Copyright

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

FIRST EDITION

Text © Neville Southall 2020

Poems © Anne-Marie Silbiger 2020

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Jacket photograph © Allstar Picture Library Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo

Hand lettering © Charlotte Akers

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Neville Southall asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008403737

Ebook Edition © September 2020 ISBN: 9780008403751

Version: 2020-07-27

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Dedication

This book is dedicated to anyone who suffers, whatever their age, gender, sexuality, race or situation. Please know that you are not alone.

Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Note to Readers

5  Dedication

6  Contents

7  INTRODUCTION: Life and football

8  1 CONFIDENCE

9  2 PRESSURE

10  3 FEAR

11  4 ABUSE

12  5 FAILURE

13  6 IMPROVEMENT

14  7 MOTIVATION

15  8 RACISM

16  9 HOMOPHOBIA

17  10 ADDICTION

18  11 ALCOHOL

19  12 SOCIAL MEDIA

20  13 HELPING OTHERS

21  14 INEQUALITY

22  15 LGBTQ+ ISSUES AND SEXUALITY

23  16 MENTAL HEALTH

24  17 GETTING OLD

25  EPILOGUE: Be better

26  Acknowledgements

27  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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Introduction
Life and football

There are four elements of my personality that I hold most dear. The first three are trust, loyalty and honesty, and I don’t think you can have the first two without the third. If someone has something brutal to say but I trust them implicitly and believe that they’re loyal to me, I’d much rather that they say it to me straight than keep it hidden.

The fourth element is that I’ve always believed it important to have an open mind, to realise that you don’t know everything. Because I’ve discovered, and am still discovering, that I know absolutely fuck-all. And so everything I do now involves learning as much as I can about people and about their lives.

I find discovering – and being allowed by them to discover – things about people to be incredibly interesting, and it disheartens me that not everyone feels the same way. People should be open-minded. If they don’t know about something, then they should make it their job to find out rather than either closing themselves off to it or, worse, spouting a view about something that they’re not educated on. I’ve been burnt a few times where I’ve had opinions on subjects that I didn’t know enough about, so the only answer was to educate myself. Ironically, education then reminds us how much we don’t know.

I had the values of my parents hardwired into me. I think that’s how good parenting works, and goodness knows I’m not perfect. My mum and dad were great parents to me, because they lived by good values. Having said that, my dad came home from the war, where he’d been shot at, and he never spoke about it. He had been taught that the best way to process his feelings, his fears and his experiences was to bury them. That is what society preached.

I believe that the lack of communication hampered his generation badly, although people might not have appreciated this at the time. I don’t remember anyone ever asking my dad a single question about what he’d been through. I certainly didn’t. Nobody ever sat him down and asked if he was OK. We just assumed that if he wanted to talk about it, then he’d come to us. But he signed up to the army as soon as he could, with the idea that war would be a bit of fun and a chance to enjoy comradeship with others like him. And it became something far more serious than they had ever been led to believe or were prepared for.

The mentality of soldiers at war has always interested me. I read a book the other month about people who killed in war, what their feelings were afterwards and how they managed – or didn’t manage – to process them. There was a Japanese guy who was talking about being indoctrinated to hate the Chinese. His first bayonet practice was stabbing Chinese people. It became nothing. The army went into villages, raped the women, killed everybody. One day they were walking along a cliff and saw a woman carrying a baby. They were ordered to capture them. The woman wouldn’t stop crying, so one of the soldiers threw the baby over the cliff and the woman jumped after it. Having seen all of that horror, and been an active part of it, how could you ever cope?

When my dad was sat there waiting to fight, what was that like for him? How could he cope with being so helpless, when the only question of the day was whether he would live or die? When he had no choice but to carry on and continue to be strong – or be ostracised as a traitor? What goes through your mind when you’re eating your breakfast each morning? How do you walk in a line towards such unspeakable danger? These are human beings.

My dad was lucky – he got out. But the mentality of these people is extraordinary. They rarely processed it until it was too late, and they were expected to come home and fit in with normal daily life. The provisions were not there for them to do anything else, and we owe it to them not to make the same mistake with the current generation of young people who experience unspeakable things.

I like to think of myself as an experiment. How do you find out what works for you, and what makes you happier and a better person? I’ve learnt that the best way is to work on new strategies to solve problems and find out which are successful. It’s all a process of trying, failing and succeeding, of living and learning. That applied to my football career, and what I do now. They might be very different careers – and in some ways I’ve lived two lives – but the principles are the same.

With mental health issues, I have to think the same way. Approach it as a scientist would: if we start trying something and it doesn’t work, we’ll move on to something else and continue the cycle. If one of the things we try works, then great – we know that works. But let’s try something else too and see if we can make things even better, knowing we have an alternative solution if not.

As a footballer, you’re basically taught not to think about much at all off the pitch, and that cannot be healthy. What did I have to think about? I went into training, I did something that I really enjoyed but which came naturally to me. Someone told me what I was doing the next day and someone told me what I was doing on Saturday. The only time when I had to think was on the drive home. And when I got home, I didn’t want to do much thinking because I wanted to be rested and ready for the next match. Football challenges you in areas such as confidence, fear, pressure and motivation, but it all becomes part of one mass, one process.

You live your life around games. If you have a day off, fine. If you don’t have a day off, fine. But it doesn’t really change anything. You go to the airport, and someone from the club has your passport because they believe that you’re too stupid to keep it yourself and hand it to the customs officer without losing it. They tell you where to sit and how long to sit for.

I didn’t like lots of structure in my life, and I still don’t. A lot of footballers don’t, which might sound surprising. If a manager came into the dressing room and started giving me too many instructions just before kick-off, I thought, ‘Look, I’m going to stop goals going in. You really don’t need to give me lots of shit to do, because I’ll always just do the best I can.’ By the end I didn’t even really like team meetings.

I was always interested in the mentality of the manager in the ten minutes they have with the team directly before kick-off. They have to give the same message, but how do they do it in different ways to keep it fresh? That’s why Alex Ferguson was so brilliant, because he used different voices and different gears and different coaches. He kept changing to guarantee an impact. So if he took his squad to the same place three or four times, the message would be the same but delivered in a slightly different way. It all comes down to communication.

You get to the ground and there are people there that matter to you, but the thing that matters most is the match. I never thought about the fans, the public or anything – I just did whatever I needed to do to be the best that I could be. If I thought it was best that I went to the match early, I went early. If I thought it best that I went a little later, I went a little later. That’s a very selfish attitude, but you’re taught to be selfish. You have total tunnel vision. And the indirect result of that is that when anyone tells you to do something out of the ordinary, some cannot cope – and they kick up a fuss.

I know what I don’t know; that has always been one of my greatest strengths. I don’t have all the answers, or even half of them. I know what I know, and know how to use that to help myself and others, but I also know where my gaps are, in knowledge and in expertise. If you know what you don’t know, it’s far easier to be an open person than if you think you know everything. It’s easier said than done, and it takes work, but it’s worth it.

That’s why Twitter has been brilliant for me. Because if I don’t know something, and feel like I owe it to others to gain a greater understanding of it, I can quickly find someone who knows more and ask them. And at the start of each chapter of this book is a short tip or piece of advice from some of the people who I have relied upon in my education. When I reached out, they responded. Each of them does exceptional work in campaigning or raising awareness. At the end of each chapter is a short poem by the brilliant Anne-Marie Silbiger, who gave up her time for free to compose each one from scratch for the book. These are just some of the people I have met through Twitter.

