Why Worrying About Worry Holds Back Amateur Footballers, Study Finds

When a Norwegian goalkeeper misjudges a pass and hands an opponent an open net, the world watches a single mistake decide an international match. How that player responds in the minutes and days afterwards, however, may matter as much as the error itself. A new study from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) suggests that the way footballers think about their own thoughts, a psychological construct known as metacognition, is closely tied to the competitive anxiety that undermines performance on the pitch. The research, published in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, surveyed 150 Norwegian players aged between 16 and 40, spanning both sexes and every level of the game, and found that amateur players experience significantly more competitive anxiety than their elite counterparts.

Clinical psychologist Magnus Ueland Nygaard, who co-authored the paper with Audun Havnen, professor of adult clinical psychology at NTNU’s Department of Psychology, was drawn to the topic in part by the composed reaction of a professional goalkeeper after a high-profile blunder. The player acknowledged in his post-match interview that mistakes happen and that dwelling on them leaves a footballer preoccupied with the past rather than the present. Nygaard notes that while nobody can see inside a player’s mind, such a response may reflect both the team’s support system and the psychological resilience accumulated over a long career. That resilience, the study suggests, is not evenly distributed across the sport, and the difference may lie less in what players think than in what they believe about thinking itself.

Competitive anxiety refers to an athlete’s emotional reaction to stressful sporting situations, and decades of research have established that it degrades performance. It manifests as physical tension, persistent worry and loss of concentration, and it has been reported as the most important contributor to inadequate performance in football. It is also associated with an elevated risk of injury. Sports psychologists have traditionally focused on managing players’ negative expectations about performance, for example the thought that one might fail. Far less attention has been paid to metacognitive perspectives: whether players worry about their own thought processes, whether they believe worry is useful, and whether they feel their negative thinking is beyond their control.

The NTNU researchers measured the association between metacognitive beliefs and competitive anxiety across three dimensions. The first was somatic anxiety, asking whether stress produced physical tension or nervousness during a game. The second was worry, probing whether players were anxious about performing poorly. The third was concentration disruption, examining whether that worry caused players to lose focus in the match. Metacognitive beliefs were divided into positive and negative categories. Positive beliefs encompass rituals and the conviction that worrying is part of preparation, while negative beliefs centre on the perceived uncontrollability of worry, captured by thoughts such as: when I start worrying, I cannot stop.

The results revealed a clear hierarchy of anxiety. Players competing at amateur level reported significantly more competitive anxiety than those at elite level, and the authors suggest that greater experience of dealing with pressure offers a plausible explanation. Age followed a similar pattern, with older players reporting less competitive anxiety than younger ones. Women demonstrated substantially higher levels of competitive anxiety than men, a finding consistent with previous sports psychology research, although the authors caution that female athletes made up just 23 percent of the survey sample. The study is among the few to apply metacognitive models, which are well established in clinical psychology, to a sporting context.

The distinction between positive and negative metacognitive beliefs carries practical weight. Havnen explains that if a player holds positive beliefs about worry, the player concludes that worry is beneficial, that it solves problems and belongs in preparation. But for many people, once worrying begins it cannot be stopped, and that experience signals negative metacognitive beliefs about the uncontrollability of their own thinking. The researchers’ findings indicate that the belief in worry’s usefulness may be misplaced, and that at amateur level it can actually be detrimental to performance. Players of both sexes use pre-game rituals, including deliberately thinking about their thoughts to reach the right headspace, and these rituals may feed the very cycles they are meant to break.

Elements of the metacognitive therapy framework already appear in sports psychology settings, according to Nygaard, including attentional training techniques and what practitioners call detached mindfulness. The aim in sport, however, is more often to improve performance than to reduce symptoms of psychological disorder. These coaching techniques have been popularised well beyond the dressing room, most famously in the television comedy Ted Lasso, whose fictional coach uses unusual exercises and rituals to lift players out of negative head spaces and encourage more instinctive play. The show draws on real managers: Mikel Arteta has employed pickpockets to keep his Arsenal players mentally alert, while the Norwegian coach Per-Mathias Høgmo asked his players to recite poetry to teammates as part of a mindfulness project that challenged them to focus on what they could actually control, whether playing in front of three spectators or 50,000.

Elite footballers themselves often describe deliberately constructing mental scenarios before matches. Brazilian striker Ronaldinho said in a 2006 interview that imagining the game was simply his job, and Cristiano Ronaldo has reported on a podcast that visualising a moment beforehand leaves you better prepared for it. The technique extends beyond football: swimmer Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian in history, is renowned for running multiple versions of his races through his mind before competition. Yet Nygaard warns that too heavy a reliance on visualisation can become a form of detrimental worry or rumination. Viewed through the metacognitive model, this can increase competitive anxiety and reduce performance, turning a preparation tool into a source of preoccupation.

Havnen’s take-home message from the metacognitive point of view is a shift of focus. When people worry about how they perform as parents or at work, they try to foresee things that have not happened and paint negative scenarios, in effect attempting to control the future. If instead they shift attention towards the things they can control, they can leave unproductive thoughts alone and address what is actually within their power. In football, a game of small margins in which individual mistakes affect the fortunes of the collective, that reframing may be especially valuable. The authors note that context-dependent demands are placed on players at every level, and that amateur players of all sexes and ages put pressure on their own performances just as professionals do.

Not all players, however, have access to the same reserves of support or experience to draw upon. Sportspeople are competitive by nature, and the way they think about their stress levels may shape how they play. The researchers therefore suggest that interventions should be adapted to an athlete’s level of experience, rather than assuming that techniques developed for elite squads will transfer automatically to the amateur game. For a sport in which a single lapse of concentration can decide a match, the study offers a technically grounded conclusion: managing anxiety may begin not with suppressing negative thoughts, but with changing what players believe about the thoughts themselves.

Subject of Research: The relationship between metacognitive beliefs and competitive anxiety among elite and amateur football players

Article Title: The relationship between metacognition and performance anxiety in football

Article References: The relationship between metacognition and performance anxiety in football. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: metacognition, competitive anxiety, football, sports psychology, NTNU, amateur athletes, elite athletes, worry, visualisation, detached mindfulness, performance, Frontiers in Sports and Active Living