by Ruud Gullit
Emotions such as anxiety and confidence may lie miles apart, yet on the pitch they are surprisingly close. Psychology coaches are increasingly common at soccer clubs. Although now they are generally accepted, this kind of thing used to be taboo and consultations were kept secret.
Psychology coach
I have always been open about my own connection with Ted Troost, who pioneered a style of physical therapy called haptonomy. I felt good as a result of his treatment and I’ve never made a fuss about it. At AC Milan we were also way ahead of our time in this. They had a team of psychologists at Milanello mixing with the players’ group. No one thought it strange.
Besides individual sessions on request, we also did team sessions. We would all lie down on the floor and then the psychologist would say: “Close your eyes, breathe with your stomach and imagine a black-contoured frame. Put all your negative thoughts about what you can’t do into that black frame. Now do the same but with a gold frame, and think of all the things you want to do and that are going well.” Then he played the theme from Chariots of Fire.
There’s no proof that it helped. But I know we won everything in sight with AC Milan, and we never ridiculed it. Medical supervision was uniquely important at AC Milan and the psychological health of the players was a part of that.
Another psychologist kept an eye on the relations between players in and around training sessions. He got involved in everything. If two players had a disagreement, he would intervene between them immediately and try to get to the deeper causes of the problem and to deal with it. Because he kept a close eye on everything he prevented things from getting out of control—disagreements hardly had an opportunity to develop in the dressing room.
I have rarely experienced such a large homogeneous group. We never had a chance to form cliques. The psychologist intervened straight away. It was all interconnected and felt really natural. Marco van Basten and Frank Rijkaard were in the same dressing room as me, but we didn’t form a Dutch clique within AC Milan. The Italians treated us like their own and involved us in everything—outside Milanello too. If you couldn’t adapt, you didn’t belong at AC Milan. To avoid the risk of buying a player who didn’t fit in, they screened you extensively beforehand. When they contacted me to suggest a transfer, the club knew more about me than I did.
When it came to Frank Rijkaard, at first the club had doubts—not about the player, but about his personality. He had signed contracts with Ajax and PSV, had fled to Sporting Lisbon and later he had moved to Real Zaragoza. They interrogated me and Marco endlessly about Frank. Happily we persuaded everyone that Rijkaard would be an asset for AC Milan. He was the missing link, with his strength, insight, stamina and ability to score.
You had to fit the club profile. How did you behave as a professional in the dressing room? And out of the dressing room? Were you gregarious? Everyone is different, but you have to work together. Respect for each other was an important principle. It is a key aspect of performing together.
Captain
To captain a team is something special. You represent the players and at the same time you’re the person they come to, as do the managers, board, directors, media, sponsors and fans. Internally and externally, you’re the figurehead. To be a good captain you need a sense of responsibility.
You need to have the right personality. A captain knows how to bring all the elements together. Not everyone is able to carry the responsibility for the team and its performance. You have to stand up for your players and the club. It’s an important function, often even more so off the pitch than on it.
It doesn’t really matter which position you play in—on the pitch you toss for the kickoff and have access to the referee if there’s something you want to say or you want explained. That role on the pitch is more or less defunct these days, now that referees have stopped listening to players. Of particular importance is your negotiation with the directors or the board regarding bonuses.
Captaining the national side is an even greater privilege. You are representing your country. That captain’s armband stands for something, although I feel that it should always be given to the person who emerges as the natural leader of the selected team. There should be no controversy within the group about the choice and the captain should be a first choice for the team; otherwise he soon loses credibility. Naturally, the more experienced members of the team are the first in line. In Spain, it is standard for the person who has been at the club longest to be the captain.
I know that selecting a captain can cause dissent in the team. So it’s good to have some guidance from above to help the process along. In 1973, Ajax had won three European Cups, predecessor of today’s Champions League. Instead of going for the compelling present holder of the position, Johan Cruijff, the Ajax players elected the calm, senior and introverted Piet Keizer as their new captain. Within weeks, Cruijff was on his way to Barcelona.
Reserves
For a player, the hardest thing to accept is being a reserve. It means being satisfied with second place, while you know that you really belong in the first team. A manager can never afford to neglect the reserves, because that leads to discord in the group.
In 2015/16, some of the Chelsea players began to complain. At first it was only the reserves, but then the first team began to express frustration too. Although Chelsea kept losing, José Mourinho continued to keep his first team unchanged. He wanted to show his confidence in them, but then the reserves began to complain that they never had a chance to play—a huge dilemma for a coach. Winning is one answer, but Chelsea weren’t winning.
Members of the squad who aren’t playing need more attention than the first-team players. Reserves are crucial, because with today’s intensely busy schedules it’s impossible to complete a full season with only eleven players. You need to keep your reserves sharp so they’ll perform when you play them. The work this involves is done during the week. Let the reserves know they matter as part of the squad. At AC Milan the psychologists kept a particular eye on the reserves.