I think the principle of reaching out to educate yourself applies to football too. There are too many people doing jobs in which they have to pretend to be experts on subjects that they don’t know enough about, and that leads to people leading others without having the best tools to help them succeed. At times in this book I’ll talk about football and at times I’ll talk about ‘normal’ life, but there’s a crossover at every point. What applies to football and to footballers invariably applies to life.

The main reason that I wanted to write this book is because people don’t just want to listen to someone talking shite. They want solutions, or potential solutions. They know what the problem is, and they’re desperate for someone to help them deal with it. But I also wanted to get across that I’m not just an ex-footballer. In fact I’m not a footballer at all anymore. I work in a special school, a school where it takes so much time and effort to get anything for the kids. I’m also a human being, and the public too quickly forgets that about our sportspeople and celebrities. We suffer the same high and lows, and are forced to deal with both in a very public arena.

People want some strategies. I believe – or hope – that I have some ideas on a number of subjects and that I can offer solutions. I’m not perfect, and I don’t have all the answers, but I want to start a conversation about how we approach certain topics and certain communities within society. We have let the most vulnerable communities in our society down for too long, and in truth this means that it isn’t a society at all.

In writing this book, I wanted to give myself a place where I can hopefully prove that a former footballer like me doesn’t just have to be defined by the job they had in the past, but also by the way in which they approached life after it. If this book can be helpful in offering an insight into that, brilliant. And if I can use the platform that football gave me to get through to people on a number of issues that I consider to be important – more important than football – then I’m very lucky.

I also wanted to create something that told people who are struggling that there are others who are thinking of them, so they know that they’re not alone; after all, it’s far too easy to ignore people and live in our own bubble. In putting pen to paper in this way, I hope to raise awareness and tell those who don’t think of others enough that they should. Because that’s the only way that our country will become more tolerant. Only by being kinder on an individual basis can we help to create a society that relies upon community and consideration for others.

This extraordinary year in our lives, during which we were forced to live in lockdown conditions and in fear of a deadly virus, has only increased that need to look after our own well-being and to increase our empathy and sympathy for those around us. I honestly believe that out of such misery something beautiful can be built, a society in which those who are struggling are not deliberately ignored or stigmatised. But it will take fight and unity, both on a personal and a community level.

So this is me. This book is as close to me as you can get. I played football for twenty-odd years, but that isn’t me now. I’ve done that. I’ve been asked 3,000 times what my favourite game was and I’ve answered that question 3,000 times. Football has certainly helped me in the second part of my life, and for that I will always be grateful. But there are other things that I’m interested in. I want to help people, and I want everyone else to help other people too.

1
Confidence

‘We fear failure and criticism, but have faith in yourself and show yourself compassion and still do what you want to do.’

Saiqa Naz, cognitive behavioural therapist (#AskSaiqa)

Every footballer goes through periods when they’re low on confidence, but I don’t think we view them in such psychological terms at the time. For me, I was just either going through good periods on the pitch or bad periods, and I tried to keep an eye on my outlook accordingly. Fortunately, I had more good times than bad.

If I was doing well, I tried not to think about my mood at all because I never needed to – football ruled all. But even if I was going through a patch of poor form, I never sat down and thought, ‘Right, I’m low on confidence now and that needs to change,’ because it was only ever correlated with my performances. Make sure they were good, or improve them if I needed to, and the confidence would look after itself. That was one benefit of being so obsessed with my career: football led everything else.

When you’re doing well on the pitch, nothing else matters. The best way I can describe it is that it feels like you’re flying slightly above the ground, with the usual roadblocks of life unable to affect you. The highs that success gave me meant that I was happy every day, as they made everything else fall into place. During those times, even losing a match didn’t matter. I just saw it as a blip in a continuous upward trend.

When you’re a young player or young person, you’re desperate to make an impression, so you’re happy to be relied upon and take responsibility. You want to impress your friends, impress the people at work, impress your manager. As a goalkeeper, that’s particularly true because you know that pulling off great saves is the best way to get praise. Because most journalists and pundits have never been goalkeepers, they’re impressed by the spectacular. So when I was starting out at Everton in 1981, I was desperate to be busy.

As you get older and wiser, you realise that it’s better to be quiet as a goalkeeper. From then on, I honestly wouldn’t mind if I never even had a single save to make. I didn’t want to do anything – no dives, no catches, no chivvying of my teammates. If the defence could stop me having to get involved in the game, I was happy. It meant the team were performing perfectly. Of course, people would then say that I’d had an easy match, but it merely proved that our preparation had been perfect: I’d organised the defence well and they’d protected me.

That can be a tricky thing to appreciate, psychologically, because people are hardwired to be busy. It’s not in our nature to do nothing, and being busy builds confidence. As a goalkeeper, you’re like an emergency doctor on call, ready to help if something happens – and being paid for doing so – but actually better off not being needed at all.

When I first broke into the Everton team in 1981, I didn’t do that well. I don’t think it was related to confidence; I was just making the wrong decisions. I think if you’re truly low on confidence then it ends up with you not making any decisions at all, rather than making the wrong decisions. I was making decisions, but too often choosing badly. Working out which are the right decisions to make and which aren’t becomes a semi-automatic learning process, because experience shapes your behaviour and decision-making. Practice does make perfect, and always has.

What drove me on in that difficult initial period was my determination that I didn’t want my career to be defined negatively. I knew that if my poor decision-making on the pitch carried on for too much longer that I’d lose my best chance to establish myself in the First Division (as the Premier League was known at the time). So I needed to change it. I always wanted to be the best, so I redoubled my efforts. Now you might still think, ‘Oh fuck, not another mistake’ when they happen, but the determination to reach the end goal carries you through.

Being confident doesn’t mean that you won’t make mistakes, because everyone does in every job. I’m a firm believer that only by going through a shit time can you be prepared for the next time it comes around. It helps to give you a sense of perspective. Confidence is having the faith in yourself that you’ll learn from your mistakes, not that you won’t make any.

Some players find that harder than others, of course. Some beat themselves up for mistakes and in doing so make things harder for themselves the next time they find themselves in a similar situation. I also think that a lack of confidence can often lead to people looking for others to help them out, including their teammates on the pitch. How often do we see a player going quiet in a match when it’s not going their way? But the confident people will demand the ball, continue to take shots, try to create chances or come and claim crosses. Their confidence shouts louder than their mistakes.

Working through things yourself, however hard, is one of the keys to establishing confidence. If you prove to yourself that you can solve a problem, move on from it and put it behind you, it stands to reason that the next time you suffer a setback it will scare you less because you already have proof that you can respond to it positively.

When I was going through a tough time on the pitch and I wanted to try something that I thought might help me improve, I’d go straight to the manager or the goalkeeping coach, make the suggestion and explain why I thought it might work. Almost every time, they’d allow me to do it. And why wouldn’t they? Nobody knew my game better than me.

Maybe it’s easier for a goalkeeper, because the chances are that the manager isn’t a goalkeeping expert. But some gaffers can have set ideas about what a goalkeeper should be, based on who they have managed during their career, and that can put barriers up. Luckily there was almost always a circle of trust at Everton, where the coaches had faith in me getting it right and I trusted them enough that I would take their advice on board.

