A game of few laughs? Sports psychologist says joy is England’s missing ingredient

Sporting success isn’t down to pickle juice, according to a leading sports psychologist. The secret isn’t to be found in the inflatable unicorns England’s players famously mounted to recuperate in the pool. Or the £3,400 electric bikes they pedalled to boost their post-match recovery. It’s not even about the manager.

“Instead, what I’m going to say will horrify you,” said Michael Caulfield, who has worked in professional sport for more than 25 years. “Football is – or should be – only about joy.”

Joy was what England’s fans so badly wanted this week in their game against Slovenia. After the toil of the team’s opening Euro 2024 matches against Serbia and Denmark, fans craved quality.

But what they got was another performance mired in fear and anxiety. And another draw.

Caulfield, who has worked with Gareth Southgate in the past, says: “We’re now obsessed with the next quick fix – and I include the massive cult of the manager in that. Alongside pickle juice.

“The brutal truth is that players only learn from other players. You could bring in the reincarnation of Sigmund Freud and Barack Obama to motivate the team – and Ed Sheeran to play guitar to them afterwards – but the only thing that will make a difference is learning from and helping each other.”

And what are the players (ideally) learning from each other? The joy each and every one of them felt as children when football was their obsession.

“The players need to get back to their 10-year-old selves because what has been forgotten in this age of professionalism, is that football is not a perfect game,” said Caulfield. “It’s a simple game. It’s a game of utter chaos. It’s the most random game of all.”

He pointed to a match last Wednesday, where Georgia triumphed 2-0 against Portugal. That, he said, was a joyous game: when Georgia scored a goal, the team rushed back out on to the field again, just like football-crazy kids in the back streets, oblivious to anything else except the ball.

The key problem, as Julian Nagelsmann, the manager of Germany’s national team, has said, is that a player can only be improved by so much.

At the level of tournament football, it’s no longer about formations and systems, false nines, low blocks, pressing, sixes and fours, and eights and tens, and pockets of space – it is about managing the player as a person.

Only 30% of Nagelsmann’s job, he has said, is about football and tactics. The other 70% is about managing the player.

The sport performance consultant Andy Barton agreed. “What we want is happy football,” he said. “If you’re happy, the synapses in your brain work faster and you can make quicker calculations.

“There seems to be quite a high fear of failure in the way England have been playing and the way to deal with that is to make failure acceptable.”

That’s not to say that losing is OK, he hastened to add, but it is about giving players the freedom to try to test things: to play without fear.

“Taking players’ minds away from winning or losing, and focusing instead on the things they are in control of – the process – means they can get into a state of flow,” he said.

This means players aren’t worried about failure because they’re not thinking about consequences, he explained: they’re just thinking about the action in the moment.

“You want players in this state even when they’re right in front of the goal,” he added. “They shouldn’t be thinking about whether the ball is going to be a goal – they should be so present that their only thought is taking the shot. If they’re not thinking about what happens after that, then what happens after that will take care of itself.”

So what can England’s frustrated, disappointed fans learn from sports psychology?

Dr Sandy Wolfson is one of the most prominent sport and exercise psychologists in the UK. A chartered member of the British Psychological Society, she has a specialist interest in football – and is a passionate Newcastle supporter.

She believes that sports psychology has a lot to teach everyone. “I’m a hopeless fan myself, so I know that we get so highly intertwined that it is very difficult to keep positive when your team isn’t doing well,” she said.

For both players and fans to keep positive in the aftermath of footballing disappointment, she said, they should turn to rituals.

“Players and fans can achieve catharsis and consolation by getting into the habit of analysing the game with other fans,” she said. “They should look for aspects of the game that weren’t so bad when looked at from a neutral perspective. They should look at past games where the team has done well and then focus on the future – look forward to the next game or, if it’s been really bad, the next event.”

Barton is looking forward already. “I suspect the England team will be liberated in their game on Sunday by the fact that it’s all or nothing,” he said. “I have the feeling that they’re going to feel more freedom – and so more happiness and flow. I could be wrong – but I have hope.”

Five top tips for success from sporting psychologists

1. Take your mind away from the consequences of your action and focus on the action. Anxiety, fear, stress are projections of the future: concentrate on the present.

2. Learn how to change your perceived reality. Premier League footballers learn to shut out fans if they feel oppressed by them. This could help people who don’t like public speaking, for example, who can see their audience as more intimidating than they may actually be.

3. Find a ritual to recover from disappointment that creates positivity.

4. Learn from those you admire. Stay close to them and be forgiving of their mistakes and failures.

5. Don’t have top tips, said Caulfield, because by tomorrow someone else will have come up with five other tips and “you’ll be completely confused”. “A good grandparent is better than any tip,” he said. “Turn to grey hair because the chances are they’ve been through a bit. They’re not right or wrong but they’ll ask the right questions and help you sort things out.”