The Game That Begins at the Final Whistle

18/10/2025

     Who are you? Do you feel comfortable describing yourself? Can you clearly list your main strengths and weaknesses? What is it like to hear others talk about you? A task that seems simple in theory is often anything but in practice. And what if...once or twice a week, you received thousands — or even millions — of comments and analyses about your skills and mistakes? Add to that an environment where thousands of decisions are made in seconds, with immediate exposure to people who are utterly convinced they understand what you do. Who are you, really?

     Playing football at a high level demands, among many skills, the ability to make decisions with extraordinary speed. And there are plenty of them: studies suggest that a player makes between 1,500 and 2,500 decisions in a single match. That’s at least one decision every four seconds on average — and some may be decisive for the outcome of the game, for better or worse.

     To this, we can add another factor that heightens the challenge: the exposure of every single one of those decisions. The player knows that they will be strongly judged, analysed in every possible detail, and subjected to a true public scrutiny. So here we already have two required competencies: the ability to decide, and the ability to handle the immense exposure that follows those decisions.

     It is a fact that professionals in positions of great relevance, responsibility and/or power may feel pressured by the decisions they must make – but this is part of the role. Yet, those decisions are not usually evaluated instantly, nor by thousands of people who consider themselves experts in the subject. In the case of footballers, three factors converge: a large number of decisions made in extremely short time spans; the immediate exposure of those decisions; and the scrutiny of a vast audience who believe themselves to be legitimate experts.

     And we do not stop there. In addition to these three factors, there is a distortion in the analyses caused by the gap between the time of the play and the time of its review. Slow-motion images — repeated countless times — can generate a scenario that bears little resemblance to the “real scene”, where everything happened in mere seconds. A still image is used to interpret a moment of extreme speed. Meanwhile, the player decided and acted in real time. In other words, they are judged based on a play that was not exactly the one they experienced on the pitch.

     Some consider it an exaggeration to say that this distorts perception so much, arguing that analysis must be as detailed as possible to be faithful to the original situation. A legitimate argument — but applied to the wrong phenomenon. A football play is not a physics experiment where an action is decomposed into frames to perfectly understand what happened.

     In football, it works the other way around: a play demands interpretation, and the speed of movement directly affects that interpretation. When the image is slowed down, the reading can change. It is important to clarify that the point here is not what is right or wrong (nor a defence or critique of VAR), but rather the fact that the player acts by one measure and is judged by another.

     Thus we arrive at the complexity of the scenario a footballer faces when dealing with evaluations of their performance: hundreds of decisions made in split seconds, instant assessments, the participation of thousands of self-proclaimed “experts”, and analyses distorted by a completely different sense of time.

     And how can this be changed or mitigated for the player? From an external perspective, that is definitely not a viable option. It cannot be changed. On the contrary, the trend is toward an intensification of this situation — more technology, more interactivity, ever faster analyses, with cameras and sensors everywhere. In short: growing pressure on athletes.

     Fans, the media and the wider audience seek and feed on this roller coaster of emotions and opinions. They don’t want emotions “only” during the ninety minutes or on match days — they want content for every other day as well. And there’s nothing wrong with that; it’s what drives the whole “machine” of football. But when we look from the player’s point of view, what we call here an emotional roller coaster is far from simple or harmless. It can be devastating for an athlete’s psychological balance.

     The referee blows the final whistle. The player leaves the pitch carrying the weight of the decisions they made, already preparing to analyse everything that happened in the match with teammates and the coaching staff — which, in itself, is already a major demand. Yet there is still “extra time”: while seeking physical rest and recovery after the match, the player enters a process of intense mental and emotional activity to process not only what they experienced, but also how their performance has been judged.

     Body at rest, mind at work — a solitary, silent, difficult task, partly unconscious, amid mental and emotional turmoil. Lonely even when surrounded by people, because those nearby — however well-intentioned — often reinforce confirmation biases or bring new information from analyses, which can add to the inner turbulence. The point is: the opinions around never replace or lessen the need for the athlete’s own internal elaboration.

     If building and consolidating a successful professional career requires relatively stable plans and a high level of self-knowledge, football offers the opposite condition to the player. The greatest challenge for the footballer may not be the “chaos” within the four lines — for that, they receive support, guidance, and training, along with their own individual skill. The greatest challenge may lie in the chaos outside the pitch, for which they were rarely prepared — and often cannot even clearly understand what might affect them.

     In simple terms, physical preparation has evolved to the point where today a player runs, on average, twenty to forty per cent more per match than in the 1970s or 80s. That greater physical demand came hand in hand with advances in training methods, physiology, nutrition, biomechanics, and so on. And what about the mental and emotional side? Has the psychological support repertoire kept pace with the huge new challenges?

     Here we encounter an important and rarely discussed paradox. Football has become, on the pitch, an increasingly collective game and, off the pitch, an increasingly interactive sport… while the player, paradoxically, has become more solitary and, at the same time, more exposed. The chants of the fans, the analyses everywhere, the voices on social media — these can indeed be inspiring, but only when there is inner strength and balance to filter and process all that content. The path to resilience and consistency in facing this challenge is not found in “external” references — whether social, collective, or formulaic.

     The reference point for balance lies in one’s own personal story, in knowing who one truly is. Not in that club, that season, or that age category. Who one is along a unique journey through sport and, even more so, through life. Origins. Symbolic inheritances. Contents so well hidden they were forgotten. Work that does not respond to the immediacy of social media clicks, nor to goals scored in stoppage time. Work outside the binary logic of penalty shootouts. Work without yellow or red cards. Work without fear of the coach’s opinion. Work without the pressure of the perfect play. Work without the voices and chants of the crowd. Work without the referee’s whistle.

     To build and write one’s own story. The footballer is, in truth, their own Club — the one they live and play for, all the time.

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