But my independence did occasionally get me into trouble. On the opening day of the 1990/91 season we were playing Leeds United at Goodison, and the team produced an awful performance. We were 2–0 down at half-time, and after going into the dressing room I realised that I needed to clear my head, away from the rest of the lads. I went and sat against one of the goalposts and just tried to get my head together to perform in the second half.

I’d actually done exactly the same thing a year earlier, during an away game at Wimbledon, but this time it became a story. I suppose the fact that it was at Goodison made it notorious, but the press picked up on it and turned it into a massive issue. They said that I had gone back out on the pitch in protest at Colin Harvey’s management. That was total bollocks, because it was just about clearing my head and restoring my confidence, but I can now see that it was badly timed.

Colin rang me that evening after the match, and he was furious about my actions. I explained the situation and my reasoning, which seemed to appease him, but when I saw him the next day he told me that the club was fining me two weeks’ wages and suspending me from all club activity.

Given that I thought I’d been mistreated, having explained myself fully, I asked my agent to ask Colin if I could go on holiday if he didn’t want me around the club. I had no intention of doing anything of the sort – I hated holidays and wanted to train more than anything else in the world – but it did the trick. Colin was soon on the phone to tell me to come into training on the Monday, and I started the next game against Coventry City. I never did it again.

If confidence was a relatively simple thing for me to manage, it clearly isn’t the same for everyone. When I was coaching the goalkeepers at Bradford City in 2000, we did a survey of the players and asked them to describe how they felt at various times during the course of the matchday: on the way to the game, in the dressing room just before they went on and when they kicked off. Their answers were very different. Some players built themselves up over time, feeling nervous in the morning but pumped and ready by kick-off. Others woke up feeling great, but that ebbed away as kick-off approached. Some needed an early positive piece of action in the game before they felt ready. Others didn’t.

All this probably seems obvious if you actually think about it, but it proved that every player was different. They did whatever they had to do to try to feel as comfortable as possible so that they performed at their best, and no one single approach would have worked for all of them. As coaches we had to understand this, allowing the players a degree of independence to enable them all to be as relaxed and confident as possible. If one goalkeeper needed an early touch of the ball, the defenders might give him a few backpasses to get him into the game. If another suffered from their confidence ebbing away just before the game, one of the coaches might have a one-to-one with them at 2.30pm and offer them encouragement.

Superstitions are often derided or mocked because they seem silly to those who don’t require them. Putting your shin pads on a certain way or the team coming out onto the pitch in a certain order can’t affect the result of the match, these people will say, so you’re just relying on meaningless nonsense. But things like this are about the potential impact they have; they’re done to keep a player within a comfort zone and the right frame of mind to attack the challenge to come. Psychologically, that helps to build confidence and so they become valuable. As long as the superstitions don’t dominate your match preparation, why wouldn’t you do it?

Personally, I didn’t really have any superstitions because for me it was all about physical and mental preparation, but I’d never criticise a player that did. You do whatever it is you need to do to feel good when the match begins. Of course, you can’t solely rely on a superstition as some magical good-luck charm that will sort everything out; but if it helps give you an extra few per cent, then go for it.

There’s also no magic formula for building up confidence. It’s about people, and understanding how they tick. That example of managing confidence on a matchday at Bradford City is just one way in which it makes a difference. If you can put your jigsaw together as a team, understand the nuances of the personalities of the players in that team and allow them to express themselves, you’ve got a good chance. If you’re trying to force players into a system and just expecting them to gel with each other organically, with no micromanagement, you’re onto a loser.

But although this indicates that coaches play a vital role in building – and maintaining – confidence, the best players are the ones who look for solutions on the pitch to problems that present themselves. They obviously also need the talent to execute the solution, but thinking quickly is half the battle. Let’s say I’m a full-back who has been told to switch the play to the opposite flank when I get to the halfway line or pass it into central midfield. That’s fine, but if I also have the awareness to spot that the midfield is cramped and that there’s a space down the right, I’ll exploit that and surge down the wing even if this is not normally my role. The key lies in creating players who have the freedom of expression to solve those micro situations, and that comes from living and learning.

I remember the golfer Lee Trevino; he’d do shots that nobody else could do. It was all about vision, freedom of expression and confidence. He just saw things in a way that others couldn’t and so he practised them, and was therefore able to be confident even when attempting the unusual or risky. Lionel Messi is the best player in the world not just because of his talent but because of his brain. He’s able to see a problem or an opportunity and solve or exploit it better – and more quickly – than anyone else.

Every player at the top level has talent, but it isn’t just about natural talent. It’s about managing the person to get the most out of that talent, to get them feeling confident and allowing them freedom of expression, then fitting together players with slightly different levels of talent that work best together to create the best team.

I really think that it’s getting harder and harder for coaches to do that successfully, because it requires management of the personalities of the players in the team. Managers have far less power over the players than they used to. If a player gets fined a week’s wages for failing to listen to instructions, does it really make as much of a difference when the salaries are so high and their agent will be able to kick up a fuss and cause problems for the club anyway?

So the only way you can do it in the modern age is by creating a philosophy – a team spirit and style of play – that is so attractive to players that you persuade everyone to buy into it, thus creating something close to a universal confidence among the squad. That’s exactly what Howard Kendall did at Everton and what Liverpool have done under Jürgen Klopp. Everyone leaves their ego at the door and is given the freedom to express themselves. They all know that they have the manager’s trust, and this automatically makes them feel confident.

It’s also vital to remember that confidence isn’t just affected by what happens on the pitch, even though that was almost always the case for me. Don’t fall into the trap as a manager of preparing for matchday and forgetting about the players’ lives outside the game. If someone’s kid is ill, or they’re having problems at home, it will obviously affect them on the pitch. It’s the same in every line of work.

Let’s say a player has a new baby that has been quite poorly. The player isn’t getting much sleep as a result and is putting far more work in at home than they normally would. This means that they’re more tired, and so training reduces their energy levels more than it usually would. Come matchday, they have less residual energy and so they make mistakes that they normally wouldn’t make. That’s going to kill the confidence of a player. It also puts a greater strain on their home life, because the player has evidence that it has affected his work.

When I was playing, this sort of situation could be very hard for players. You were hardwired to simply plough on through any domestic issues and keep them to yourself. But if off-pitch issues were affecting your performances, you’d quickly be dropped. At the time, an appearance bonus of £200 might make a huge difference to your lifestyle, which would only exacerbate the confidence issue. Perhaps a potential suitor might be put off signing you because of a period of inconsistent form. It’s easy to see how whole careers can be shaped by the minutiae of daily life.

But in some ways, I think players in my day at the top level were a little more resilient. In the 1980s, there was much more variety on matchday. We had to adapt to different pitches, different balls and completely different conditions. Some grounds might be open at the corners, so the wind would whip through. There were plastic pitches, which changed how the ball bounced and how you dived. We might play on what were basically mud baths during the winter. Clubs would choose their own match balls, which moved differently through the air. The atmosphere at some grounds was really intense, at others less so.

All this has largely been lost. Plenty of stadiums look identical to one another, and every match ball is standardised. The pitches are all kept in incredible condition, because that’s what managers and players like; you never get a mud bath these days. And the atmospheres around the country are virtually the same. There’s very few places that would really intimidate a player now.

