It was one of the images of the Metropolitan on the magical night before the Inter, although today the team is out of the Champions League. Half a stadium biting their nails, the players hugging and Simeone crouching at the entrance to the locker room tunnel without looking at the penalties and missing the miracle of cloud. “The match came to me Bayer Leverkusen. “I saw the first two penalties and they scored them, I didn’t see the second one and Jan stopped it. If they are showing you the path, follow that path,” the coach confessed, laughing.
“Simeone “He is the most maniacal person I have ever encountered.” The speaker is the former soccer player and ex-pupil of the Argentine at Atlético de Madrid, Guilherme Siqueira. The Brazilian played a season and a half with the rojiblancos (2014/15 and half of 15/16) and does not forget the numerous manas not only of the Choloalso from Professor Ortega. “Once the speaker where they always play the same songs 10 minutes before warming up stopped and the Profe went crazy: ‘What is happening?’, he shouted and it was as if we were already losing 0-1,” Siqueira revealed.
The left back also remembers going by bus from the concentration hotel with the same rock songs at full blast that didn’t even let him hear his own music and the response his compatriot gave him. Joao Miranda when I asked him about it on one of those trips. “Haven’t you noticed? It’s all superstition, Siche.”
And the thing is that Atlético had just won LaLiga the previous year, 2013/14, with that draw at the Camp Nou with a goal from Godn So the red and white coaching staff decided to repeat the routines that, they believed, made them champions. “When we come back from the warm-up, Gabi pick up a ball, pass it to the Cholo and this one began to throw it away without stopping… everything the same, always the same”, he confesses William.
If sport is a compendium of talent, work and luck, in football this last factor is the one that is least attempted to be left to chance. There are countless players or coaches who have their own routines to concentrate on the game. “By always doing the same thing, I feel safer. It is important for the perception of control. I have the feeling that I am in control, it strengthens self-confidence, reduces stress and keeps my attention focus where I want it to be,” he explains. David Perispresident of the Sports Psychology Federation.
If we look closely at each match we can see some of them. The most common are, for example, players who always step onto the pitch with their right foot first, those who have fetish clothing or amulets when facing matches or those who always enter the field at the end of their teams.
He Arsenal He played a few minutes in the first leg of the Champions League round of 16 in 2009 against the Roma with nine players because Kolo Tourwhose obsession was to enter the field last, wanted to wait for the club’s medical services to attend to his teammate. William Gallus at half-time of the game. Furthermore, the Ivory Coast center back was reprimanded for entering the field without permission. Fortunately for him, his team advanced to the round and reached the semi-finals where he was knocked out by the Manchester United.
“The line is whether you control your routines and they help you. When you don’t control them and they are an obligation or cause anxiety, not doing them is the limit,” Peris defines the difference between routines and what could be considered mental illnesses, such as those that describes the former Real Sociedad footballer, Tree Gurrutxaga in Runner-up, the book he co-writes with Ander Izagirre. The player came to play matches trying to cross the lines of the field of play with his right foot, something similar to Jack Nicholson in the movie Better Impossible.
Pepe Reina He has a ritual before the start of the game that takes him a minute and consists of greeting his defenders in a certain order, touching the goalkeeper’s two posts and advancing from her to the edge of the area and back in stretches of six steps. But if there is a curious hobby of the goalkeeper, it is that of filling the car tank before games because he had done it once and it had gone well. “You associate a positive memory and you want to recover it, but you have to prevent it from being an obsession,” he comments. Peris.
“Superstitions come from being alone for a long time. You don’t stop thinking. You have habits, movies, music, calls to the family, sneakers… You think: ‘if things are going well, I’ll do the same,'” he reveals. Siqueira and confirms Peris’s theory that everyone generates their own routines to feel “connected to football.”
It is when leaving football that many footballers are more aware of the obsessions they had when they played. The little touch on the crossbar Casillas when he marked his team, the boots half size less than Aitor Ocio for increasing the “sensations” or not shooting on goal in the warm-up of Hugo Sánchez to “not waste goals.” “Football players always have more superstitions than coaching staff,” says Siqueira.
It is not the case of Simeone, who far surpasses all his players and his mania also affects the club’s travel department, which has to change hotels when the result is adverse, or the team’s travel schedules, or the players who give the wheel. of press. Although that Witsel spoke in the preview against Dortmund for the third time in the Champions League, it did not end as well as the previous two. “What helps you you have to keep and what doesn’t, avoid it,” concludes Peris.