Delivering sport psychology inside English Premier league football clubs: Meeting the person not the footballer!

Coaching lecture series "Coaching - Research and Practice"

Dr Mark Nesti

Reader in Psychology of Sport at Liverpool John Moores Unversity and one of England's leading sport psychologist.

This presentation will examine how psychological support can be used to assist football players inside the highly pressured and volatile culture that very often exists in the elite professional game.

Material will be included from the speaker's 16 years of applied practice with English Premier league footballers. This will be used to highlight that to be effective, psychologists need to use interventions that are grounded in humanistic, existential and other person centred approaches.

The psychologist must also attend to the culture within the club to ensure greater congruence between their work and the environment. In order to impact this, I will argue that sport psychologists may also need to operate as organisational psychologists, and that this has been something that is often overlooked within the field. 

Further information

Reinhard Stelter, Coaching Psychology Unit, University of Copenhagen

The lecture is part of a series of lectures titled "Coaching - research and practice", which is sponsored by the EMCC. The lecture series aims to build a bridge between research and praxis in coaching and at the same time embed coaching practices in the research discourse. The intention is to hear from researchers, who explore coaching from a business, health or sports related angle. The Coaching Psychology Unit at the University of Copenhagen was established in order to launch and coordinate interdisciplinary research, education and dissemination in coaching.