You hear managers moaning now if they play away in Europe or in the domestic cup competitions and the pitch is bobbly or sandy or muddy, because they’ve grown accustomed to everything being just so. But that variety was useful for players. It taught us to be adaptable, to cope in unexpected and imperfect scenarios.

It also made us resilient. The pitches we played on throughout the winter would sap our energy. The boots we wore would be heavy, caked in mud. But our bodies learnt to cope – they had to. In 1984/85 I played seventy matches for Everton and Wales in ten different countries. In the absence of the physiotherapists, nutritionists and expert medics that clubs use today, that was a long season.

Players now are gym-fit, but I’m not sure that their bodies are as resilient. Of course the pace of the football is more intense, but I think it was more physical when I played and the facilities that players were able to lean on were scarcer. I hear about many more players now complaining of tiredness, but when I played fatigue just wasn’t a thing. Nobody ever asked if you were tired. You just played and played, for better or worse.

One truly positive change in football between then and now is the increased use of sports psychologists and the difference they can make to a player’s confidence. The idea of psychological help didn’t really exist when I was playing, and many people would have scoffed at it. Instead we were subject to a pretty simple process: play well and you could stay in the team and at the club; play badly and you’d be binned. The rest was just noise to be ignored.

In fact, you weren’t ever really expected to talk about anything at all. If you were injured, you didn’t show that you were hurt and just got on with it. If you were going through something, you concentrated on the football and vowed not to let it show. That’s just how it was.

When I started doing the work I do now, it became clear to me very quickly that there were players who could have benefited hugely from getting help. That wasn’t necessarily the senior players, because I probably still don’t know what some of them were going through, but we had quite a few apprentices who didn’t make the grade but might have with a little more guidance and support.

I remember one trainee who was put on a diet because he needed to lose a few pounds. He’d come in every morning and have his breakfast at the training ground, and then have his lunch after training and go home. The club spoke to his family, and it turned out that they were making him sandwiches for the train journey to training in the morning, and after a big tea he’d eat two Mars bars. So he did need to shift some weight.

Two weeks later, the guy was basically only eating two apples a day to try to lose it, and he couldn’t last on the pitch. He had no energy whatsoever. He eventually left the club because he never rediscovered his form. Nobody ever sat down with him and asked why he was eating badly, or if he comfort ate to cope with things or had ever addressed the fact that his solution was so extreme. With a little help, he might have been able to find a balanced solution that also addressed the root cause. But he just lurched from one extreme to the other.

We had another apprentice, and when he came in he looked really good. But on a pre-season training run he got beaten by Jimmy Gabriel, who was the assistant manager and must have been in his mid-fifties by then. We asked how he’d managed to lose to Jimmy and his answer was that he could easily have beaten him but that he just wasn’t that bothered, so he let Jimmy win.

He was a goalkeeper, and one day in training he said that he’d been playing against Manchester United’s youth team on the Saturday and had saved a shot. Saving the shot made him laugh so much that he forgot to get up and save the rebound, and the United striker scored.

I remember telling him that he had to go away over the summer and maintain his fitness and work on improving by himself, and I gave him loads of drills to practise. He came back for pre-season training and he could barely do a press-up. He was so weak physically that it was obvious that he hadn’t done a minute of exercise over the entire break.

Now those two were good kids, and good players too. They could have made it, but they were never going to because both needed support from within the club and within the game to give them that edge. One needed support to talk through his eating and extreme diet, and the other needed to discuss why he didn’t have the will to improve or better himself. Perhaps a sports psychologist wouldn’t have solved the issue, but the pair of them didn’t even get that chance. There was nobody for either of them to turn to; they had to work it all out themselves.

Every player goes through things, because they’re human beings and that’s the reality of being human. It’s sometimes extremely hard to work through problems without any outside help, and if you do have to work through them on your own, it takes time. But in that apprentice environment, you got very little time because there was always someone ready to take your place and you were being judged all the while. Without the support network, those who had problems were starting from behind the line – and they ended up getting lost.

Some stuff you can work out yourself, but sometimes you just need someone to talk to. I don’t even think that every time it requires a trained psychologist; a pair of ears will do just fine. Someone to listen, who won’t judge you, who won’t say too much to you and won’t share what you’ve told them in confidence, but just hears what you’ve got to say. Sometimes when you talk through something or write it down, you identify the issues and can solve the problem. But nobody did that with those apprentices – or with us as players. I’m lucky that I was able to process things pretty well myself, but it would still have been good to have someone that did that. Someone independent who just listened to you.

It all comes down to fate. Those apprentices could have met people along the way, outside the club, who gave them that time and space to work through things, who could have helped them and set them on a different path. In some respects, the lack of such people defined their lives.

I think that’s where I can help people. I don’t claim to be a qualified counsellor, but I am prepared to listen to people and give them time. I’m prepared to hear what they have to say, and I try to come up with potential solutions. Maybe the lack of that support when I played football has made me better at that.

The most important aspect of confidence is its infectious nature. You can tell immediately when a club is in great form and the mood is high by looking at the training-ground car park in the morning. It will be packed half an hour before players are due in, because everyone wants to impress and become an integral part of something successful. When things are going badly, however, while some players will still stay longer at the end of training, others will want to leave immediately. Although they know they have to be there, they might want to escape if there’s a negative atmosphere around the club.

The notion of self-fulfilling confidence can be really useful. If you have the total respect of a squad that has bought into your philosophy, you might want to allow them to have a few days off – tell them to go away and do some light fitness work by themselves, but mainly just have a few days in the sun and relax. They won’t do anything foolish to undermine morale and will come back refreshed, having spent some time with their families and feeling buoyed by the fact that the manager clearly trusts them.

I don’t think we see enough of that micromanagement in other industries. It’s perhaps because people just don’t have the time or the budgets to commit the resources to it, but its absence creates a workplace culture in which people can become incredibly dispirited. You have people who work their arses off in their jobs, and occasionally it would be clever if the people above them could recognise that and make a gesture.

Little things make a huge difference. One day, if a manager approached someone and said, ‘Look, you’ve had a banging headache all day, just go home half an hour early,’ how much would that motivate someone? You’d get far more than your thirty minutes back from them because they’d feel energised by it. It sends them the message that they aren’t just a drone working without recognition.

Say somebody has had a crap time at home for one reason or another. Find out what their favourite flowers are, or what kind of chocolate bar or sandwich they like, and bring them something in. You can do so much for that person’s wellbeing with a single gesture. They’ll feel valued and cared for, and will repay you in the same way.

People often don’t do this kind of thing, because they feel – not unreasonably – that they’re too busy to think about it. But every kid that comes into our school is given an individual learning package, and with that we can tailor their education to their needs. Yet we don’t seem to ever do that in later life. It all just gets lost in the noise.

It’s odd, because not doing it is also so counter-productive. If you feel that people above you care about you, you’ll be predisposed to give them more and be confident about yourself. You’re sure that others have your back. You’ll also become more likely to express yourself because you believe that they know you well enough to realise that any mistake wasn’t intentional, and you’ll feel better about being able to rectify it anyway. It’s so much easier to be confident in yourself if you have faith that others are confident in you.

