How to sell sport psychology

Five lessons from talking to psychologists and analysts who've worked with Bayern, Brighton and a host of other top teams

Try telling the tale of sport psychology's changing influence on European football in under 1000 words. The (fairly literal) brief that underpinned my article in last week's Observer, outlining how Bayern Munich and other Champions League teams attempt to evaluate their players’ ‘game personalities’.

Whilst the monitoring of on-pitch behaviour is nothing new, the depth and detail of emerging attempts to analyse everything from hand gestures to facial expressions shows the scale of sport psychology's affect on football.

I was able to give some sense of the profession's influence in the article, but the piece was primarily intended for an audience who might be unfamiliar with the discipline.

So, in this week's edition of the newsletter, I wanted to share some key takeaways that are more specific to practitioners working in roles within or related to the sport psychology field.

The insights are based on interviews with Max Pelka, Bayern Munich's former sport psychologist, Geir Jordet, a psychology professor who has worked with a number of Europe's top teams, and Yaw Amankwah, a former pro-turned pundit, who now works with Jordet.

They talked to me about a pioneering project to analyse the ‘game personalities’ of Bayern's players, using match footage, human observations and AI. Backed by a benchmarking system boasting over 100,000 data points, the initiative allows teams to understand, for example, how a player’s emotional control compares to other players in their position, during a defined game state.

For me, the key to convincing club stakeholders of the concept's value lay in the trio's ability to ‘sell’ sport psychology: they were talking a language that coaches, backroom staff and front office personnel brought into. Here are the five key points I took away from talking to them.