Why should sport psychology 'stay in its lane'?
With top European clubs including psychologists as part of their coaching teams, is it time to rethink the traditional remit of the 'psych'?
Why don’t more coaching teams include psychologists? Beyond the roles Ian Mitchell and Joaquin Valdes (pictured above, alongside former Spain manager Luis Enrique) occupied within the English and Spanish national football teams, how many psychologists can you think of who have been handed similar positions within coaching units?
Bill Beswick (who worked with ex-England boss Steve McClaren) will be another name familiar to UK readers, but the examples are few and far between - and the rarity of such instances is important.
There is a real distinction between being part of a coaching team and working closely with playing and non-playing staff (embedded to an extent far beyond the narrow, unfairly drawn parameters of what some in the sports world still believe to be the domain of a ‘psych’). In short, collaborating with backroom colleagues is very different from being a member of the coaching team.
When I spoke to Sarah Murray, a former English Premier League psychologist, in 2022, she described the role that individuals such as Mitchell and Valdes - now sitting next to Enrique in Paris Saint-Germain’s dugout - would occupy.
“It’s the kind of experienced person that would support the coaches to manage conversations, to work alongside players, to think about their own behaviours and actions, to think about the impact of mental health on performance and all the things that an experienced sports psychologist can be really useful for,” she said.
Murray also highlighted one of the possible drawbacks of this model: namely, an athlete’s perception of a psychologist’s proximity to coaches.
“There are players that I am sure over the years would have seen my fully immersive and integrated approach and I know it would have stopped them coming to ask for help or wanting to work with me because perhaps they thought I was very close with the coaches,” she explained.
It raises the question of whether sport psychology should ‘stay in its lane’. Should practitioners aspire to emulate the likes of Beswick, Mitchell and Valdes? Does the profession have the potential to leave a more strategic imprint on the elite environments it’s part of - or does it risk diluting its value by stretching itself too thinly? How are psychologists currently seeking to widen the scope of their remit?
In this issue, I’ll be attempting to answer those questions, investigating the work going on across European football and looking at the implications for different sports.
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