I’m a firm believer that you have to learn to take the rough with the smooth. That doesn’t just apply to football or other sports but to all areas of life. People who can appreciate the good times but not get carried away by success are more likely to be happy. And people who can cling on to the memories and the lessons of those good times and use them to help them through a rough patch are far more likely to be able to come through the other side better for the experience.

You just have to treat both extremes as similarly as possible and stay on an even keel. Allow yourself to get carried away when things are going well and you risk taking your eye off the ball. Allow yourself to become too dispirited when things aren’t going so well and you harm your own chances of them improving quickly. How you behave in one extreme affects your behaviour in the other extreme.

I suppose my reaction to winning trophies was considered a little odd, but it all played into that principle. Most players – at Everton and other clubs – celebrated raucously, and I totally understood why they did so. For them, winning a trophy was a concrete recognition of their hard work and what they’d achieved. It was why all the long hours were worth it.

But for me it was all a bit awkward. I was never happy receiving adoration or being the centre of attention. After we won the FA Cup Final in 1984, the first trophy of my senior career, I was overcome by a wave of embarrassment. I wanted to get my medal but didn’t enjoy going up to the Royal Box, and I frankly found the lap of honour a bit much, even though I knew the supporters expected it.

I went to the post-match celebration at the Royal Lancaster Hotel. It wasn’t my thing at all, and I rarely went to those events after we won trophies. But my parents had come down for the final and they really wanted to go, so of course I took them along. I would have been happier going back to the hotel and watching TV on the bed with a nice cup of tea. That was much more my thing.

I felt exactly the same in 1995, when we beat Manchester United in the final. I’d played really well in the match to stop United scoring, and in doing so I became the most decorated player in Everton’s history. All of the players headed off to the party in the evening, but this time I felt no obligation to go. My then wife Eryl and daughter Samantha had come down for the game, but they’d gone back home after the match and I had no interest in hanging around longer than I needed to. I drove home, got in at 10.30pm and went to bed. On the way home, I kept seeing cars full of Everton supporters driving back to Liverpool with smiles on their faces after winning the cup. That was all the recognition I ever needed, knowing that I had helped make every single one of them happy that day.

I also saw a car that had broken down by the side of the road, and the people standing by it had Manchester United shirts on. I stopped to pick them up and took them to a garage nearby. I’m sure the last thing that they expected was for Everton’s goalkeeper to help them out on the evening of the final. It might have been different if we’d lost the game!

That wasn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy winning finals; of course I did. But the adoration I received for just doing my job always made me feel very awkward. If you go to work in any other field of employment and do the job to the best of your ability, nobody jumps around and celebrates and tells you that you’re brilliant. We’d only done what we were supposed to do and knew we were capable of doing: winning.

My reaction was exactly the same when I won individual honours. It seemed odd for an individual player to be heralded in a team sport, when nothing would have been possible without the help of my teammates. I felt pretty uneasy to be given so many plaudits when the people around me had done so much of the work.

In a purely footballing context, confidence can be drained in a huge variety of ways but it will always be expressed on the pitch, because that’s the main stage. So talk to players individually, sit down with them and get them to open up. Ask them if everything is all right at home, and if they’re sleeping properly. There’s no excuse anymore, with the rise in awareness of mental health issues and the use of sports psychologists. But I don’t think managers always do it. Some are far too hands-off, and it sends the wrong message.

That’s why you have to admire what Klopp has done – and what Kendall did before him. Everyone sees the great football that Klopp’s team plays, and the shots of him hugging and smiling with the players, but he also prides himself on knowing each one of them inside out. They know that they can come to him with any problems, and he knows that he can give them constructive criticism without denting their confidence. It’s a two-way street. So they’re motivated to look after themselves off the pitch, work hard in training and prepare properly for matches. That’s all down to maintaining their confidence.

Footballers express themselves more when they’re confident, because human beings express themselves more when they’re confident. And losing confidence means a lack of ability to be yourself, or a lack of faith in being yourself. That can be incredibly hard to deal with mentally.

Imagine a cross-dresser, a man whose family doesn’t know about his cross-dressing. Let’s say they all go out for a family lunch, and he’s aware that his family might want to come back to his house afterwards. Imagine being worried about them finding female clothes and therefore needing to hide them. How would that lunch feel for this person, being constantly fearful about his relatives discovering something that he wasn’t yet ready to share with them? Could he eat his food and enjoy the meal as normal, or would he have something in the back of his mind, nagging away? Now extend that to every day of his life.

It’s exactly the same principle for a footballer. If you have any baggage or any doubts in your mind, it’s more than likely that they’ll affect you more on the pitch than elsewhere. Allow the situation to continue unaddressed, and careers and lives can be destroyed. Forget that a footballer is a human being, even for one minute, and you’re leaving them open to mental health issues.

Confidence

by Anne-Marie Silbiger

In all of us lies the urge

to be confident

with our friends

lovers and strangers

2
Pressure

‘Learn to push boundaries if it breaks down walls, but when others dictate your actions it’s time to take ten steps back.’

Asha Iqbal, mental health activist and honour-based violence survivor (@_socialdrone)

What really is pressure? Is it a self-made construct, forged in your own mind? Is it entirely created by external factors? Or is it, as seems most likely, a bit of both?

Pressure will always exist for a player – the key lies in managing it. You can control the self-made pressure, and football clubs, managers and supporters can control the external pressures. Only by getting all of these groups pushing in the same direction can you effectively reduce it until it no longer affects performance. Contented players feel far less pressure than those who feel the weight of expectation pushing down on them. It’s that simple.

Before an important, high-profile match it’s inevitable that you become aware that you and the rest of the team are carrying people’s expectations; you can’t escape that. But on a normal day you go to the ground to not let yourself down, then not let your family down, then not let the club down … and only then not let the fans down. That’s the natural order for most players, I think. And knowing that natural order allows you to reduce the pressure.

I used to say to myself, ‘Well, what else do you want to do?’ And the answer was always, ‘Nothing.’ I wanted to play football, I knew I could be successful at it, and I used that as a means of reducing the pressure on myself. On my debut for Bury, I got booed by my own supporters. We were playing against Wigan Athletic, and when I ran onto the pitch for the warm-up they shouted, ‘Fuck off, you’re fucking shit.’ I remembered that incident for a long time. Most people there trusted me, but there was a tiny minority who clearly didn’t like change and who already had their favourite goalkeeper. They really didn’t like the fact that I’d replaced John Forrest, the previous No. 1.

I can understand that – they didn’t know me and I was a nobody. That might cause some young goalkeepers to freeze. But honestly, I never let that stuff create any extra pressure on me. I’d come to Bury to see if I could make it as a professional footballer, and everything that happened from that point onwards was me proving to myself and others that I could do it.

Next I went to Everton, and the pressure could have increased at a bigger club in the First Division. But I reasoned that the worst that could happen was that it didn’t work out and I went back to Bury or similar, and the best that could happen was that I continued to prove that I could do it. And I knew which I wanted.

Some games are bigger than others, but I just made them part of the process too, because I wanted to play in those matches. If you sat down and overanalysed it, then that pressure might get to you; so you had to avoid that. You simply had to walk over the white line and play the match.

