When Your Mind Steps onto the Soccer Field
Soccer psychology and mental training: pressure, setbacks, and CBT exercises
By Gildas Garrec · 220 pages · 2026
About this book
Sport psychology for soccer players: pressure, practice, injury and rejection. A CBT program for working on personal progress, without predicting a professional career.
You play, you keep improving, and one question comes back more often than you'd admit: do you have what it takes? This book starts from a finding that should set you free rather than worry you: sport psychology research has identified what distinguishes exceptional careers — after the fact. None of it can predict, in advance, who will make it. No scout, no test, no non-selection can cross you off the list for good. Built not around superstars but around concrete mechanisms — the practice that actually counts, how you respond to an injury or a rejection, the pressure of a match that matters — this book gives you an eight-week program, built on cognitive behavioral therapy tools, to work on the part of your journey that's truly yours. No promise of results. A method for improving, whatever path lies ahead of you.
Table of contents
- 1Introduction — The Promise, and What Disproves It
- 2PART 1 — What We Think We Know
- 3Chapter 1 — The Ten Thousand Hours Myth
- 4Chapter 2 — The Myth of the Early-Born Child
- 5Chapter 3 — The Myth of Mental Toughness
- 6PART 2 — What Research Identifies
- 7Chapter 4 — Seeing Before Everyone Else
- 8Chapter 5 — The Rocky Road
- 9Chapter 6 — Filling a Gap or Extending a Model: Two Drivers
- 10Chapter 7 — The Skills You Can Learn
- 11Chapter 8 — When Regulation Breaks Down
- 12Chapter 9 — Identity Beyond Performance
- 13PART 3 — What You Will Go Through
- 14Chapter 10 — The Injury
- 15Chapter 11 — Not Making the Team
- 16Chapter 12 — The People Around You
- 17Chapter 13 — The Match
- 18PART 4 — Why It Predicts Nothing
- 19Chapter 14 — What's Not Up to the Individual
- 20Chapter 15 — Survivorship Bias
- 21Chapter 16 — Why Talent Scouting Gets It Wrong
- 22Program — The 8-Week CBT Protocol for the Six Skills
- 23Conclusion — The Only Predispositions You Can Learn
- 24Glossary
- 25Appendix — Mental Training Journal Template
- 26Appendix — Post-Match Self-Assessment Grid
- 27Appendix — Questions to Ask a Scout or Academy
- 28Bibliography
- 29About the Author
- 30Also in This Collection
