Mental Training and Football: an Interview with Steve Perryman, MBE

The interview was conducted between December 2003 and January 2004 by John Syer, based on questions asked by members of the Sporting Bodymind team. It is remarkable for its congruence with our work in the corporate arena and the principles transformational leadership training and individual coaching through heightened awareness. Glenn Hoddle, who played in front of Steve in the Tottenham HFC midfield and was known for his pinpoint passes, used to say that Steve was ‘his eyes’. Steve himself says that his greatest attribute as a player was his voice. The value of this interview comes from Steve’s vision and undimmed ability to communicate.

Mark Mercer: How has mental training developed in the game since the 1980's?

Steve Perryman: It hasn’t. Perhaps it is available to more people but it’s still misunderstood because it can’t be quantified. Football is judged by games won or lost and to a lesser extent by improvement. You can’t judge within the win or loss how much was due to the use of mental training. The press judge it from the same viewpoint.

John Syer: What was it that Christopher and I were doing, when you were a player, that caught your interest?

Steve Perryman: It was your opening speech and discussions. You were describing things I’d learned about football naturally, as naturally as I’d learned my journey to work or whether I had the right tie on. It was my football experience that had taught me to think football. In the end, I was saying to myself: ‘I’ll get the ball from him probably twenty times in this match. I’ll get it by my early movement. When I sense he’s going to take the shot, I’ll get out wide very early. My opponents won’t notice. He’ll give it to me and from there I’ve got options. I can get it to Glenn or to Archie [Steve Archibald] or, if I’ve space, I can take it on.’ I was playing the game in my head before I got to my strip in the dressing room. That’s what you two were describing and I knew it was right. I had a very common sense approach to the game; if this happens, that happens. And that’s what you were putting across. So I thought: ‘If they’ve got that right without doing what I’ve done as often as I’ve done it, it’s possible they can teach me something.’

Mark Mercer: What makes our approach to mental training different?

Steve Perryman: Your approach is easy for me because I know you – or I know John and Chris. Back in the 80s, when I was a player and first met them, everyone was interested in Spurs. We were a blueprint then and your sports psychology was a part of it. Nowadays, if someone doesn’t understand what sport psychology is I explain what happened to Archie [Steve Archibald] and how he used his image of a bear.*

Emma Markwick: From your experience, what is the useful application of mental training to football - in terms of level of intervention (individual, pairs, unit or full team) - and which interventions get the most powerful results?

Steve Perryman: They are all important. Immediately after and before a game any work should be with the full team. Individual work should be done mid week. I particularly like pairs work. Pairs work has great focus. A soccer player is helped by there being another player in the room for this type of training. Then he can talk a bit, listen a bit and talk again. Some players aren’t used to just talking by themselves

John Syer: Why should a manager take a sports psychologist on his coaching staff? What are the potential difficulties and rewards?

Steve Perryman: First the difficulties. Players are used to working two hours a day and then going home. You can’t fit football and sport psychology into two hours. You have to have a change in attitude and longer days. Then there’s the fact that some players are not comfortable writing down answers or saying what they really believe. They find it embarrassing in front of the others. Yet a lot of footballers follow the leader. If the strong character in the team or the captain believes in it, mental training is more readily accepted. Otherwise the doubter can cause problems to the team’s acceptance of it.

The reward of team mental training is that the team is tighter. It becomes a unit, as understanding of each other becomes greater. Sometimes the manager may be clear but his thinking is ‘grey’ to his players. Without understanding the content, the sports psychologist can often spot this discrepancy and help the manager to clarify some of the ‘greyness’. I’ve never been so clear going into a game as I was when we had the team meeting before playing Liverpool. You set the meeting up with Keith. You asked him to say exactly what he wanted us to do (which made him clarify his planning) and then made us get into our units – defence, midfield and strikers. We had to discuss amongst ourselves firstly what Keith’s tactics meant we had to do individually, then what we had to do as a unit and finally what we needed from each of the other two units. Then we came back and each group a) described what they were going to do, and b) what they needed.

A team doing mental training has a greater feeling of winning and losing the game as a unit. A team that doesn’t do it is more likely to have the typical dressing room argument between the defence and the front players. The press in Japan told me that one of the best things about my team [S-Pulse] was that they knew exactly why they had won or lost: because I had your type of meetings, everyone knew what should be happening.

I’ve talked about the rewards of individual mental training already but should add that another of its great benefits is that it can improve a player without physical injury or wear and tear on the body.

Vyla Rollins: What do you feel is the one psychological attribute that exists in great players versus good or mediocre players? Do you feel that attribute is something that is intrinsic to their personality or is it something that can be developed?

Steve Perryman: A purpose, a dedication, desire and belief. The great player has this in abundance. A good player has a measure of those things. A large part of it is personality but whatever you have to start with can be worked on.

Mark Mercer: What is the role of the manager in promoting mental training within a club?

Steve Perryman: He has to seek the right expertise. However, mental training has to be understood by the Chairman. The Chairman must chose a manager who is open to it.

Christopher Connolly: How can managers with completely different styles - Keith Burkinshaw and Brian Clough, for instance - both succeed in producing top teams?