I understand the notion of big-game pressure and how it affects certain people. But for me, the bigger the game, the better it was. When you get to a certain level and play against lower teams, you’ve got to be ruthless and show that you’re better than them. But when you play against elite opponents, you just want to find out if you’re better than them. And when you play against them and you do prove that you are, you just want to do it again and again.

There’s also a need to compare your own situation with real-world pressures. I know that there are different types of pressure in the modern game with the money involved, that the players are expected to perform consistently and everything is televised. But real pressure is having no food in the house and the bailiffs knocking on the door. That has to put footballing pressure into some context.

Did I want to walk over that white line? Yes. Why did I want to walk over it? Because I enjoyed doing it and I knew that everyone in the stadium would cut their arm off to be in my position. That wasn’t pressure, it was an honour. Did I have my health and little in my life to worry about? Yes. So I was fortunate. At that point, you realise that going out and having fun was the key. As long as I prepared to the best of my ability, there was nothing else I could do. That’s a reason to remove pressure, not add it.

One of the best lessons I was ever taught about pressure was to laugh in the face of it. At Bury, the manager Jim Iley hired former Manchester United manager Wilf McGuinness as a coach, and he was absolutely brilliant with us. He was an excellent hands-on coach, but the best thing about Wilf was the way he could build your confidence with just a few words.

‘When you get into the team, centre-forwards are going to try and smash you,’ Wilf said to me. ‘There’s no reason for that, other than it’s what they do to try and intimidate you. If you just get up and laugh, they won’t know what’s going through your head. Just get up and don’t react. Just laugh at them.’

For goalkeepers, some situations can be intimidating, so you just have to rise above them. I remember playing Wimbledon in the FA Cup in 1993, and John Fashanu told me, ‘The next time you challenge me it will be your last.’ But again I just laughed it off. It was all part of his strategy to gain an advantage, and laughing at it was my strategy to do the same.

How much pressure you feel can also depend on your manager. Howard Kendall was the best manager I had at relieving it. When he was under serious heat at Everton during 1983/84, and close to the sack, he was brilliant at reducing the pressure on us. The training and team spirit were still good, but Liverpool were flying in the league and we were struggling to score goals, particularly at Goodison. Between the beginning of the season and the turn of the year, we’d played eleven league games at home and only scored seven times.

Howard came home after training one day and an Everton fan had spray-painted ‘Kendall out’ on the door of his garage. You saw other graffiti around the city with similar messages, and supporters were handing out leaflets outside home games demanding that the manager and chairman leave their posts.

But Howard never even mentioned the word ‘pressure’. Nothing changed. Sometimes when you’re under the cosh you can hear it in someone’s voice, the frustration that what they believe in isn’t working. With Howard, there was none of that. He was like a breeze. He would simply come in and stress the importance of enjoying ourselves. He was never one to harass the players to do better in a negative way, and he never shouted at us. Everything was just normal.

It’s really difficult at times, when you’re struggling, to make it a fun environment without looking like you aren’t taking it seriously. When times are hard, negative people tend to panic and look too hard for solutions that aren’t there. But Howard was able to trust his processes and trust his players. Of course, he occasionally tried new things on matchday and with team personnel, but he always stuck to his philosophy.

When things are going badly you expect change and upheaval. It’s really difficult not to panic when you’re personally under pressure. Everyone has their own way of dealing with it, but most people tend to get more stampy and aggressive. Howard was never like that. He believed that his methods and his philosophy could work, even if they took longer to succeed than most people thought they would.

The club was also good – that needs to be said. By keeping faith in Howard and being patient with him when things were going badly, it reduced the pressure on him, which in turn meant he didn’t pass any stress on to us. There were calls from the media and supporters for the club to make a change, but the chairman ignored them and just let Howard get on with it. We came through it, and we got our rewards by the end of the season. Those rewards were the prize the club and manager deserved for their perseverance.

That’s not to say that Howard wasn’t afraid to experiment. I remember we once had a comedian come into the training ground to try to lift our spirits. But it wasn’t so much what Howard did, as what he didn’t do. He didn’t rant and rave. He had answers for people who asked questions. The difference between him and Mike Walker was that Mike couldn’t answer the questions; he just told the players that they weren’t fit. With Howard, he’d always have thought about the potential questions that players and the media might ask, and he had serious, sensible answers for them.

We had a really good environment in the dressing room, and that has to help. Humour makes it easier. The dressing room is like an accident and emergency department, where you have cutting and dark humour – but you wouldn’t take any of that outside. It’s done to create an environment in which you can work effectively for the purposes of the job without focusing on the pressures on you to perform. If you’re inside, everything is up for grabs. But if anyone attacks you from the outside, everyone has your back and you rally round.

I spent six months trying to please Howard, because every time I came in after playing well he’d say, ‘Yes, but what about that kick or that throw-out?’ It drove me wild, but it motivated me into thinking that the only way to shut him up was to be better still. Then one day I came in and he gave me a compliment. My self-belief shot through the roof and any pressure that might have built up just dropped away. Brian Clough did the same with his players, because even a handshake from him would be enough to make them feel brilliant. It turned out that Howard knew me better than I knew myself.

Howard never said that you can’t do this and you can’t do that. If I wanted to do something, he let me do it – he trusted that I was always looking for ways to improve. But his management was proof that there are so many variables that can alter the pressure a player feels.

Over the summer of 1983, Howard had given all of his goalkeepers a chance to impress in pre-season matches. Jim Arnold and I had played a similar number of league matches the previous season, and I thought I had a good chance of being the No. 1 on the opening day. But when the team sheets were announced for the home game against Stoke City, Jim was in goal. With only one substitute allowed at the time, I had to watch the game from the stands.

But then I was very good at not letting things like that bother me. The biggest contradiction of my career was that I was motivated to the point of obsession about wanting to be in the team and play football, but if I wasn’t selected I was very philosophical about it and rarely got angry or bitter. Although I could have believed that the work I’d put in over the summer had gone to waste because I still wasn’t the first choice, that was never my thought process.

Instead, I reasoned that it was a message to tell me to work even harder and be even more focused on my own improvement. It was merely another challenge for me to overcome. The only way I could change the manager’s decision was by proving that I was better than Jim. I couldn’t change what had already happened; what will be, will be.

And it tended to work. On 1 October that first season, for an away game at Notts County, I was back in the team. I don’t think Jim had really done anything wrong, and we’d only conceded seven goals in our opening seven matches, but Howard often made calls like that based on his gut instinct.

Maybe if I’d gone a whole season without ever making the team, despite my hard work, I might have got a little more disillusioned at the lack of games I was being given despite being confident in my own ability. But every time I was left out of the team or suffered a setback, working doubly hard seemed like both the obvious response and the one most likely to succeed.

I think as a goalkeeper, the pressure on you is slightly separated from the team, and that probably allowed me to cope more easily. But it works the other way too. I played really well out in Holland in 1996 in a World Cup qualifier, when Wales lost 7–1. I had probably the best game of my career and honestly could have conceded twenty times. But despite being content with my performance, I couldn’t be outwardly happy because the team had been humiliated.

Although I could move on from mistakes, in the aftermath of them happening I’d be furious with myself. If I was on the way home from a match in which I’d made a mistake for a goal but we’d won, I could have run someone over. That’s an awful thing to say, but it’s true. It would take me until the following Monday to get over it and shut it away, even though I knew it was a stupid reaction. For me, it was the embarrassment of letting people down.

