What Role Does Mentality Play in Talent Development?

"NONE!" it screams inside me. Or is this topic simply being neglected? In the BFV/DFB coaching education, it is mentioned, and no opportunity is missed to emphasize its importance.But how does it look in reality? What are the associations actually doing? Are players/talents mentally supported? Does this happen professionally?

First, I'd like to briefly address the content on the topic of psychology in coaching education. In our fundamentals, the House of Football is said to consist of three pillars and a roof:

The pillars are called technique, tactics, and fitness (football-specific), whereby fitness must not be confused with endurance.

...and then, at the BFV (Bavarian Football Association), you additionally receive information on the topic of motivation. Formulating goals appropriately, etc.

But that's about it. The rest, an interested coach has to learn on their own.

Of course, psychology is the decisive factor in football! However, it's my thesis that for many coaches, doing justice to all three pillars is already asking too much. Psychology here is, at best, basic fare!

Some coaches, especially former players, can still teach technical skills; many confuse fitness with endurance, and making tactical behaviors understandable is something only a few manage. Psychology, in many cases, is then reduced to the locker-room speech with sentences like, "They need to eat grass!"...

To make matters worse, the football community lags noticeably behind general societal development. It's enough, at this point, to mention the topics of homophobia or gender equality.

So if PSYCHOLOGY plays such a decisive role in football, why isn't more attention devoted to it, explaining to coaches in more detail what lies behind it?

Entire degree programs deal with sports psychology, both in relation to the individual and from the perspective of team sports:

On Wikipedia, under the heading "Orientation," it says about sports psychology: "Sports psychology is research-active in both the natural sciences and the humanities. It deals with development, motivation, learning, volitional structures, and social behavior. On the one hand, it concerns the development and application of sports-psychological methods for gaining knowledge in the sport sector…"

Volitional structures describe the goal-directed regulation of thoughts, emotions, motives, and actions for the conscious, deliberate achievement of goals. Put more simply: self-regulation to achieve goals.

This brings us to today's topic, "MENTALITY." In the definition of mentality, in contrast to volitional structures, one speaks of a predisposition (a predominant psychological personality trait) in the sense of a pattern of thinking and behavior of a person or a social group — in our case, the team. And in this context, "team" is understood not merely as the starting eleven or the entire squad, but rather the entire environment, including various coaches, physiotherapists, and other club officials, whose statements reach the players in connection with football.

"Predisposition" means that we are all "preconditioned" by our genetic makeup and our social environment. In other words, our mentality is inherited and shaped by the people who surround us / have surrounded us. And it is certainly not set in stone. Healthy personality development and targeted guidance can work "miracles"!

I don't want to be misunderstood here: a single conversation with a player won't lead to clearly measurable performance improvements overnight, but his changed attitude will influence his actions and thus also his development / athletic development. This makes the influence of "coaching" in this context hard to measure. But the cause-and-effect relationship should be easy for all of us to grasp.

In the short term, a coach can also unleash energy within his team or in individual players. In such cases, the team or player has already acquired the ability but is unable to access it at a given moment. The cause of this lies in blockages that can arise for various reasons. And I speak here from experience!

A U19 team I had the privilege of coaching was on the verge of promotion to a higher division and only needed one point against a team ranked significantly lower in the league. The match took place on an unfamiliar surface, artificial turf. My team was presumably blocked because of the promotion chance that had crystallized toward the end of the season, and we were down 0:5 at halftime — against an opponent we had clearly dominated in the first half of the season.

I was aware that at that point we were simply standing in our own way, and I tried to "shake the team awake" with clear, loud words. By pointing to the first-half-of-season result and, above all, to learned and often-applied behaviors with corresponding examples, the team was meant to get back on the track to success.

Shortly after the start of the second half, we scored our first goal, and with every further action, our confidence and belief that we could still achieve the draw grew. With a penalty shortly before the end of the match, we rewarded ourselves for the second 45 minutes. Final score: 5:5.

Coaches should be able to apply short-term interventions accordingly, but this requires training with practical, hands-on examples!

However, far more important in the context of talent development are the medium- and long-term successes achieved through "mental" guidance / coaching of players along their path: changed thoughts, emotions, motives, and actions pave the way to the best possible development of the person / the player!

I look forward to addressing another topic in talent development with you next week under my column "So schaut's aus." Until then! Stay healthy, and always a good ball!