Steve Perryman: By being themselves. By having their own philosophy from their discussions and experiences down the years. What worked for Brian Clough wouldn’t have worked for Keith Burkinshaw. A manager has to be believable. He can’t be believable if he’s saying someone else’s words, not unless he’s looked into it, cut it about and decided to take those words on board. Eamonn Dolan, the manager at Exeter and a friend of mine, picks up from everyone including me. However, having heard what people say or seen what they do, he takes time to work out how he might make the idea work for him. The style itself is not important but it has to be the style of a leader: it has to be purposeful, honest and consistent. Brian Clough was consistently surprising.

John Syer: How did you use the principles of mental training when you became a manager?

Steve Perryman: My focus is to help make players experienced before it happens naturally, to take a short cut. Mental training is a way of doing this. In the old days a player became experienced through time. He hit his purple patch when his brain caught up with his body and both were working at their peak. As a manager, I try to speed up the process so that he has longer at his prime.

Of course, I have to pay some respect to naivety. It was my naivety as a young player, for instance, that stopped me being scared out of my life when making my first team debut. Yet above all, mental training helps a player learn what he’s doing well and what he’s doing badly.

Working with a player who has to score goals, I may ask him to keep a record, to write down the date, the opponent, the score, how many goals he scored, why he scored or why he didn’t score. I’ll give him an example: ‘I scored because I got first to the ball, I knew it was coming back off the goalkeeper, therefore I got in first’. Asking the player to think it through shows him how to continue his career as a goalscorer. That’s how I use what I learned from listening to you as a player – how important it is to encourage players to think about their game and to use what they discover about themselves for the future. A sport psychologist does all this more professionally, in a proper sequence and using the correct words but anything I do in this way is bound to help.

Ten players can beat eleven if they are more together. I think team mental training prepares for that. Having a man sent off can suddenly give them a common aim, if things haven’t been going well up till then. A full team of eleven, if playing ‘together’, can be as strong as twelve. On the other hand, eleven players who are not ‘together’ can seem to be only ten.

Mark Mercer: How can mental training support the coaching team?

Steve Perryman: At Watford John spent time with the staff, helping us to talk about our experiences to each other. Team mental training is about team building and developing trust. As Manager, I must have trust in the Youth Coach, for instance. I have to show that I trust him to get on and do what he should be doing but I must also show that I care, that I’m not leaving him out in the cold. And I have to have input. The coaching staff team meetings with the sports psychologist allows us all to talk about this and make our relationships stronger.

Mark Mercer: In your experience, what difference does team mental training make to the way players interact during a game?

Steve Perryman: Mental training takes away some of the wrong assumptions players make about each other. Talk breaks down these assumptions and allows players to learn why a particular player does what he does. This happens in relationships outside of sport. I heard this sort of thing just this morning: ‘When you said x, what I thought you were really saying was y.’ ‘But I didn’t say y, did I?’ ‘No but I thought that was what you meant. ’ ‘Well, I didn’t!’

Normally, footballers don’t talk seriously about football. If you ask them they just say ‘It’s our job. What’s there to talk about?’ We might have some sense of unity about the crowd that doesn’t understand us but we just talk on the surface. The great thing about the work of the sport psychologist is that it gets us to start talking about what is important in our job.

Deb Shepherd: How would a group of talented individuals coming together for the first time fare against a team with good team spirit that had been working and playing together for a season?

Steve Perryman: Over the course of a hundred games they would probably lose. On an odd day they would win. A team with understanding works together better on a bad day, has less bad days and has an understanding as to why they are playing well or not. With the other team things just happen. It is a team’s understanding that allows improvement.

Mark Mercer: What role can mental training play in enabling youth team players to make the transition to the Premiership?

Steve Perryman: Sport psychology is another avenue to explore to become a good player. It is an avenue that shouldn’t be ignored. From youth team to Premiership, sport psychology upgrades a player’s thinking. For a start it teaches players not to waste their mistakes. Football is a game of mistakes and of confidence. What you do with your mistakes is key. Your mental training exercises should be taken into our normal training to get more benefit from the training time. Players need to watch each other and ask themselves ‘Why is that player such a good player?’

Deb Shepherd: Apart from the language problems, what are the main differences between managing an English team and a Japanese team?

Steve Perryman: In Japan, the club or Company gives you the players to work on and improve. You have the players longer so have longer to improve them. They’ve not got the same ‘get rich quick’ attitude. Sport psychology has a tremendous role to play in any English team but in Japan, where people are so private, to help them to talk to each other is incredibly rewarding. Then there’s the fact that the Japanese player is so much more open to self-improvement. They are much more open to learning – to learning a new language, a new instrument or a new level of performance - than the English professional is.

On the other hand, the Japanese player lacks responsibility. They are taught to follow, not to lead. Of course you have to give them a structure and a plan and then you are leading them. But you can teach them to lead themselves and each other. I found that one of the biggest avenues to improvement was to get them to take their own decisions. For this they had to understand their personal jobs and the team job. An English player could understand all that and still have his own way of doing things and probably got to have his own way too. In Japan they totally believe in their teacher – at school, in sports, at the office. You are held in high regard as teacher and that brings greater responsibility. You want to give some of that responsibility back to them themselves.

* See Sporting Body, Sporting Mind: An Athlete’s Guide to Mental Training by John Syer and Christopher Connolly, forward by Steve Perryman.

For more information on Steve Perryman:
www.steveperryman.se