What happens when a football player loses confidence...

We've all seen it, and if you haven't, watching some of the recent highlights of Cole Palmer or Muhammad Salah will quickly reveal it to you.

When a player is full of confidence, there are certain attributes that exude out of them, here's just a few of them...

• Controlled aggression - they demonstrate a willingness to get on the ball, to receive the ball in tight areas, to be the one demanding the ball. They are direct and focused in their work.
• Proactive decision-making: Makes quick, decisive plays without overthinking.
• Increased creativity: Willing to attempt difficult skills, passes, or shots.
• Precision: Executes passes, shots, and dribbles with confidence and accuracy.
• Adaptability: Handles pressure well, adapting to changing game dynamics without hesitation.
• Positive energy: Displays enthusiasm and excitement, both vocally and in actions.
• Expressiveness: Expresses joy openly when scoring or making a significant play, energizing the team.

But when a player is low in confidence. The picture changes quickly, and if you need any examples of this, you need look no further than Manchester United.

Low confidence can lead to:

• Hesitantancy: Avoids demanding the ball, shies away from tight areas, and lacks assertiveness.
• Reactive decision-making: Overthinks or delays actions, often opting for safe, conservative choices.
• Safety-first mindset: Reluctant to attempt challenging skills, passes, or shots, sticking to predictable plays.
• Imprecision: Struggles with consistent accuracy in passing, shooting, and dribbling.
• Rigidity: Finds it difficult to adapt under pressure, becoming predictable or ineffective.
• Low energy: Appears subdued or disengaged, with minimal vocal or physical enthusiasm.
• Inhibited expression: Rarely celebrates or displays joy, potentially dampening team morale.

And these outward, observable signs can be quickly identified.

But how do they get to that place? And what happens inside the mind and brain of the player when they lose confidence?

There is a specialised part of the brain called the amygdala. Multiple convergent studies show that the amygdala complex is a critical area of the brain for assigning valence to events.

Valence is the emotional value or appeal of an event or situation.

We can view it as being extremely positive (+1), neutral, (0), or extremely negative (-1).

When a difficulty or setback occurs, the player's brain will tend to assign the event a negative valence - or negative emotional value.

For example, being dispossessed in central midfield and losing possession might be given a negative valence of -0.2.

Whereas, missing an open goal in the last minute that would draw the game might be assigned a negative valence of -0.9.

For each of these negatively valenced events, the mind stores information.

The mind generates Emotional Memory Images or EMI's of the event (Hudson and Johnson, 2021). A 'record' of the event, so to speak.

The larger the negative valence, the bigger and more impactful the mental imagery.

The key here is that these negative mental images are stored nonconsciously.

This means they are often not in the player's daily awareness, but they sit in the background, only activated or triggered when relevant cues appear.

So... at this point our player has had a couple of negatively valenced events that have been stored outside their daily awareness.

In the following game, when an opportunity to take a shot at goal presents itself, the old stored images from the previous game (the missed open goal) flashes into the mind of the player and as a result, he or she shies away from the shot and plays it safe.

But in doing so, they feel the criticism of the manager, the groan of the crowd, the agitation of their teammates.

The result? They feel more stressed.

As more and more of these difficulties, setbacks, mistakes and missed opportunities occur, the associated baggage (in the form of emotional images) accumulates in the player's mind.

And just to remind you here, this is a nonconscious process! Meaning the player experiences the FEELINGS that come with the process, but are not conscious of the process itself.

Now, our player is going into a match with an accumulation of negative images from past events clogging up his or her headspace.

They get into a negative mindset, they start talking to themselves negatively, their body language or nonverbal behaviour shrinks and contracts, showing their vulnerability.

They overthink things, they take the extra touch, they hesitate, and all this creates a vicious cycle of decreasing performance until the player appears bereft of confidence, potentially being taken out of the team, which only reduces confidence further.

What happens next?

Well, usually a player will use a combination of psychological approaches combined with training practices to shift them out of their funk and start climbing the ladder of confidence again.

These psychological practices might be focusing on positive self-talk, visualisation exercises - where they see themselves performing well, positive team-building exercises to boost mood and wellbeing, or any number of other techniques.

The practical side of it might include training harder, bringing more focus to training and games, putting the hours in on the training pitch and practicing the key skills over and over again as confidence gradually builds.

The practical side might also include a bit of good fortune.

As Alan Shearer has said multiple times, the striker might just need one to go in off his or her shin, through a deflection or even in off his back-side! Anything to shift the chemistry of the player and start to bring the positively valenced images back to forefront of the mind.

The problem with these approaches is that they can be quite time-consuming. A player can take months to refind their form, years in some cases...

But what if there was a better way?

What if, rather than having to grind through all the positive self-talk, visualisations, extra training sessions and more intense running, the nonconscious mental imagery causing the low confidence could be shifted?

What if the negatively valenced mental images serving as baggage to weigh the player down could be cleared and processed, and replaced with positive images from earlier moments?

Just how much more quickly could it help a player return to form?

And what kind of impact could that have on their season? On their team's season?

Could we see a player back to their expressive best in a fraction of the time?

Yes, yes we could.