Why aren't there more psychologists working in English football?

Real Madrid and Tottenham are two of the richest clubs in world football. Madrid generated revenue in excess of £700m in 2021. Spurs spent £1bn on a stadium that is arguably the best in Europe. Neither side employs a psychologist dedicated to their men’s first-team.

They are not alone. Based on publicly available information, at least 50% of Premier League clubs employ psychologists to work with their senior squads. If you want to put a positive spin on this figure, it’s a demonstration of an evolving commitment to psychologically supporting players (the figure would have been much lower ten years ago).

Viewed more critically, it means that half the sides in the most lucrative league the game has to offer are either unable or unwilling to state that a psychologist is part of their first-team backroom staff. In stark contrast, a quick Google search is all it takes to show that each top-flight club employs a physiotherapist.

It begs the question: why aren’t more psychologists working in English football? To try and answer the question, I sat down with David Wheeler, a professional footballer who has played in every tier of the domestic game below the Premier League and has quizzed managers on this very subject, and Dr Misia Gervis, former England women’s team psychologist.

If you don’t have time to listen to the above audio recording of the conversation (which, given the complexity of the topic, I’d recommend doing), I’ve written a quick summary of the discussion below.

It’s worth noting that our chat lasted approximately 40 minutes: this is a topic you could easily spend four hours talking about. Whilst I hope the brevity makes the recording more digestible, there are some issues (such as the affordability of psychological support, for example) which we didn’t have time to discuss in detail. There are others (the extent to which psychologists are used within women’s football, the way the profession supports clubs in other countries etc) that we couldn't cover at all, due to the length of the interview.

I have written about some of these points previously, but to summarise, demand for psychological support services should be high. The performance advantages of adoption are clear, if not well-documented. As Wheeler, referencing the benefit of using psychologists, explains: “I think most clubs are missing a bit of a trick here: they're missing an opportunity to gain an edge on opponents on a performance level.”

In addition, the mental health concerns it could help address are stark: 2020 figures revealed a 50% rise in the number of players seeking counselling support from the Professional Footballers' Association (PFA) between 2018 and 2019. Last season, PFA members at clubs in the Premier League, EFL and the Women's Super League were invited to complete a confidential survey on mental health. Some 22% reported experiencing severe anxiety over the previous month.

David Wheeler @djwheeler07

From my own struggles with mental health to speaking to professional mangers for my studies. Why I believe we need more Sport Psychologists in professional football 👇 #MensHealthAwarenessMonth #mentalhealth bbc.co.uk/sport/football…

bbc.co.ukFighting football’s ‘hypermasculine’ silenceDavid Wheeler, a 32-year-old Wycombe midfielder, explains his unique research into what he calls football’s ‘hypermasculinity’.

Some commentators have suggested that suppressed demand could be linked to clubs’ ability to afford psychological support. Whilst you could potentially make a case for this argument at lower league level, a 2018 study estimated the cost of employing an accredited, full time psychologist at first-team level to be between £27,000 and £100,000 a year, depending on experience: this shouldn't be prohibitive for teams in either the Premier League or Championship. 

Unfortunately, Wheeler - who spoke to ten elite managers about the subject during the course of his research - believes that clubs “don’t feel like it’s their responsibility” to provide psychological support of this nature. Indeed, his study recommends mandating teams in English football’s top two leagues to recruit a regulated psychologist. As Wheeler puts it: “Clubs have to have a physiotherapist, so why not a psychologist?

“Ultimately, if a player is not in a mental state to play, not only are they at risk of physical injury, but they're unlikely to perform at the top of their game, so it’s also a performance issue.”

He believes that enforced provision of psychological support would also generate positive publicity for the profession, by allowing more players and coaching staff to see first-hand the value of the service offered by experts such as Gervis.

“You’d get a process of players and managers coming out and saying, ‘Oh yeah, we've got the psychologists here, they've done this, that, and the other’, like we've seen with set piece coaches, which in turn would normalize speaking about mental health,” he says.

The relative lack of media attention afforded to footballers’ use of psychologists - despite the efforts of players such as Jordan Pickford and Tyrone Mings - might also be due to the presence of a cultural ‘stasis’ within the sport, according to Gervis.

“People who are now running clubs have been quite insular in their understanding of what's happening and therefore all the cycles (we’ve seen before) get repeated because people feel comfortable with them,” she explains.

She also called on her contemporaries to ensure that professional psychological support, when permitted within clubs, is a ‘visible’ practice, seen as much on the training ground and in the gym as it is in other parts of a club. However, as Gervis mentions, when psychologists are given licence to work with players, the scope of their remit is sometimes so broad, achieving cut-through is nigh-on impossible.

“What's happening is clubs are employing sports psychologists to work with 150 people,” she says.

“One sports psychologist to work with the whole academy: I mean, how can you do that?”

“It's tough on the psychologist because they know that they're not delivering what they want to deliver all the time and the clubs will go, ‘Well, is this any value? Is this helpful?’”

Gervis also points out that the psychology training coaches receive might not prepare them for “working with somone like me…I think they know how to work with a physio, but they’re not sure what working with a psychologist looks like.” It’s a theme echoed in Wheeler’s research.

“Most of the managers (interviewed as part of the study) didn't have a very deep understanding of what a sports psychologist actually does, how to work with one and also what the difference is between a sports psychologist and ‘mind coach’ or someone else of of that description,” he says.

If this paints a relatively bleak picture for psychologists, it’s perhaps worth remembering the words of current Madrid assistant manager Davide Ancelotti. Despite not working with a ‘psych’ at the Bernabeau, the Italian was effusive in his praise of the profession when I spoke to him in August, explaining that the club’s decision not to employ a psychologist was in part because players were doing so themselves. As he put it: “In the future, I think all footballers will have a psychologist.”