In those situations too, humour helps. I’d go into training on a Monday morning after conceding a goal or two at the weekend and the players would take the piss out of me – ‘You were shite on Saturday, Nev.’ OK, fair enough, I was. But then it was over. And if supporters or journalists ever gave me grief, then my teammates would defend me to the hilt. It’s when they weren’t taking the piss that you knew you had a real problem.

The toughest period was between getting home on the Saturday night and the Monday after a mistake, because you were frustrated and separated from the game. That frustration depended upon the result of the match, how the rest of the game went and who was in charge. Sometimes if we lost, you could reason that the manager had picked the wrong team, played the wrong system or made the wrong substitutions. But you learnt to quickly put it away, otherwise you’d only risk it leading to more frustration.

Yet being the goalkeeper meant that I felt impervious to the pressure that the manager and the rest of the team were probably feeling. Perhaps that wasn’t right. Maybe I should have been trying to gee everyone up more. But I was selfish, and I believed that being selfish was the only way that I could be successful. Being obsessed with my own preparation and my own performance was my main strategy for getting the best out of myself, and I figured that if the team weren’t playing well then that only made my own performance level more crucial.

Sometimes I didn’t care if the team all played badly together. Because if that happened, then the chances were that we weren’t a bad team, we’d just had an off day or the system wasn’t right – and these things can be addressed. The worst was if four or five first-team players were regularly having off days, because that increased the pressure on your own performance through no fault of your own.

As a goalkeeper, you aren’t really in control of how the team plays. You can obviously make a difference with your own saves – by giving your defenders confidence – and with your distribution, but that only goes so far. You can’t make things happen further up the pitch, and if you concentrate on trying to then you’ll probably make things worse, not better.

I couldn’t make the strikers score, but I could save shots and make sure that the worst we got was a 0–0 draw. And if the players in front of me knew that I was doing everything I could to keep a clean sheet, it reassured them because it took some of the pressure off. That sort of thing made a difference, even if it might have come from my own selfishness.

In our first thirteen games of 1984, we only conceded six goals. The strikers found their form too, and we set off on an unbeaten streak, winning eight times. From being booed by our own fans and Howard getting personal abuse, we relieved all the pressure on ourselves in the league – eventually finishing seventh – and went on a run in the cup competitions that eventually ended with us beating Watford at Wembley. I conceded one solitary goal in the entire FA Cup run.

For players nowadays, there’s obviously more cameras around, and everyone has a phone with a camera and will post pictures on social media. That leads to players feeling increasingly restricted in what they do and what they say, which threatens to create a claustrophobia and loneliness that ramps up the pressure you feel.

Everyone wants to see more characters in the modern game and bemoans the lack of individuality in the personalities of players, but it’s tricky because as soon as someone raises their head above the parapet they get hammered from a different section of the public or the media. Paul Gascoigne is the perfect example of that, with people leaving bottles of beer outside his house so that they can get a picture of him. Now that’s really sad, because it doesn’t help him.

I think everyone in the public eye has a shelf-life of being the one in the media spotlight, and therefore in the public’s consciousness too. That’s a really unpleasant reality, because it must be damaging to the mental health of those people who suffer the cycle of being built up and knocked down, and – because the focus is on a select, chosen few – also affects the confidence of top players who aren’t heralded at all.

When I was in good form but had an off day, I’d come home knowing that I’d played like shit. But I might look in the newspaper and read that I’d got ‘unlucky’ for the goal. That word was only used because the media liked me at the time, so they judged me by different rules than other goalkeepers. As footballers, when you’re young you get the benefit of the doubt because you have potential. Then you’ve got a long middle section, followed by a point at which you’re judged to be over the hill.

Now your performance level might not change much over your whole career, but the way in which you’re perceived does change. What once might have been considered to be ‘unlucky’ is later viewed as ‘clumsy’ or evidence that you’re ‘in decline’. You might have been be lauded for having a personality and some character, but that can be warped into you being a troublemaker or a loose cannon. And all this seems to be led by the media.

We’ve seen it time and time again with young English players, especially with Gazza. The media delighted in his antics because he was both brilliant at football and did foolish things that sold copies. He was the media’s hero until he was no longer at his peak and he wasn’t considered of use to them. They then removed that golden boy status and exploited his problems for their own gain. Just imagine how damaging that process is to someone’s mental health.

Gazza should have been working in a school like ours. Kids would have loved him to bits, because he has the sort of innocence and enthusiasm that would have made him connect with them. He loved to entertain as a player, and loved the idea that young kids were watching him and became inspired to play football by his example. He could have had exactly the same impact after playing, and it would have helped him mentally to cope with life without football.

It was the lack of football in his life that allowed Gascoigne’s problems to take hold; he had no structure without the game. But with that structure and with proper friends, not those who were out to play on his fame and exploit his wealth, he’d have been far better off. He should have been given a role working with youth teams and then out in the community interacting with kids through football, and he would have made a huge difference to so many lives because he has that innate ability to connect. Doing this would have given him a greater purpose in life.

Instead, he lost his structure and then suffered at the hands of a tabloid media that turned his struggles with addiction into front-page news to sell papers. At no point in that process did they ever reach out to him and offer help. He became their property without him asking for it.

Gazza is a high-profile and extreme example of someone who suffered without structure, but there are many others who have struggled with the same issue. It’s no different to normal life. If you’ve worked in a factory for thirty-five years, and one day you come in and, without warning, learn that it’s been shut down, then your purpose to get up in the morning has been ripped from you. How do you replace that? How do you cope?

Anybody that becomes popular will one day become unpopular, or at best ignored. Your face is in the newspaper or on TV every day, and then suddenly … nothing. That’s either because you’ve become so ubiquitous that the media needs a new version of you to take your place, or needs to give a different – most probably negative – side of you to maintain your notoriety. And there’s a constant conveyor belt of people who will take your place. Popularity has a shelf-life.

For whatever reason, the media paints certain people in a certain way and deliberately skates over elements of their lives or personalities that don’t fit the image they want to portray. Take George Michael, when he was alive. The amount of charity work George did was extraordinary, but the media focus only ever seemed to be on his sexuality and private life. It’s the same with Elton John, who has done some astonishing work with AIDS charities. But that’s never the focus.

The key is to avoid being swayed by either extreme. Don’t get carried away by the praise and buy into the notion that you’re some kind of national treasure, and in the same way don’t take any notice when they cast you aside. But to be fair, it’s so much easier said than done, because it happens to young, impressionable people, and it can be heart-warming to read complimentary things about yourself. The problem is that this persuades you to emotionally invest in the opinions of these people, which then sets you up for the fall.

My agent would always tell me not to worry about what the papers said. They didn’t know me as well as I knew myself, so it didn’t matter if they said I’d played well or played badly, just as long as I could judge myself how I’d played. And whatever they wrote became fish and chip paper the following day anyway. I never really set my stall on what anyone said if I didn’t know them or respect them as an expert on me or goalkeeping.

But for some people it does make a massive difference, because their careers become defined by how often they’re on the front page of newspapers, and so the nature of the coverage creates a huge pressure on them. I honestly don’t know how that type of celebrity copes, and I know that plenty don’t. Popularity is a very odd concept, but you have to remember that nothing about you needs to change to meet the supposed standards they set for you. If they like you, fine. If they don’t like you, fine. If you want to change, fine. But you have to stay true to yourself, not some version of you that they’ve constructed.

