“The players didn’t show enough fight.” Listen to any pundit’s post-match reaction and you will hear variations of that soundbite. But can you analyse an athlete’s state of mind, based on their on-pitch body language?
In an era when football is increasingly leaning on data to demonstrate physical attributes, statistics offering an accurate indication of a player’s psychological qualities, such as emotional control and leadership, are harder to come by. But Premier League clubs including Brighton are using a technique intended to help in that regard with selection and recruitment.
Thomas Tuchel made headlines by telling England’s players to communicate more after he evaluated their interactions during the final of Euro 2024, but counting the number of times players gesture or talk to each other on the pitch tells only part of the mental battle being played out.
Yaw Amankwah, a former top-flight defender in Norway and Denmark, is at the centre of the push for better psychological evaluation of players. “When you take your eyes off the ball, it’s a treasure trove of information,” says Amankwah, who also works as a pundit. “Once you disregard tactics and just look at the psychological part of the game and players through this lens, it’s impossible to unsee it. It’s the subtle, nonverbal messages that show if players are very confident, aggressive or in their own bubble.”
Amankwah uses the example of a player who blasts a 20-yard shot into the stands and, 45 seconds later, receives a consoling pat on the back from a passing teammate. It is a fleeting moment that might be missed – or overlooked – by fans, media and even coaching teams, but, to a former professional, it illustrates a quiet sense of leadership. “I know the cues and small behaviours that you have to learn in order to function effectively on a football pitch,” Amankwah says.
Over the past six years, he has worked with the psychology professor Geir Jordet, analysing thousands of hours of match footage from across the world, including videos of every player in the Premier League and Women’s Super League. The result is a dataset containing more than 100,000 unique observations, which has enabled the duo – via their company, Inside Out Analytics – to create a proxy ranking of players across different types of behaviour.
The information can demonstrate, say, whether a defender’s emotional control, compared with opponents’ and teammates’ in the same position, is in the top 5% of those players in the league. As Jordet puts it: “It’s a new world that opens up. The map gives clubs a benchmark and that’s critical because you can look
