certain places. For a while there’s been something fundamentally wrong at Manchester United, where supposedly world-class players won’t – or don’t – perform. But is there a philosophy that everyone is working within?

I also think that there are managers who can spend money, and managers who aren’t suited to it. There’s managers like José Mourinho, and that is – or maybe was – his thing. Collecting expensive players and managing them and their personalities. Then there are others who prefer working-class English lads who graft, and that’s their thing.

You take Moyes and Allardyce. Look at the type of players they were and the type of people they are. And they have managed players who haven’t tried a leg. Are they allowed to tell the truth to them? Can they inspire them? But if everything is geared towards creating a certain type of player, managers can walk into the job with their eyes open – and the club have appointed them because of it. They have a mandate. Then they can be the best managers they can be. It all goes back to being the best of you, not a version of someone else.

If your club is constantly changing managers and lurching between philosophies, and each manager that comes in has different ideas and one might like you and another might not, that’s very hard for players. You’re increasing the pressure on them when you should be easing it.

So don’t expect managers to build the club when you haven’t already created an environment in which they’re able to do so. Tell them to manage the first team to play in a certain style, and ensure that any player who comes in fits with that philosophy. Because when you walk into the canteen at the training ground, you can instantly spot the mood and tell whether everything is or isn’t going to be perfect on the pitch.

There’s a really interesting point about reducing pressure that comes from American sport and the psychology of that country. There, the typical scenario is that everybody is incredibly upbeat and positive and ‘Have a nice day!’. This extends to sport, where everything is presented as a positive, every mistake is an opportunity, and they try to engineer a spirit where every supporter coming to the match believes wholeheartedly in the team winning. In this country, we sometimes see that constant positivity as ugly or brash, as if confidence and cheerfulness were something to be sheepish or embarrassed about. But I want everyone coming to the stadium to believe wholeheartedly that we can win. And you’d be amazed at the difference that can make.

There are some brilliant psychologists now working at the biggest clubs in the world, but clubs don’t do anything with the crowd other than making them pay more and more for the same tickets. Why don’t they work with them? There are 40,000 people there that you can use to your advantage to reduce the pressure on your own players and increase the pressure on your opponents.

Concentrate on the grounds and the crowds. Get those people wound up to back their team. Get them to make some noise. Make sure that everyone is up for a good time. If you do – whatever happens in the match – they will have a good time. Don’t assume that the fans will come whatever, and don’t make them pay ludicrous prices for a shit burger and the same seat. Every matchday has to be an event. We seem to be scared in this country of letting people enjoy themselves.

The clubs don’t help. They effectively make it clear that they can do whatever they want and the supporters will come anyway, so they don’t need to try. So go the other way. Look at everything: the music, the colour schemes, fan involvement. Don’t just plasticise everything or roll it in glitter. Maximise the experience for supporters by giving them things that they really need. If it’s raining or cold, give them hot drinks or hand out umbrellas at the transport hubs. Or even, and I know this is completely alien to them, reduce ticket prices. I think Leicester City winning the league is a really good example of this. It wasn’t just that the team had a great shared morale, but that every supporter believed that the owner cared.

If every club did that, the supporters would think, ‘Bloody hell, this club values me, they’ve thought about me, so now I’m going to do everything I can to cheer them on, rather than sitting back and waiting to be entertained and shouting criticism at the players when they fail to entertain me.’

Then there’s the players on matchday. The interesting thing to me is that the players are all fit, but some of them are deemed unable to last ninety minutes. Is that because the game is more intense and more demanding? Perhaps. But is it also because we’ve created an environment in which players are psychologically programmed to break down, because they’ve been left unprepared for obstacles in the road by the lack of expression allowed in their personal lives? Maybe this also makes it harder for them to express themselves on the pitch. Perhaps this creates a pressured scenario in which players feel that everything matters so much now that they become tense, too tense. When they get the ball and when they walk down the street, are they allowed to be themselves?

There’s a danger that such an environment leads to a culture of fear, which creates its own pressure. If I know that I can’t give the ball away because the opposition might score, the manager might get sacked because he becomes impatient with the club philosophy and I might get crucified on social media, then it’s going to be very difficult to play with any freedom. That pushes players into their shells, so they play it safe and try not to lose or, worse, try to stay hidden.

But for whatever reason – and it’s probably pure greed – clubs fail to make the connection between looking after the supporters and reducing the pressure on players. They chase money as much as they can and forget to create a positive environment – then they wonder why their players feel unable to express themselves under the extra pressure they have piled onto them.

Pressure

by Anne-Marie Silbiger

Some of us are delinquents in hiding

No call to achieve

Yet the demand to be somebody

Looms thunderous in those ears

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