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Elite football is built on pressure, evaluation, and constant change.
But players do not develop through pressure alone.
In this conversation, Helena Schmitz, Sports Psychologist at DFB and 1. FC Nürnberg, explains how sport psychology works across club and national team environments, why proactive support matters before challenges become visible, and how psychological safety can coexist with high standards.
From trust and communication to team culture, co-regulation, and performance under pressure, this interview shows why the mental environment around players matters as much as the individual work itself.
The biggest difference is time, but also context and objectives.
In a club environment, psychological work is embedded in the players’, coaches’, and staff’s everyday reality. You work with a relatively stable squad throughout a season, which allows you to build trust, develop relationships, and support long-term development. Presence is a crucial part of this process. Being available around the training ground or in informal moments often creates the foundation for meaningful conversations and effective support. Confidentiality, obviously, also becomes particularly important in this environment, as players need to feel that they have a trusted space where they can openly discuss challenges, concerns, or personal topics.
The continuity of the club environment also allows for the gradual development of shared mental models. Whether it is helping players understand the psychological demands of their role, supporting communication processes within a team, or reinforcing behaviours expected in specific performance situations, there is time to repeatedly work on these aspects and integrate them into daily practice.
In contrast, the national team environment operates within much shorter and more concentrated timeframes. The focus is on successfully navigating qualification games and ultimately competing in major international tournaments. In a typical year, we may only have around four international windows of approximately ten days each, with all of the work having to take place within these limited periods.
From a football perspective, this creates a unique challenge because players arrive from different clubs, where they may be used to different tactical principles, behavioural expectations, communication styles, and performance environments. Part of the task is therefore helping players adapt to a shared framework and collective way of operating within a very short period of time. Building trust also looks different in this context. Rather than developing relationships over months, it often relies on quickly creating credibility, being visible and approachable, and helping players feel connected to the group from the moment they arrive.
At the same time, psychological work in football is never only about the individual player. It also involves coaches, support staff, team dynamics, and the wider culture of the environment. While the sport psychologist contributes to this process, the psychological environment is shaped every day by the people players interact with most frequently. Therefore, supporting coaches and staff in creating consistent messages, behaviours, and expectations becomes an important part of the psychologist’s work. While both settings require such a systemic approach, this perspective becomes even more important in the national team environment. With limited time together and a squad that can evolve throughout the qualification process, a large part of the work is about creating alignment, clear communication, and a shared culture across all relevant stakeholders as quickly as possible.
At the same time, international camps can also create unique opportunities for personal and psychological development. Being temporarily removed from the demands and routines of the club environment often provides players with the space to reflect on broader aspects of their development beyond immediate performance demands.
Ultimately, the goal in both environments is the same: creating the conditions that allow individuals and teams to thrive, develop, and perform at their best.
In my philosophy of sport psychology, I differentiate between proactive and reactive work.
Reactive work will always be necessary. Elite sport is full of challenges that require immediate support, whether that involves injuries, personal setbacks, selection decisions, transitions, private topics, or mental health situations.
However, I believe sport psychology creates its greatest impact when proactive work has already been established. Psychological development should not start when problems emerge; it should be embedded into the environment long before challenges become visible.
For me, this proactive work exists on multiple levels. It involves the individual level, where it is about the person, psychological skills training, self-regulation, values-based development, and mindset. It also includes the interpersonal level, where we focus on communication, collaboration, mutual trust, roles, relationships, and leadership. Finally, there is the organisational level, which includes cultural norms, alignment of visions between different departments, expectations, shared identity, and the overall performance environment.
When these levels work together, athletes and coaching staff members are better equipped to deal with pressure and adversity before situations escalate. In that sense, effective intervention is often built upon effective prevention.
I believe players grow best when challenge and support exist simultaneously. Sometimes there is a debate about whether performance decreases if too much emphasis is placed on players’ wellbeing. In my opinion, this is a false dichotomy.
