The deep emotional undercurrents of sport

Seven years ago, before moving to the UK, I attended football matches of a very promising youth football team in my hometown of Naples. I am an avid fan of the game, and I was able to get close access through a journalist friend of mine. Seeing them play so passionately woke my interest as a psychologist. I started observing the behaviour of the players and how the coach sought to improve their performance.

Despite their talent, the team often struggled to perform in crucial moments. I noticed a troubling pattern: the players looked to the coach for every decision, no matter how small. They had unconsciously adopted a dependency mindset, idealising the coach as the person who could fix everything. But this was affecting their growth. Instead of taking responsibility and thinking critically, they became passive. 

The coach, to his credit, recognised this and began shifting responsibility back onto the players, urging them to think for themselves on the field. Over time, the team's performance improved, not just because of tactical changes, but because the players began to function as a more autonomous unit. A successful coach does not allow themselves to become the crutch the team leans on, but instead fosters a sense of shared ownership and accountability.

As a psychologist passionate about sport, I have always been fascinated by how psychological theories can illuminate the inner workings of teams. And what I was seeing in Naples was a clear illustration of Wilfred Bion's theory of group dynamics. 

Bion, a British psychoanalyst, proposed that when individuals come together, they form a collective entity with its own emotional and psychological undercurrents. His insights, typically applied to therapeutic settings, are also highly relevant in understanding the role of a coach in a football team.

A complex system

To an outsider, a football team may seem like a straightforward collection of players, each with a role to perform on the field. However, in reality, a team is a complex system, with hidden dynamics influencing how it functions as a unit. Players do not just bring their physical skills to the table; they bring emotions, anxieties, and defence mechanisms that shape the team's culture, often in ways they themselves do not recognise. This is where the coach, as the group leader, steps in – not just as a strategist, but as someone who must navigate these deeper emotional undercurrents.

Bion argued that a group's natural tendency is to revert to primitive, emotional states unless guided properly. In football, this regression can manifest in different ways: dependency on the coach, over-reliance on star players, or a fixation on external threats like rival teams. These unconscious tendencies – what Bion called 'basic assumptions' – can derail a team's progress if left unchecked.

There is another side to this too. In many teams, star players often become the focus of attention, with the rest of the team unconsciously stepping back and waiting for these players to deliver. Bion called this the 'pairing' assumption. It is a belief that two key figures can carry the team, almost like a saviour complex. I have seen this situation in football teams where the hopes of victory rest squarely on the shoulders of star players, and when they falter, the whole team collapses. Think of Cristiano Ronaldo's time at Juventus. The Portuguese superstar was bought by the Italian team with the aim of being the team's driving force in winning the UEFA Champions League. In the three years he spent in Turin, Ronaldo failed to achieve this objective and, speaking to The Athletic in October 2021, Leonardo Bonucci, Ronaldo's teammate at Juventus, attributed the reason to the fact that his presence had led the players to think, subconsciously, that this would be enough to win. "We began to fall a little short in our daily work, the humility, the sacrifice, the desire to be there for your team-mate day after day". 

Overcoming the enemy

Bion's third assumption, the fight-flight response, is another common phenomenon in sports. This happens when the team becomes fixated on an external threat, either in the form of a rival team or an imagined challenge. Instead of focusing on their own development and strategy, the team becomes consumed by the need to either confront or flee from this perceived enemy. The young football team I watched in Naples went through something similar. They were performing well throughout the season, but when it came to playing their biggest rival, something changed. In the days leading up to the match, the atmosphere shifted. Training sessions, which were usually focused and disciplined, became tense. Players spent more time discussing the rival team's strengths and weaknesses than honing their own skills. They were consumed with the idea of overcoming this 'enemy', and it was as if their entire identity as a team became defined by this upcoming match.

The coach, despite his efforts, struggled to refocus the players. He could see what was happening but did not fully comprehend the psychological dynamic at play. The team was not just preparing for a difficult game; they were trapped, as Bion's theory will suggest, in the fight-flight mentality. They saw the rival as an external threat that had to be defeated at all costs, and as a result, they were no longer thinking about their own strategy or development. The game plan they had refined over the season was suddenly sidelined in favour of reactive, fear-driven tactics. Their identity as a team, built on cooperation and skill, had been overshadowed by their fixation on the opponent.

When game day arrived, it was clear that the team was not mentally prepared. They were frantic from the first whistle, more focused on countering the rival's every move than executing their own strategies. Passes were rushed, positioning was chaotic, and communication on the field broke down. It was clear they had lost sight of their own game. They were reacting rather than playing with intention. Unsurprisingly, they lost the match – not because they were outplayed, but because they had been psychologically outmanoeuvred long before stepping onto the field.

This experience reminded me just how critical it is for coaches to be aware of group psychology, especially when facing high-stakes games. Teams often lose not because of a lack of skill, but because they allow themselves to be dominated by the emotional need to fight or flee from an external enemy. The lesson I took from this is that success on the field is not about focusing on the opponent but refining your own strengths, developing resilience, and sticking to the principles that have made the team successful in the first place.

Under the surface

Bion's theory has deepened my understanding of what it means to lead a group, particularly in a sports context. A coach's responsibility is not only to manage tactics but to guide the emotional and psychological undercurrents that shape the team's behaviour. By identifying when the team is regressing into dependency, pairing, or fight-flight modes, a coach can redirect them toward more productive patterns of thinking and acting.

This is what needs to change in how we understand coaching: it's not just about strategies or motivating speeches. A coach must be aware of the unconscious dynamics that can hinder a team's progress and have the skill to address them. Too often, we look at a coach's role through a narrow lens, focusing only on the surface level of performance. But if we are to unlock the true potential of teams, we must start acknowledging the deeper emotional work that coaches do – whether they are aware of it or not.