Emotions have been running high on the red side of north London this season. Too high, according to some.
“The emotion is something that's a negative — it's not a positive for me in a title race,” argued Gary Neville on his YouTube channel The Overlap last month. Neville, who helped Manchester United win the Premier League eight times, was pointing specifically to the wild celebrations that accompanied Arsenal's 4-2 win away to Aston Villa in February when two stoppage-time goals secured them three points and moved them back to the top of the table.
Arsenal experienced more late drama two weeks later when Reiss Nelson's 97th-minute goal completed their comeback from 2-0 down after an hour to win 3-2 at home to Bournemouth. Their manager Mikel Arteta called it “probably the most emotional moment that we have lived together”.
Twelve days after that, Arteta's side were involved in a penalty shootout against Lisbon's Sporting that ended in defeat, marking the end of their third trophy challenge this season: the Europa League.
These spikes of intense emotion aren't unusual when a team is locked in a fight for something important — whether that's a first league title in almost 20 years or avoiding relegation. Indeed, in recent seasons, the title races between Liverpool and Manchester City have been laced with emotional highs and lows: “This is Liverpool. This means more”, remember?
When matches are physically intense — when players cover more ground, spend longer periods in high-heart-rate zones, make more tackles et cetera — we understand that the majority of them will need more time to recover, that their bodies might be aching and sore for a day or so afterwards. But what about when teams experience periods of emotional intensity? How does that affect players? Does it require the same consideration when it comes to recovery? How does mental fatigue affect physical readiness to play again?
It's not an easy thing to quantify, explains performance coach and psychologist Jamil Qureshi: “You can see how many minutes someone's played, you can measure how far they run. But it's very, very hard to measure how much emotional contribution has been made in a game. So it's not a science.
“But what you might see is people making mistakes that they wouldn't normally make. It's that loss of focus or lack of concentration which is the issue. Another one is people becoming over-emotional; that's where they may become reckless, or start to do something which will compromise the 90 minutes.
“Look at the recent game between Fulham and Manchester United (an FA Cup quarter-final where Fulham scored first but then had two players sent off on 72 minutes, and ended up losing 3-1). Fulham looked in control for 70 minutes then, in the space of 30 seconds, they were down to nine men and then conceded two goals (in the next five minutes). That wasn't to do with talent or technical ability. It was to do with an inconsistency of thinking from them.”
Fulham suffered a costly meltdown in their FA Cup quarter-final loss to Manchester United (Photo: Paul Ellis/AFP via Getty Images)
Following that dramatic win over Bournemouth, The Athletic's James McNicholas wrote that “the greatest threat to Arsenal's title hopes could well be an element of emotional fatigue”. Why? Well, most of us know how it feels to go through periods that are emotionally intense, and how it can often leave us feeling drained physically as well as mentally.
Sports-science consultant Jo Clubb explains why that is.
“To the body, stress is stress,” Clubb says. “Although we naturally separate it into work (stress) or relationship (stress), or whatever it might be, to the body, it all triggers similar responses. So the physiological and psychological aspects are completely intertwined.”
The physiological responses to stress can include the likes of increased heart rate, faster breathing and tensing of muscles, to name just a few. Stress can also change a person's cognition, arousal and attention — explaining why players might make uncharacteristic mistakes during times of heightened emotions.
In Clubb's role as an applied sports scientist (she has worked with teams across the Premier League and the NFL and NHL, the world's biggest leagues in American football and ice hockey), her focus is on aspects such as training load, physical recovery and testing. “We lean to more physical measures, in part because they're more easily assessed,” Clubb says, “but because the psychology — the life stresses — are intertwined with your body's physiological response, actually; it's all in one big melting pot.”
That's when it becomes useful to have a team of support staff who are all watching events from different standpoints and providing their own perspectives.
“As a sports scientist, if I just have my head in the numbers, I might not appreciate the context of that,” Clubb says. “But through observation — and through the staff experience as well, because they obviously experience the emotions too — in that instance, it might be an example where numbers-wise, the training loads aren't particularly high. But more recovery, or greater emphasis on recovery, is given despite the lower physical loads because the emotional loads are acknowledged but are harder to quantify.
