“The Mental Health Burden of Professional Football Coaches: An Autopsy of a Malaise”

Concern is growing around the mental health of players, but little attention is paid to that of professional coaches. Yet they rub shoulders with the anguish of uncertainty on a daily basis, all the more so in a season with four runs, like the one which is about to end in Ligue 1. Autopsy of a malaise.

Requested in the mixed zone by the teams of Prime Video, on April 15 at the Parc des Princes, the coach of RC Lens, Franck Haise, spoke to his colleague Julien Stéphan, on technical unemployment since his departure from Strasbourg in January, to send him his best wishes for success. “The job of coach is not easy,” he assessed with this sibylline formula, embellished with a smile filled with brotherly compassion. The late Gérard Houllier estimated that the life of a coach is divided between “20% happiness and 80% confusion, worries and conflicts”. Coaching in the world of professional football is a job that consumes little by little. Dijon coach Pascal Dupraz described it as that of a tormented man, “always glued to his defibrillator”.

“When you take the photo in July for the League site and you see your face at a press conference in March, you say to yourself ‘but I took fifteen years!'”, pretends to be surprised Philippe Hinschberger, interviewed by RMC Sport. The former Metz player (1977-1992) is however no longer brand new in the profession, since he has been coaching since the end of the 1990s, mainly in Ligue 2 – in Louhans-Cuiseaux, Niort, Le Havre, Laval, Créteil and Metz (L2 and L1). Recently, he was dismissed by Amiens, a decision in which he actively participated, he told us. Hinschberger no longer recognized himself in this team: “When you fail too often it’s hard, you fall back into questions after each match, it’s exhausting.”

“If I lose a match, I very rarely sleep, confesses to RMC Sport Christophe Pélissier, the coach of AJ Auxerre, whose team is struggling at the end of the season to stay in the top flight. matches a week, I’m mentally worn out, I have admiration for coaches who play 70 matches a season under very high pressure. It’s very simple, the week that marks the end of the championship, I always have a angina, otitis or my back is blocked, it’s quite systematic.”

Live your job without forgetting yourself

The fight against the Covid-19 epidemic exposed the mental health of athletes, and informed them of the suffering they had been trying to hide until then. If the subject remains taboo and the barriers difficult to break down, it is also better documented. The International Federation of Professional Footballers’ Associations (FIFPro) has taken it up and shown that footballers are a group subject to psychological disorders. On the other hand, no study has been published on the case of coaches, whose position is nevertheless one of the most stressful one can imagine. Day and night, big responsibilities weigh on their shoulders: preparing each meeting, managing a myriad of personalities as diverse as they are complex to better form a team, take care of it, anticipate and adapt to the unexpected, respond to the press, all in high-stakes situations. A tumultuous life, in short.

“Every day something happens: a guy kicks his foot in a nightclub bathroom at three in the morning. It’s 9:30 a.m., we practice at 10:30 a.m. You don’t know if he’s going to s train because he has to do a trial with the medical staff, you always have things. It’s my big fear. The morning of the match, when I wake up, I always put the Whatsapp group with the info medical: ‘What is the bad news of the day?'”, testifies Hinschberger. A series of underperformances, tensions that are created around the demands of the club, the bronca of the supporters: the atmosphere can become deleterious and spiral out of control when things go wrong. The coach then risks going astray, vis-à-vis his players, vis-à-vis himself. “It’s when you’re in the whirlwind that big mistakes happen”, abounds with RMC Sport the former defender of OM (1985-1987) Jacky Bonnevay, coach in the early 2000s, then assistant to Gernot Rohr , Vahid Halilhodzic or even Claude Puel.

A phenomenon exacerbated in the context of a season with four runs, which accentuates the precariousness of the profession, the consequences of the match being even more harmful. The 2022-2023 season has also broken an instability record for coaches. With nine coaches thanked before mid-season, the exercise was already unprecedented on the speed of these dismissals. “When you have the whole environment burning around you, you don’t necessarily realize how much you are impacted”, notes the mental trainer Nicolas Gouspy, who accompanies coaches on the management of their emotions, the relative stakes to their profession. “After a while, whether you like it or not, when you forget yourself in your work, you lose performance. The whole difficulty is to remain sufficiently lucid about what is happening. in us, in relation to the way we experience the events that follow one another. This does not happen overnight. Like a burn-out, it is a weakening that is done over time. “