High-performance environments will always be challenging, but they should also feel psychologically safe. Players need to know that mistakes, setbacks, and vulnerability are part of development rather than signs of failure. At the same time, they need clear standards, accountability, and ambitious expectations.
For me, psychological safety is not about lowering performance demands. It is about creating an environment where players feel respected, valued, and able to take risks without fear of being defined by a single mistake.
The challenge, therefore, is not choosing between wellbeing and performance, but creating conditions in which both can coexist and reinforce one another. Practically, this can mean creating regular opportunities for open dialogue, encouraging honest feedback between players and staff, normalising conversations about mistakes and learning, and ensuring that individuals feel heard even when difficult decisions are made. Often, players can accept challenging feedback, non-selection, or demanding expectations if they feel the process is fair, transparent, they can see opportunities for growth, and the message is delivered within a trusting relationship.
The same principle also applies when working with coaches and support staff, who play a key role in shaping the everyday environment. In fact, many of the most influential psychological interactions in football do not necessarily occur only during formal sessions with a sport psychologist. They happen in everyday conversations, feedback situations, team meetings, training sessions, and moments of challenge, support, success, or adversity through coaches, support staff, and other key stakeholders within the club. For this reason, psychological work should never be viewed as the sole responsibility of the sport psychologist, but rather as a shared responsibility across the entire performance environment. The sport psychologist is only one contributor to the psychological environment; every coach, staff member, and leader within the organisation helps shape it every single day.
Facilitating psychological safety is therefore not only the responsibility of the sport psychologist but a core responsibility of everyone working within the environment, particularly coaches. Part of my role is helping coaches and staff understand that psychological safety does not reduce accountability or competitiveness. Psychological safety is not the opposite of high standards; rather, it provides the foundation that allows individuals and teams to consistently meet high standards. Research and practical experience repeatedly show that athletes are more likely to learn, adapt, communicate openly, and perform under pressure when they feel secure enough to take risks, make mistakes, and recover from setbacks.
When this foundation is established, individual development naturally begins to influence collective functioning and team performance. In football, pressure is often experienced individually, but performance happens collectively. Every player brings unique experiences and challenges that require individualized support. At the same time, culture, trust, communication, and relationships within the team strongly influence how players cope with pressure and perform.
Co-regulation is therefore a massive part of team sports. Players constantly influence one another through their communication, behaviour, emotions, and responses to adversity. That is why my work is not only about supporting individual players. It is also about contributing to an environment in which people can challenge one another, support one another, and collectively perform at their highest level.
Ultimately, this highlights why sport psychology, particularly in football, should never be viewed solely through an individual lens. Players rarely grow in isolation. The environment, relationships, and culture around them often determine whether pressure becomes a threat or an opportunity.
This interview is one of those conversations that should make football people pause.
Because when we talk about performance, we still often jump straight to the visible parts.
Training intensity.
Tactics.
Selection.
Physical load.
Recovery.
Match preparation.
Technical execution.
All important.
But Helena’s answers point to something that sits underneath all of this:
The psychological environment.
Not just the individual player’s mindset.
The environment around the player.
The relationships, conversations, standards, trust, communication patterns, leadership behaviours, and cultural norms that shape how people actually perform under pressure.
That distinction matters.
Sport psychology is often misunderstood as something reactive. A player struggles, then someone steps in. A setback happens, then support is offered. A confidence issue becomes visible, then the psychologist gets involved.
Helena makes a much more strategic point.
Reactive work will always be necessary in elite sport. Injuries, selection decisions, personal setbacks, transitions, mental health situations, private challenges, and performance crises do not wait for perfect timing.
But the real impact happens when psychological development is already embedded before those moments arrive.
That is the part I find most relevant for football clubs.
The best environments do not wait for problems to become visible.
They build the conditions that help players handle pressure before pressure exposes them.
That means working at multiple levels:
The individual level: self-regulation, values, mindset, psychological skills, personal development.