You also need your reserves to prepare the first team for the next game. At AC Milan we often played tactical games with the first team against the reserves. At other clubs the reserves would do their level best to show what they could do, but at Milan that wasn’t the point at all, it was a tactical training session for the first eleven. Most important of all was for the second eleven to play their role as a practice team, to allow the first eleven to work out tactics.
No one dared go full out against the first team during tactical training. If anyone tried it, they were told off and given short shrift. Since we often changed the first team it was not uncommon for me to play with the reserves too. The object was to improve the first team. If the first team won that weekend, then we had won too.
Whenever I played against the first team, I never gave it the full 100 percent. Those games aren’t intended for you to give your best performance. Sometimes you’ll get players who go hell for leather in a training game, and then don’t do anything when they get selected. It’s fine to show what you can do during training, but never in a tactical practice session.
Premier League managers don’t have an easy time of it, with their enormous squads of as many as thirty players. Players from every corner of the globe, each with his own culture. Try keeping all of them happy, especially when you have to tell someone why he hasn’t been selected. After the third time, he says: “That’s all very well, but I just want to play.” In the end, players start to get annoyed. The advantage of such a busy program is that most players can expect to get their chance at some point. Then they have to show what they can do, which may not be that easy since the pressure is all the greater when you so rarely get a chance.
In the same way, reserves also get their chance to play in international games. Opportunities come when the best players are rested. Easy to say perhaps, but try going out there and taking over from Arjen Robben, Wesley Sneijd
er or Robin van Persie. Or stepping in when players like that don’t want to play in an international, or play with the brakes on because their employer insists they come back without an injury, or that they can only play for one half.
Personal circumstances
You would imagine that a stable home life would be the ideal situation for a player. But everyone experiences that differently. What’s important is to feel good. Some clubs advise young players to settle down quickly: family life provides a tranquil base and a place to build a regular routine. But what if you’re always arguing with your partner? Or if there’s a young child in the house who keeps you awake half the night? It’s hard to lay down a definitive rule on this one.
At AC Milan they used to look at your qualities as a player and your behavior in the dressing room, but also at your life outside the club. What is your social life like? Do you go out on the town? Do you have a family? Any hobbies? How do you perform on television? These factors mattered when AC Milan were considering whether to accept me as a player.
Naturally, clubs have moved on over the decades. Life has changed since twenty, thirty years ago, if only through social media. These days, appearance is crucial. You don’t need to have much talent to become famous and earn buckets of cash. Look at the Kardashians: a sign of the times. Young people grow up with these heroes and as club and manager you have to keep in mind what the fans want, without losing sight of the need to perform on the pitch.
Performance has to be paramount. If you have other things you want to be doing that’s fine. It’s important to enjoy the good things in life: expensive headphones, the latest phone, flash clothes with smart hats and intricate tattoos, fast cars, beautiful people; all the superficial things that people like to be seen with and that reflect your identity. There’s really no point in objecting to that mentality. This is the young generation of today. Life goes on.
If you want your club to be a part of the march of time then you’ll have to embrace change, not try to stop it, as long as performance on the pitch remains the priority and winning is paramount, preferably as a team. Because it’s only natural that certain members of a club will get together and form cliques. And even if they’re together, each of them will have his own agenda, because there’s a lot of money to be had, with transfers, and with all kinds of commercial deals. For a top player, these can be even more lucrative than soccer. Those players have to be made to understand that it’s because of soccer that companies are interested in them. If they lose sight of that, they’ll lose their place at the top of the soccer pyramid.
Coping with fame
It’s not easy to deal with instant fame and popularity. Everyone wants you. They never bring anything, they’re always taking.
I regularly meet young players who have shot to the top and are having trouble keeping their feet on the ground or dealing with the concept of being famous. I always give them some of my time and offer a more critical opinion of them, since that’s what’s usually missing. I’ve got plenty of experience and I don’t have a hidden agenda.
The most important lesson to learn is: dare to say no, even to people close to you, like your parents, brothers and sisters. They’ll call you arrogant, big-headed, or say you’re betraying your roots, but you have to protect yourself. It’s not one person asking for something. No, there’s a whole line out there. If you give them what they want, you’ll be busy all day long, only you won’t be playing soccer, which is where you’re supposed to be focusing your energy and your attention. If you do something for one, you won’t be able to send the others away. Dare to say no. You’ll be criticized for it, but that’s something you must learn to live with. Don’t get involved, even though they won’t love you for it.
Today it’s hard for young stars not to be affected by how their lives have changed: they earn such extraordinary amounts of money. When you’re young you want fast cars, a fine house, smart clothes, beautiful friends, I understand all that. But ask yourself this: is this good for my career?
The good people around you are the ones who dare to disagree. I understand the urge to follow the advice of your immediate family. Unfortunately, their critical faculties might leave a lot to be desired. The young soccer player is always the prince in the family, can never do anything wrong, not least because he earns lots of money and raises the whole family’s lifestyle to new heights. Members of the family will probably see an independent business advisor as a freeloader. Just leave it to the older brother . . .
