“Lack of fight” is a common critique in post-match analyses, but can we truly assess an athlete’s mindset from their on-pitch body language?While football increasingly relies on physical data, measuring psychological traits like emotional control and leadership remains challenging. Premier League clubs such as Brighton are adopting new methods to address this in player selection and recruitment. Thomas Tuchel notably urged England players to communicate more after assessing their interactions during Euro 2024’s final, but simply counting gestures or talk doesn’t fully capture the mental dynamics at play. Yaw Amankwah, a former top-tier defender in Norway and Denmark, champions enhanced psychological evaluation. He emphasizes that focusing beyond tactics to subtle, nonverbal cues offers deep insights into confidence, aggression, or isolation in players. For example, a player’s frustrated shot followed shortly by a teammate’s consoling pat reveals understated leadership—an observation often overlooked by fans or even coaching staff. Over six years, Amankwah and psychology professor Geir Jordet have analyzed thousands of match hours worldwide, including every Premier League and Women’s Super League player, compiling over 100, 000 unique observations via their company Inside Out Analytics. Their data-driven rankings benchmark behaviors like emotional control against peers in the same position, identifying top or bottom percentiles in the league. Jordet explains this novel benchmarking helps clubs interpret the significance of such behaviors quantitatively and comparatively, advancing understanding beyond mere frequency counts. Top clubs, including Bayern Munich during Julian Nagelsmann’s coaching, have trialed this approach.

Max Pelka, Bayern’s former psychologist now at Brighton, highlights that unlike other club departments, psychology has lacked measurable metrics closely tied to on-pitch performance. Pelka collaborated with Jordet and Amankwah to analyze about 25 Bayern matches in 2022-23, distilling each player’s posture, head and hand movements into concise psychological summaries for coaching staff. These insights became an additional selection variable—e. g. , deciding whether to field a leader in defense or a different personality type. Players could also review their “game personality” profiles. Pelka recalls a defender eager to use the feedback to improve his body language leadership—progressing gradually with a clear reference point makes such development easier. Pelka applies similar methods at Brighton, providing head coach Fabian Hürzeler with summaries of the team’s key psychological actions to inform decisions, even though monitoring is less frequent. Jordet and Amankwah are increasingly integrating AI to automate analyses, overcoming the vast manual effort formerly required. This advancement promises real-time evaluation of numerous teams, enabling clubs to assess potential signings with enhanced psychological metrics. Jordet envisions AI-generated flags that confirm good choices or alert clubs to warning signs, refining recruitment decisions with a new data dimension. In sum, subtle on-pitch behaviors—once overlooked—are now systematically quantified to reveal players’ psychological profiles, offering teams innovative tools to optimize performance, selection, and recruitment.