Eviction, a traumatic ordeal

In addition, the coaching profession has become more difficult to exercise in recent years. There is broad consensus among the people we interviewed on this finding. In fact, the sources of stress have multiplied: from the advent of social networks that feed the media cacophony to the club environment that rocks under influences that the coaches do not always control. “It has always existed in high-level sport, testifies to RMC Sport Christian Gourcuff. When you lose ten matches, it’s complicated, but it has accelerated, in one direction as in the other. You win two games, you’re the best coach in the world, you lose two games, you’re in trouble It’s not true everywhere, some frameworks are still stronger than others, but we’re still weakened by this environment. We are extolled and then afterwards… It is the ability to remain lucid when we are carried up high which is fundamental to holding on when we are in more difficulty.”

“You lose three matches, you are threatened today, more and more. Why? Because the coaches have agents. You lose three matches, you have the agents who call the president: ‘well, if you are in difficulty, I may have the man you need, it gives them ideas that they may not have had before”, fulminates Philippe Hinschberger. Sacked by Amiens, the former coach of FC Metz experienced what he has already experienced several times in the past: “a slow death.” “You die a little bit each time, I’ve died three or four times in my professional life,” he confessed to RMC Sport. A departure can be violent to take psychologically, and leave a lasting mark on the coaches.

“Especially the first time, it can be very difficult, even traumatic”, underlines Jacky Bonnevay. “The comments after the dismissal are dramatic”, deplores the skinned alive Christian Gourcuff. Although he is retired from the world of football, the former emblematic coach of Lorient still feels “hate “towards the Pinault family, owner of Stade Rennais. A tenacious and potentially destructive resentment that he has nurtured since the end of his Rennes adventure that he “still does not digest”.

“It is important that the coaches are able by themselves – it is often a question of lucidity at the moment T – to distance themselves from what is happening, believes Nicolas Gouspy. Because even if a coach is dismissed with loss and noise, it should not be forgotten that he was recruited. Except that, when you take the full brunt of a brutal dismissal, you may be tempted to think only of what went wrong between He was able to manage his team perfectly well for a long enough period of time, except that when one was dismissed and played the role of scapegoat, as is too often the case with coaches…” ” You have a feeling of anger”, adds Philippe Hinschberger. Then comes the absolute void. “Because you go from everything to nothing, from hyper activity to nothing, nothingness, the sea of ​​oil”, underlines the Lorrain again.

Football is lagging behind in dealing with these issues. Even if AS Monaco sets an example with mental health professionals integrated into the staff and the first team. Young coaches (note, Paulo Fonseca has his own mental trainer) are also much more willing to take up the subject than their elders. The latter are reluctant to surround themselves with a third party who will detach themselves from the pressure linked to football, particularly in terms of interpersonal relations within a group. “It’s completely stupid, recognizes Philippe Hinschberger. When we are out of confidence, we don’t always have the right speech, we are always in turmoil. You need someone else who talks to the player. “

“As a direct player in the coach-trainer relationship, coaches obviously cannot offer players a free space to speak out. They can do a lot of good from time to time, by listening, advising, paying attention… but both player and coach are too involved to access the same freedom of exchange that a third party can offer”, confirms Alexandre Le Jeune, confronted daily with this problem with young people from INF Clairefontaine and professional players who come for treatment at the national center.

However, according to the testimonies that we have been able to collect, coaches very often consider, rightly or wrongly, that mental preparation, which they associate with the managerial part, is almost exclusively their responsibility, whereas they are not trained there. This is partly due to excessive suspicion of a third party interfering in their affairs. “A form of paranoia,” agrees former player Pascal Saint-Yves, who now speaks in the ear of footballers. The outside speaker is scary.

“Two-thirds of Ligue 1 and Ligue 2 coaches have the coach’s coach. They don’t say it because they think it could be misinterpreted”, we nevertheless whisper to Unecatef, the union of coaches. Christophe Galtier was one of the few to open up about the need he had felt to be surrounded at key moments in his career to better understand the management of his group (he notably collaborated with Pier Gauthier, former tennis player and ex-coach of Sébastien Grosjean), but the PSG coach is an exception. “I think a coach worthy of the name has every interest in being accompanied in his mental preparation when he needs it, and not waiting until the last moment, when everything goes wrong,” warns Nicolas Gouspy. “To fall from the first floor, and not from the tenth”, concludes Jacky Bonnevay.