Diego Maradona is the best example of how horribly wrong that can go. When he came from Argentina to Barcelona, he brought a whole tribe with him: family, friends, acquaintances, an entire clan. It was doomed. His entourage lived in the city and Maradona was constantly distracted by them. Suddenly these followers were his principal concern and he hardly had time for his real business—playing soccer. He played well enough, but his focus was on what was happening in his household, off the pitch.
At Napoli they had a different policy and he was forced to reduce their number. Finally Maradona learned to say no. In Naples, Maradona played brilliantly because he no longer had to worry about his publicity-hungry entourage.
Mysterious forces in sport
FC Barcelona have the unusual quality of being able to play better with ten players than with the full contingent of eleven. While they sweep everyone off the field with eleven, when there are only ten on the pitch, Barcelona’s players seem to become infused with an unbelievable power as they realize that they have to do even better to win.
When preparing for a match, one question is critical: what is your plan for when you find yourself facing eleven players and you have only ten on your side?
Do you want to make your defense as compact as possible? Because it’s harder for the other side to play against ten players who are forming a massive defensive block, than against eleven who are playing to gain three points. But no, when they’re down to ten players, Barcelona go the opposite route, piling on the pressure even more and playing one-on-one in defense. Astonishing, because you need to maintain tight discipline, far more s0 than with eleven in the side.
You realize that straight away when it happens to your team. It gives you an automatic mental kick. It’s weird, as if you have another, undiscovered gear. Suddenly you’ll see players marking half a meter away instead of three meters, you’ll see players slide to try and keep the ball in play, you’ll see more fouls, more reactions to the referee’s decisions, players will encourage each other just that little bit extra and instead of turning sideways when a shot comes in, they’ll face the ball full on even though they know it’s going to hurt.
Are there really mysterious forces at work? Or is it just a question of mentality? And what happens when a team suddenly turns a huge deficit around in the last fifteen minutes to snatch victory? Does it smell blood?
Smelling blood
The perfect example of a team smelling blood is Liverpool in 2005: the final of the Champions League in Istanbul against AC Milan. No problem for the Italians, so it seemed at halftime with the score at 3–0 and an array of top players such as Maldini, Cafu, Nesta, Stam, Gattuso, Pirlo, Kaká, Crespo, Shevchenko and Seedorf. But then, as the second half started, Liverpool launched into an all-or-nothing offensive that brought them three goals in the first fifteen minutes. Eventually the English won, because AC Milan’s players were so distraught that they missed no fewer than three penalties in the shootout.
It was when Liverpool got a goal back to make it 3–1 shortly after halftime that I suddenly felt that something was about to happen. A strange unidentifiable feeling. You sensed the fear begin to take hold among the Italians in the stadium, like an animal detects fear. AC Milan’s players felt it too. Instinctively. Why? A kind of collective primitive power is released when you score, and you suddenly start believing in yourself. It’s the same feeling you get when you enter a place and the atmosphere is good or bad. Without anyone s
aying anything, you feel it. Standing on the other side, you get such a boost of energy and confidence when you sense the fear in your opponents that it’s almost an out-of-body experience. Instinct takes over.
I experienced something similar at the European Championship in 1988. We lost to the USSR in a group game and the Russians were stronger in the final too. Until we made it 1–0, and then 2–0. And especially the way Van Basten scored the second; you simply knew it couldn’t go wrong after that. Not even when they got a penalty. Even then there was no salvation for them; Van Breukelen was supremely confident: he knew exactly which corner Igor Belanov would target.
You see that kind of thing at kindergarten. Put a group of toddlers in a room, place a toy car in the middle and leave them to it. The result is pandemonium and the survival of the fittest. This kind of behavior is a matter of primitive instinct. Do you radiate anxiety or confidence? The people around you pick up on it. If you walk around school all day with your eyes cast down, you’ll be the victim, one hundred percent.
Is there such a thing as a bogey team? Well, even the best clubs in the world have a team they fear the most. In my day at AC Milan it was Verona. Manchester United don’t often lose to Liverpool. It’s hard to put your finger on the reason, because there is no reason. It’s really a question of feeling. In some way or other, these clubs cannot abide each other and each time you wonder before the game: this time they’ll do it. But in the end they never do. Until one day they actually manage it, like Liverpool did last season, when they knocked Manchester United out of the Europa League to qualify for the quarterfinals.
Another unusual phenomenon is that some teams manage to outperform themselves in one week and then a week later they slip up on a visit to a relegation candidate and seem to play at half power. At AC Milan we were constantly being confronted by opponents who gave it 110 percent and played on, or often just a little over, the edge of the permissible. For clubs like that, Milan was the most difficult fixture of the year. Of course, it made us even stronger and harder to beat. Oddly, when I moved to Sampdoria and we played those same clubs there was little left of that fighting spirit that they used to bring when they visited AC Milan.