It’s easy to see why the English media and English fans hype up young English footballers. What they’re doing is selling a dream. They’re not just hyping you up, they’re pushing the idea that you could be the answer for the country and will finally take England back to where they think the team belongs. Then when you inevitably fail to live up to that unrealistic hype, you get flak.

Take Tom Davies at Everton. He comes into the team at the age of eighteen and tries his bollocks off, so everyone says, ‘Oh, he gets it, he’s a breath of fresh air, he’s the future.’ Then when he suffers a period of patchy form, like every young player does, or the team isn’t performing so well, it’s, ‘He’s shit, get him out of the team.’ By the age of twenty-one he’s already gone through that entire cycle and now has to move on. Judge Tom Davies on the situation he was put into, the lack of help he got from senior pros in the team, the changing managers, the fact that he’s a bloody kid.

How hard is that for him to deal with? He’s still learning and developing as a player and person, but now he has so much piled on top of him and he’s having to do it all in the public eye. How strong do you have to be to manage that and come out level-headed the other side?

It can be enough to break a kid. They might start to shy away from the ball, scared of the criticism that they’ll face if they make a mistake. They might play it safe, which is against their natural instincts and so reduces them as a player. They might go and mark someone when they don’t have the ball so they don’t get given it. And to top it all, they’ll get groaned at by 40,000 people if it goes wrong. But supporters don’t seem to care. They just think, ‘Oh well, we can just go out and buy someone for £40 million anyway.’

That’s the horrible side of football. The money isn’t good, the inequality is bad too. But the lack of patience and the lack of senior professionals helping out younger kids on the pitch and making things easier for them is awful. That’s cheating. That’s not doing your job.

Managers are more fearful for their jobs than they’ve ever been, and that pressure will always be passed down to the players. Nowadays, I don’t think that a manager should have to do anything other than organising the first team. The club should have an identity, and everyone should know what that identity is. The academy should produce players to match the identity of the club and its philosophy. And then you pick the manager to fit that philosophy.

But they don’t. Despite managers having more pressure on them, we’ve actually given them more to do and less time in which to do it. Clubs lurch between one philosophy and the next. One manager gets sacked, another comes in – and everything shifts. They have to say, ‘We are this club and this is how we do things.’ The philosophy should be set in stone and everything should be built around that.

You look at West Ham: from Slaven Bilić to David Moyes to Manuel Pellegrini and back to Moyes again. Where is the philosophy there? At Everton, Sam Allardyce came in – but it was never going to work because certain managers just don’t fit at certain places. For a while there’s been something fundamentally wrong at Manchester United, where supposedly world-class players won’t – or don’t – perform. But is there a philosophy that everyone is working within?

I also think that there are managers who can spend money, and managers who aren’t suited to it. There’s managers like José Mourinho, and that is – or maybe was – his thing. Collecting expensive players and managing them and their personalities. Then there are others who prefer working-class English lads who graft, and that’s their thing.

You take Moyes and Allardyce. Look at the type of players they were and the type of people they are. And they have managed players who haven’t tried a leg. Are they allowed to tell the truth to them? Can they inspire them? But if everything is geared towards creating a certain type of player, managers can walk into the job with their eyes open – and the club have appointed them because of it. They have a mandate. Then they can be the best managers they can be. It all goes back to being the best of you, not a version of someone else.

If your club is constantly changing managers and lurching between philosophies, and each manager that comes in has different ideas and one might like you and another might not, that’s very hard for players. You’re increasing the pressure on them when you should be easing it.

So don’t expect managers to build the club when you haven’t already created an environment in which they’re able to do so. Tell them to manage the first team to play in a certain style, and ensure that any player who comes in fits with that philosophy. Because when you walk into the canteen at the training ground, you can instantly spot the mood and tell whether everything is or isn’t going to be perfect on the pitch.

There’s a really interesting point about reducing pressure that comes from American sport and the psychology of that country. There, the typical scenario is that everybody is incredibly upbeat and positive and ‘Have a nice day!’. This extends to sport, where everything is presented as a positive, every mistake is an opportunity, and they try to engineer a spirit where every supporter coming to the match believes wholeheartedly in the team winning. In this country, we sometimes see that constant positivity as ugly or brash, as if confidence and cheerfulness were something to be sheepish or embarrassed about. But I want everyone coming to the stadium to believe wholeheartedly that we can win. And you’d be amazed at the difference that can make.

There are some brilliant psychologists now working at the biggest clubs in the world, but clubs don’t do anything with the crowd other than making them pay more and more for the same tickets. Why don’t they work with them? There are 40,000 people there that you can use to your advantage to reduce the pressure on your own players and increase the pressure on your opponents.

Concentrate on the grounds and the crowds. Get those people wound up to back their team. Get them to make some noise. Make sure that everyone is up for a good time. If you do – whatever happens in the match – they will have a good time. Don’t assume that the fans will come whatever, and don’t make them pay ludicrous prices for a shit burger and the same seat. Every matchday has to be an event. We seem to be scared in this country of letting people enjoy themselves.

The clubs don’t help. They effectively make it clear that they can do whatever they want and the supporters will come anyway, so they don’t need to try. So go the other way. Look at everything: the music, the colour schemes, fan involvement. Don’t just plasticise everything or roll it in glitter. Maximise the experience for supporters by giving them things that they really need. If it’s raining or cold, give them hot drinks or hand out umbrellas at the transport hubs. Or even, and I know this is completely alien to them, reduce ticket prices. I think Leicester City winning the league is a really good example of this. It wasn’t just that the team had a great shared morale, but that every supporter believed that the owner cared.

If every club did that, the supporters would think, ‘Bloody hell, this club values me, they’ve thought about me, so now I’m going to do everything I can to cheer them on, rather than sitting back and waiting to be entertained and shouting criticism at the players when they fail to entertain me.’

Then there’s the players on matchday. The interesting thing to me is that the players are all fit, but some of them are deemed unable to last ninety minutes. Is that because the game is more intense and more demanding? Perhaps. But is it also because we’ve created an environment in which players are psychologically programmed to break down, because they’ve been left unprepared for obstacles in the road by the lack of expression allowed in their personal lives? Maybe this also makes it harder for them to express themselves on the pitch. Perhaps this creates a pressured scenario in which players feel that everything matters so much now that they become tense, too tense. When they get the ball and when they walk down the street, are they allowed to be themselves?

There’s a danger that such an environment leads to a culture of fear, which creates its own pressure. If I know that I can’t give the ball away because the opposition might score, the manager might get sacked because he becomes impatient with the club philosophy and I might get crucified on social media, then it’s going to be very difficult to play with any freedom. That pushes players into their shells, so they play it safe and try not to lose or, worse, try to stay hidden.

But for whatever reason – and it’s probably pure greed – clubs fail to make the connection between looking after the supporters and reducing the pressure on players. They chase money as much as they can and forget to create a positive environment – then they wonder why their players feel unable to express themselves under the extra pressure they have piled onto them.

Pressure

by Anne-Marie Silbiger

Some of us are delinquents in hiding

No call to achieve

Yet the demand to be somebody

Looms thunderous in those ears

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