From letters to voicenotes: how are top teams motivating and reassuring athletes?

A rundown of ten sport psychology tactics deployed by sides from across Europe

Motivation. Confidence. Focus. It’s a trio of psychological traits that could be at the heart of any team’s attempt to support their athletes: it just so happens that these were exactly the characteristics that Chelsea homed in on in 2019.

That was the year the London club’s backroom team trialed a ‘psychological coding’ programme, designed to mirror the physical and tactical measurements that now accompany every Premier League match. For ‘kilometres run’ and ‘passes per defensive action’, read ‘confidence actions’, so the theory went.

The project was well-regarded by senior club figures such as Petr Cech, then the Blues’ Technical and Performance Advisor, but proved tougher to sell to another Chelsea legend, Frank Lampard (the team’s manager during the 2019/2020 season).

Whatever Lampard’s reservations, the trial is an interesting example of the way leading sides - across different sports - are experimenting in a host of areas related to sport psychology.

In this issue, I’ll be identifying ten tactics that elite teams are implementing, from the commitment England’s cricket team is displaying to cross-disciplinary collaboration to the programme the Dutch FA has established to support players’ recovery from serious injury.