“Really, it takes a group of staff to have their finger on the pulse to be aware of that and to have those conversations.”
There are a number of physical markers clubs can look at to try to assess how players are coping.
“We can look at combining measures of training loads,” says Clubb, “so the external load, which is the amount of work they've done — the distances, the speeds et cetera — but combined with the internal load, which could be heart-rate response. Or we might ask them, 'How hard did you find it?' That's known as 'rating of perceived exertion (RPE)'.
“We're combining those to look at how hard they are finding it internally compared to what they did physically, externally. Everyone has experienced this in life at times: when you go out for the same jog once a week but week to week, it feels different based on what you're going through. It's that same concept.
Arsenal watch their opponents Sporting celebrate victory following a penalty shootout in the Europa League tie (Photo: James Williamson – AMA/Getty Images)
“Another thing we can look at is the response. And that can be measured objectively, so teams might do jump testing (measuring how high a player is able to jump) once a week because the pressures, the emotions, the cognitive demands, can all have an impact on the physical output.”
The third way in which sports-science staff and coaches can monitor players is simply by observing and having the ability to engage in open and honest conversations with them. Clubb believes what is “just as important — if not potentially more so — is a stream of data and input (rather) than the actual numbers I'm collecting elsewhere with technology.
“At a conference a few years ago, someone described the 'hair in the yoghurt test'. That is, if you're at breakfast, and you are watching your players, or a particular player, and they have their hair draped over their breakfast, falling in their yoghurt, that's a sign that for whatever reason — you can't identify at that point whether it's physical or psychological — they are potentially struggling to cope. So, despite all the tech and the tools we have available, let's not forget the importance of observing the players, of body language and communication.”
Around 10 years ago, advances in technology made it possible to assess some hormonal biomarkers without the need for more invasive testing, such as taking blood samples. Instead, some clubs implemented regular (daily, in some cases) saliva tests to look at things such as cortisol (widely known as the stress hormone) levels, testosterone and perhaps the ratio between the two.
It was thought that tracking these hormones would help to build a picture of how players were coping with the physical and mental demands placed on them. But Clubb says that in recent years there has been a move away from regular hormone analysis (although hormone biomarkers are still assessed as part of a global health assessment once or twice a year).
Clubb explains this is because research showed hormone analysis had too much variation in the results — both between individuals and for single subjects: “Hormones fluctuate within the same individual for lots of reasons, including exercise and stress, but also diurnal variation, which is the changing pattern across the day (cortisol levels are typically high on waking and low around bedtime).
“We also see large variation between individuals. Some might have large changes in cortisol and others very little. These factors make it difficult to use in a team-sport setting when you're dealing with so many different individuals.”
This variation between individuals exists on a psychological level too, of course.
Psychologist Qureshi says that while a series of emotionally-draining games can have a cumulative effect and so we might see players not performing well because of the emotional contribution they are making in each of those fixtures, it's not necessarily the case for every person.
Jorginho is surrounded by his team-mates after his shot goes in off Emi Martinez, putting Arsenal ahead late on against Aston Villa (Photo: Nick Potts/PA Images via Getty Images)
“This is the difficult thing,” Qureshi says. “The art of management is to know your players: some players play so well under pressure, they almost need that pressure; whereas some may struggle with the intensity needed to perform consistently.
“So it really is up to the manager to rotate the players, not just in accordance to physical form, and physical health, but also in regard to mental wellbeing. You might have a really good player, who actually is losing concentration or losing focus because of what they're putting into each game. So are you better off playing a player who is really good, but distracted and potentially making mistakes due to lack of concentration, or someone who hasn't necessarily got the talent that another person has but is mentally fresh and has a point to prove?
“Good managers will not just assess their team in relation to technical ability, but also mental ability coming into the latter stages of the season.”
What about looking further ahead? Can an emotionally-draining season have an impact that is felt into the next one?
