Staring into the Abyss: How to Handle the Psychological Pressures of a World Cup

After blazing his penalty into the Pasadena, California, sky in the 1994 World Cup final, Roberto Baggio went to a 900-acre ranch he had recently bought in rural Argentina and spent time hunting with his father and friends.

Following his mysterious fit on the afternoon of the 1998 final—and ghost-like performance in the game itself—Ronaldo went on holiday in the Mexican resort of Cancun with his then-girlfriend, Susana Werner.

Stuart Pearce was given eight days off by his club after his squandered penalty precipitated the end of England's campaign at Italia '90 but then had to report back for Nottingham Forest's pre-season tour of Sweden.

All three men spent their summers trying to come to terms with the awful knowledge that in the biggest moments of their careers, they had come up short.

After their squandered penalties led to Spain's elimination by Russia in the last 16 at the 2018 World Cup, Koke and Iago Aspas will find themselves grappling with similar thoughts in the days and weeks ahead.

Nothing in football compares to the intensity of focus to which players expose themselves during a World Cup. The tournament's power to define careers is unique.

After Rob Green fumbled a shot from Clint Dempsey into his own net in England's first game at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, his captain, Steven Gerrard, realised immediately it was a setback from which he would not recover.

"I told him to put it to the back of his mind and focus on the fact that he was a very good keeper. But I knew he was gone," Gerrard wrote in his autobiography, My Story. "How can you recover quickly from such an error in a World Cup? You can't—and it absolutely killed him."

Green played only one further game for his country. The World Cup is both a beauty and a beast.

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Tom Bates is a performance psychologist and UEFA A Licence coach who works at Aston Villa. He says that when a player makes a serious mistake in a game, it can have an immediate inhibiting impact on their performance.

"I've worked with players who replay those mistakes over and over again on loop," he tells Bleacher Report. "That can manifest itself in different ways. You might see players chasing mistakes—in other words, trying too hard to recover and forcing things when patience is required.

"Emotionally, you can see players take extra caution: pass the ball instead of shoot, play square instead of playing a forward pass. When players focus on the mistake, they miss the next phase of the game."

Daniel Abrahams, a sports psychologist who works with Bournemouth and the England rugby team, says that if a player is to succeed in putting a mistake behind them, support from those around them is vital.

"You have to accept that the player won't be able to cope with those first few responses, which might be that night, but they have to have the capacity to get on with things the next day, especially in the middle of a tournament," Abrahams says. "When a player makes a mistake, the environment and the coaching culture should have things in place that help players deal with that, whether it's having a sports psychologist on site, having coaches who have the capacity and the language skills to be able to help that player deal with that situation or simply having an environment that accepts that mistakes happen."

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Mistakes haunt players, but they can be reframed.

Baggio and Pearce experienced powerful moments of catharsis that helped them move on from the trauma of the incidents that threatened to define their careers.

In their opening game at the 1998 World Cup, Italy were trailing 2-1 to Chile when they were awarded a penalty in the 84th minute. Baggio reacted by bending over and putting his hands on his knees, memories of Pasadena perhaps washing over him. But he drilled the penalty home and, in the quarter-finals against hosts France, found the net in a shootout, albeit in a losing cause.

Pearce showed his courage by blasting a penalty past Andoni Zubizarreta in England's shootout win over Spain in the quarter-finals at Euro '96. He, like Baggio, also scored a spot-kick in a subsequent shootout defeat as England lost to Germany in the last four.

"I knew I was going to take a penalty for England, that is for sure, and I knew that failure on that day would have been not to take a penalty—not to miss, [but] not to take a penalty," Pearce told TalkSport recently. "So I almost put myself in a position of win-win in many ways. I probably felt the tension around the stadium more than I felt the tension myself."

For some players, the best response to a mistake is not to forget about it but to peer right into the abyss of what went wrong and resolve not to let it happen again.

Sometimes a shot at redemption arrives almost instantly. Luka Modric had an extra-time penalty saved by Kasper Schmeichel in Croatia's last-16 win over Denmark, but successfully converted his spot-kick in the shootout.