The interpersonal level: communication, trust, collaboration, roles, relationships, leadership.
The organisational level: cultural norms, shared identity, aligned expectations, department collaboration, and the broader performance environment.
This is not soft.
It is infrastructure.
And it fits perfectly with how I think about high-performance systems in football.
Clubs often talk about culture, but culture is not a slogan on the wall. It is the repeated experience people have inside the building.
How feedback is given.
How mistakes are handled.
How non-selection is communicated.
How players are challenged.
How staff align their messages.
How trust is built.
How pressure is interpreted.
How people respond after setbacks.
Those details decide whether pressure becomes a threat or an opportunity.
One of Helena’s strongest points is that psychological safety is not the opposite of high standards.
That is a crucial distinction.
In many performance environments, wellbeing and performance are still treated like competing priorities.
As if caring about people automatically lowers ambition.
As if psychological safety means being soft.
As if support reduces competitiveness.
Helena challenges that directly.
Players need both challenge and support.
They need clear standards, accountability, and ambitious expectations. But they also need to feel respected, heard, valued, and safe enough to take risks without being defined by one mistake.
That is not lowering the bar.
That is building the foundation that allows players to reach it more consistently.
This is especially important in football because pressure is individual, but performance is collective.
A player can feel pressure alone. But they rarely perform alone.
Their decisions are shaped by teammates, coaches, communication, relationships, tactical structure, trust, emotional climate, and shared expectations.
That is why Helena’s point about co-regulation is so valuable.
Players constantly influence each other.
Through body language.
Through communication.
Through reactions to mistakes.
Through emotional tone.
Through how they respond to adversity.
Through how they support or challenge one another.
This is where sport psychology in football becomes systemic.
It cannot live only in one-to-one conversations.
Those conversations matter deeply. Confidential spaces matter. Individual support matters. Trust between player and psychologist matters.
But the psychological environment is shaped every day by coaches, staff members, leaders, teammates, and the wider club culture.
Many of the most important psychological moments do not happen in formal sessions.
They happen during training.
In feedback meetings.
In the gym.
In team talks.
During selection conversations.
After mistakes.
After injuries.
After wins.
After disappointment.
That means sport psychology should not be seen as the sole responsibility of the sport psychologist.
It is a shared responsibility across the performance environment.
For me, this is one of the biggest lessons for modern football operations, player development, academy strategy, leadership, coaching, and high-performance culture.
The club environment and the national team environment make this even more interesting.
At club level, there is continuity.
You work with a relatively stable squad. You see players and staff every day. You can build trust over time. You can be present in informal moments. You can gradually develop shared mental models and integrate psychological work into daily practice.
That continuity creates depth.
But the national team context creates a different challenge.
Limited time. Concentrated windows. Players arriving from different clubs. Different tactical principles. Different behavioural expectations. Different communication styles. Different performance environments.
The work becomes more compressed.
Trust has to be built quickly. Alignment has to happen fast. Players need to feel connected almost immediately. Coaches and staff need to create clear messages, shared expectations, and a collective way of operating within a short timeframe.
That is a very different form of psychological work.
Less slow build. More rapid alignment.
And yet, the goal is the same:
Creating conditions that allow individuals and teams to thrive, develop, and perform at their best.
This is why I find the interview so valuable.
It shows that sport psychology is not a side function.
It is part of the operating system of performance.
The same way clubs need tactical clarity, physical preparation, medical support, recruitment strategy, data infrastructure, and player development pathways, they also need a strong psychological performance environment.
Not as a nice-to-have.
As a competitive advantage.
And the more football professionalizes, the more important this becomes.
Because the margins are not only tactical or physical anymore.
They are relational.
They are psychological.
They are cultural.
They are in the quality of conversations, the consistency of standards, the trust inside the group, and the ability of people to keep learning under pressure.
That is what Helena captures so well.
Players rarely grow in isolation.
The environment decides whether pressure breaks them, protects them, or helps them become better.