Liverpool's struggles this season could ultimately come down to a multitude of factors, but is it possible one of them is a hangover from 2021-22? When they won two domestic cups in penalty shootouts and were fighting right to the very end in the Premier League and Champions League, but ultimately finished runners-up in both.
“In theory, physically, one should be recovered by then,” says Clubb. “But this is where the body and mind are much more complex than we're able to capture. The impact of those memories or the feelings that you were feeling back then probably could (last).
“The (NFL's) Buffalo Bills had a ridiculously draining season last year. They were the Super Bowl favourites, (then) there was a white-supremacist attack in a local supermarket at one point, the team's owner became seriously unwell, they got stuck (in Chicago) on Christmas Day getting back to Buffalo because of snow. And then a player (Damar Hamlin) had a cardiac arrest on the field (leading to the cancellation of that game).
“That's probably the most extreme example ever of a season where you're trying to take into account the emotional toll of it all (Buffalo returned to the field the following weekend as Hamlin recovered but fell short of those pre-season expectations, losing in the last eight of the Super Bowl play-offs.). There's no single number for it. But we just try to take all these different things into account with all the different tools for monitoring that we have, as well as the feedback (from players).
“But it also depends on the turnover of players, the group, and individual players as well. Some are very good at leaving things behind and moving on, others aren't. That is where, ideally, your psychologists come into play as well with trying to equip some of those who are more affected with the tools.”
Buffalo players watch medics fight to save Damar Hamlin after his mid-game cardiac arrest (Photo: Ian Johnson/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Gary Bloom is the only psychotherapist currently working in English football, and is attached to Oxford United of League One, the domestic game's third tier. He believes there are “too many moving parts” to attribute Liverpool's inconsistencies this season to an emotional hangover from the previous one, and also takes issue with Gary Neville's assertion that “emotions are something that's a negative in a title race”.
“In my experience, it depends on the result — a winning result can galvanise a group who have little energy and a defeat can absolutely have the opposite effect — but I've never seen such energy as when a team who have won a game on a Saturday come in on a Monday or Tuesday. The tempo is normally very, very high. They don't come in and think, 'Oh god, I'm knackered'. The things that knacker them are travel and lack of rest and recovery.
“So I really disagree that over-celebrating gives you negative energy. No, it brings the group together; there's a sense of success. There's a whole theory about that: the idea that if you celebrate success, it gives you a belief that you're going to be successful the next time. It's part of our DNA.”
Qureshi takes the opposite view, citing his work in the Japanese business world, where success and failure are treated equally: “They lose a contract and then they come back in and assess why they lost it. And then they win a huge contract, and they come back into the room and have a debrief on why they won it.
“Success and failure shouldn't become emotions. They're merely equal outcomes, to be understood and analysed to give us a better level of self-awareness. If you look at what you're trying to achieve over the long term, and mid to long term, it gets you a better perspective. And perspective is needed for this stage.
“It's very fine lines in the Premier League, and emotions don't help in the slightest. It's about not having the big ups and downs that accompany a win or a loss. It is a consistency of mind that will give you that consistency of performance.”
Arsenal's Oleksandr Zinchenko said in a recent interview, “We are not robots. We are human beings. We're just doing our job and when this job is successful, why are we not allowed (to celebrate)?”
It's a standpoint Clubb empathises with, saying: “The theory of arousal is that you can be overly aroused and excited and emotional with everything. And in theory, yes, we want to focus on the process, and not let the outcome affect how one responds, but also, we're dealing with human beings.
“That's when it often comes down to the coaches and the support staff to judge. But there's no black-and-white answer to this and there's no single data point to this. How do you judge when it is helping the group to let them celebrate? To let them have that release of steam? That acknowledgement that the work has paid off? And then how do they get back to, 'OK, let's draw a line under that and move on?'
“Footballers have a cliche of, 'It's always only ever about the next game', but that is what it should be in terms of preparation for them.”
Emotions aren't easily measurable and their impact is not simple to evaluate, but learning how to manage them could make all the difference as the countdown to the end of the season commences.