"The best athletes that I've worked with don't put it out of their mind," Bates says. "They have to understand almost immediately what happened and why it happened. In the dressing room, for example, I've seen players coming in and wanting to see the clip, wanting to understand the context of what happened and try to make sense of it in order to prevent it from happening again.

"The best way that I've seen athletes respond [to mistakes] is not to hide from it but equally not to get caught up in the emotion of it. Look at it from a cold, objective perspective and analyse it. Take back control and understand what needs to be improved."

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Players carrying injuries into major tournaments also face a delicate mental balancing act. On the one hand, there is the desire to have a successful tournament; on the other, the fear—and sometimes the knowledge—that they will not be able to perform at their best.

Neymar, Mohamed Salah, Sergio Aguero and Manuel Neuer were among the players who entered the 2018 World Cup after spells on the sideline, and although all were passed fit to play, we cannot know how close to optimal fitness they were when they stepped onto the pitch for the first time.

"The crowd always thinks you're 100 percent fit just because you're out there, but many times you're not. They don't make allowances," said Alan Mullery, the former England midfielder, in Hunter Davies' classic 1972 book The Glory Game.

While supporters will always make the blithe assumption that the players on the pitch are in full possession of their physical means, Abrahams says it is vital for players who are returning from injury to have clear ideas about exactly what they can produce.

"If players who've been injured for a period of time go into a game and want to have an 8/10 or a 9/10 performance, they need to have had a conversation with the coaching staff about what is realistic and attainable," he says. "'You've been out for three months. Can you deliver a 7/10 performance for us? What does that look like? How can you do that, and how can we help you do that?'

"The problem comes when the player has been out for a few months and is fit but not completely match fit. He's not as mentally sharp as he'd like to be, but he puts that to the back of his mind and just plays. That's a very dangerous situation."

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Managing psychological health has always been an important element of tournament football, and in an age in which players can find vicious criticisms of their performances simply by putting their hands in their pockets, Bates says it is important to keep social media at a healthy distance.

"You don't have to wait for the headlines or the back pages anymore. It's instantaneous," he says. "These boys check their phones religiously. After the last words the manager says, they won't get up and have a shower—they'll check their phones. That can be very dangerous."

In a recent interview with The Independent, Salif Diao recalled how the atmosphere within Senegal's camp at the 2002 World Cup changed when Senegalese president Abdoulaye Wade dispatched a representative to the team hotel to take over operations and stop the players from spending their free time as they wished.

"I remember that 48 hours. We only saw each other at lunchtime and at training," Diao said. "The rest was in your room, looking at the ceiling, playing the game hundreds and hundreds of times in your head. I got drained, mentally and psychologically. That's the feeling everyone had."

Previously joyous and care-free, the Senegal camp became strangled by tension and boredom. A picture of effervescence in the group stage, Bruno Metsu's side lost 1-0 to Turkey on a golden goal in the quarter-finals.

"Players have to make sure that they're intense at the right time and that they know what they have to do to give themselves the best possible chance to perform. But they also need time to get away from the game and say: 'I've done enough. I can only control what I can control. I need to have some downtime to clear my mind,'" Abrahams says. "In my job, I'll have a conversation with a player who'll say: 'At three o'clock on a Saturday afternoon, I'm fatigued. We're kicking off, the whistle's just gone, and I'm fatigued. Why is that?'

"It's often because they've spent all morning thinking about it. It's very paradoxical. It's the World Cup, it's the biggest stage in football, it's the biggest platform for these players, yet they have to build mechanisms to clear their minds."

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For sports psychologists embedded with teams at the World Cup, a lot of time is spent simply making themselves available to players and staff. Abrahams says team psychologists will spend a lot of time "hanging around," while Bates highlights the importance of informal interactions.

"Walking off the pitch with a bag of balls on your shoulder, those corridor chats, coffee in the hotel room—the informal moments are as important, if not more important, than the formal, sit-down meetings," he says.

Abrahams says psychological preparation at a World Cup comes down to "controlling the controllables," which is a well-worn maxim in the world of sports psychology.

Mistakes will happen and niggles, both physical and psychological, will nag at the mind, but if a player can go onto the pitch with a clear head and a clear idea of what is expected of him, he might just keep the World Cup demons at bay.