7 Reasons Good Players Suddenly Look Different When Competition Starts

01

Match day changes what the moment means

In training, a mistake might just mean the pass didn’t come off, the shot missed or they made the wrong decision. There’s usually another rep, another drill or another chance a few seconds later.

Competition can feel different. Now there’s a score, a coach watching and teammates relying on them. Maybe parents are on the side. Maybe they’ve already made one mistake and really don’t want another. All of those things can make getting it right feel more important.

The skill itself hasn’t necessarily changed. What has changed is the situation around it. And when getting it right starts to feel more important, the same skill can suddenly feel harder to perform.

02

Pressure can pull their attention away from the game

This is one of the biggest things parents miss. Your player can still know exactly what to do, but part of their attention may now be somewhere else.

It might be the mistake they just made, the coach, the score, what people are thinking or what happens if they get it wrong again.

Researchers who study pressure have looked at this a lot. Put simply, some of the attention a player needs for what’s happening now can get pulled towards things that aren’t helping with the next action.

It doesn’t look the same in every player. Some get pulled towards the score or the coach. Others start paying more attention to their own movement, which is the next reason.

03

Trying harder can sometimes make them overthink the skill

A player really wants to get something right, so they start thinking more about how they’re doing it.

Where should my foot go? Am I holding this correctly? What are my hands doing? Am I in the right position?

Thinking about technique isn’t a bad thing. It’s part of how players learn. But researchers have studied how, under some kinds of pressure, a movement a player already knows well can get pulled back under conscious control. For some players, that gets in the way of doing it smoothly.

Sometimes the player isn’t trying too little. They’re trying so hard to get it right that they stop doing it naturally.

04

The mistake affecting them might not have happened yet

Watch closely and you can sometimes see a player changing before anything has actually gone wrong. They take the safer option, hesitate, stop getting involved as much or don’t try the thing you watched them do all week in training.

A review of 53 studies into decision-making in team sports (Ashford, Abraham and Poolton, 2021) found that decisions can change with things like the score, how important the match feels and what has already happened in the game.

That review was about decisions, not worry. But it fits something I see a lot. Pressure doesn’t only show up after something goes wrong.

A player might be thinking about missing the next shot, being taken off or what happens if they lose, and that can be enough to change what they do before anything has actually happened.

Sometimes they end up playing around a mistake that hasn’t happened yet.

05

One mistake can follow them into the next moment

I tell parents not to just watch the mistake. Watch the next 10 seconds.

Do they look straight at the coach, drop their head, stop talking or avoid getting involved again? Or do they get themselves back into the game?

None of that tells you exactly what they’re thinking. But it can show you whether the effects of the mistake are carrying into what happens next.

Every player makes mistakes. That’s not the interesting bit. The interesting bit is what the mistake takes with it.

When this keeps happening, something else can start to change. A player knows what they can do in training, but if they keep struggling to show it when competition starts, they can begin to question their own ability.

Maybe I’m just not as good as I thought.

That’s why the response after a mistake matters. We’re not trying to create players who never get things wrong. We’re trying to stop one moment becoming the next five.

06

Playing well under pressure is something they can practise

Most training is built on repetition. Passing, shooting, serving, tackling and movement get repeated until they feel more natural.

But how often do players practise what to do when those same skills suddenly feel harder?

There’s actually a field of training built around this, usually called pressure training. Done properly, it isn’t about shouting at players or trying to make them stressed. It means safely adding some of the demands they may face in competition, so they get chances to practise dealing with them.

That might be a score to chase, fewer chances, a decision that matters or having to reset and go again. The research on it is still growing, and what helps can depend on the sport, the player and how it’s done.

If competition is where the pressure shows up, I think players need chances to practise dealing with some of that pressure before competition too.

07

Pressure gets harder when they don’t know what to do with it

Pressure itself isn’t always the enemy. Some of the best performances in sport happen when the game matters most.

The problem is that players can get years of coaching on what to do technically, then very little to work with when pressure changes what they’re thinking about.

So we say things like “relax”, “forget about it”, “be confident” or “just play your game”.

None of that is bad advice. But it tells the player how we’d like them to feel, without necessarily showing them what to do next.

And that’s the part I think we’ve been missing.