The science of football - part 1

Phil Brown berating his players at half time

“Football for me is a human science; it’s about man, above everything else” – Jose Mourinho

How often have you heard coaches say that a player isn’t mentally fit to start a game? Success rate in football has been seen to revolve around factors such as tactics, team-work, technical ability of specific players ,etc. Never really have people considered the way players ‘feel’ as a strong factor which decides the outcome of a game. Now feel is a term used loosely, the same way mentally fit has been. To make it sound more accurate, lets use the word psychology. Is psychology considered to be an important factor at the end of 90 minutes?

A footballer on an average, has the ball with him for 3-4 minutes in an entire game. A football fan that watches the top European Leagues and small games played out in the parking lots can tell you that mistakes are human nature. If you were to look closer, over 80% of the games played in the 2012/13 season of the English Premier League were directly affected by a ‘mistake’. It’s not that a player who scored or saved hasn’t performed his duty properly, but the reason behind them doing something successfully is because their opponent had a slip up.

So what exactly is a mistake? A rash tackle, a cross lobbed in without enough weight and a pass that drifts away wide can be the prime examples used when defining a mistake in terms of football. However do you really expect a player well trained and technically perfect to make a silly mistake?

A penalty miss is seen as the king of all mistakes. Players at the biggest stage have missed it at the most crucial of moments. These players train on their kicks week in and week out and yet seem to have their shot either saved or go into orbit. Now we can’t really come to a conclusion on why the player in question missed the penalty, but coaches and managers today use the help of trained psychologists to help the players perform better while taking penalties.

If you could take out the fear factor from a player taking a crucial penalty, you could increase the chances of the ball going into the net by at least 50-60% . However you cannot really term the feeling as fear, but more as stress. The players taking the penalties are in-fact in a highly stressful situation.

Stress Inoculation Training (SIT) is a cognitive-behavioral approach providing people with added psychological resilience against the effects of stress through a program of managed successful exposure to stressful situations. SIT has often been used by teams that are bound to play in a crucial match and has players that aren’t that confident about converting penalties.

For example we have team A that is about to play in the Champions League final. The stakes are high and chances of it being decided on a penalty-shootout are evident. A week before the big game, players Ax, Ay and Az come up to the manager and tell him they are bound to miss a penalty and don’t want to take any. The manager consults the psychologists and the three players are told to go through SIT.

The first stage of SIT is called ‘conceptualisation’. The therapist helps the individual to identify their stressors and how they respond to these and how successful these responses have been. Patterns of self-defeating internal dialogue are identified. The players talk about their attitude towards penalties. One by one they vent out their frustration as the specialists note it down.

The second stage is ‘skill acquisition and rehearsal’. The therapist helps the individual to develop and practice positive coping statements to be used in stressful situations. Other techniques such as relaxation and making a realistic appraisal of situations are also practised. The specialists lecture them about the advantages of positivity. They remind them that a penalty is either won or lost when the player makes the dreaded walk towards the box from the team huddle. They are told to imagine and recreate the scenario in their mind, with the outcome always being a goal.

In the third stage ‘application and follow-through’ the individual begins to apply the newly acquired skills to progressively more difficult situations in the real world. The therapist provides support and further training when necessary.Now it’s all about practice. They imagine the scenario again, they enact it out without a ball, they enact it out without a goalkeeper and then finally enact it out with a goalkeeper over and over again until they are confident enough.

Slowly but surely the players take out the stress factor from their penalty taking ability.

David Beckham was the designated penalty taker for England

Now Geir Jordet is a psychologist who has done quite a few studies on penalties. An interesting one shows that players who waited longer to kick after the referee blows the whistle, perform better than ones who don’t. This study was done in 2009 by Jordet, Hartman and Sigmundstad. According to them most players rush their penalties as they are more worried about getting out of the stressful situation rather than scoring from it. This does indeed has detrimental effects on a player’s conversion rate.

The last statement was backed up in a different way by other researches. In a journal called Human Movement science, they found that players who focused on shooting at a particular area of the net were more likely to score than those who were previously told to just shoot at the side opposite to the goalkeeper. The point they make is that instead of dividing your concentration, focus it completely on scoring rather than expecting where the goalkeeper will jump. Lesser the targets, higher the efficiency.

Not just stress, but distractions seem to be quite dangerous to penalty takers. Goalkeepers do the “spaghetti or jelly legs” (Jerzy Dudek in 2005 against AC Milan, Petr Cech in 2012 against Lionel Messi), they point at different directions (van Der Sar in 2008 against Nicolas Anelka) , intimidated the penalty takers (Jens Lehmann in 2006 against Esteban Cambiasso) and do a lot more in a bid to distract penalty takers.

According to Greg Wood, a sports psychologist at Exeter University, during a highly stressful situation, players are more likely to be distracted by any threatening stimuli and focus on them rather than the task in hand. For this very reason, psychologists have helped a lot of footballers (especially frequent penalty takers) with what they call ‘tunnel vision’ .Now tunnel vision is a term used when a player is successfully able to block out everything except the target from his senses. In the biggest of arenas, penalty takers are distracted by a number of threatning stimuli. Fans are chanting and screaming out at them, boo’s are echoing, deregotary terms are shouted out and just about everything you would want to avoid in a stressful situation.

As always there are exceptions and there is one which predicts that stress could be a good thing, up to a certain level. The Yerkes-Dodson law is an empirical relationship between arousal and performance. According to the law, players should feel a mild amount of stress or ‘arousal’ to increase performance as the player concentrates more. However there doesn’t seem to be much proof behind it and it remains to be just a viable ‘worst case scenario’ solution.