Young Moroccan star shows the psychological strength of today’s elite players

{"text":[[{"start":7.85,"text":"Watching 18-year-old Ayyoub Bouaddi boss midfield for Morocco in their opener against Brazil, the question arose: how is this possible? Bouaddi, who faces Scotland in Boston on Friday, looked like a World Cup veteran. He led Morocco with 87 touches, as teammates kept seeking him out. "}],[{"start":26.75,"text":"The pressure must have been even more intense given that he only debuted for Morocco this month. Before then, the boy from just north of Paris captained France’s under-21s. "}],[{"start":38.3,"text":"Bouaddi achieves off the field, too: he passed his final school exams in the “science” stream aged 16 and is studying maths at university. This summer he’ll probably jump from Lille to a giant club."}],[{"start":52.15,"text":"Bouaddi looks like a case study of the psychological strength of the modern footballer. Elite footballers excel with their heads as well as their feet."}],[{"start":61.25,"text":"He displays an ability for which these people are selected: to perform on any stage unhampered by stress. “Great players experience pressure as a challenge, whereas the ordinary player experiences pressure as a threat,” Inma Puig, for years a psychologist at FC Barcelona, told me."}],[{"start":79.65,"text":"Top-class footballers feel fear — they might vomit or make multiple toilet visits before a game — but they use it to motivate themselves. Their gifted peers who could not handle it were weeded out young, perhaps on debut for a national junior team. They escaped stress by failing."}],[{"start":96.2,"text":"The survivors reach professional football as children dropped among hyperambitious men. Kylian Mbappé described walking into France’s changing room aged 18: “It’s very difficult, because great players don’t want to give you their place. That’s what makes them great players.” By 19, he was a world champion with France. "}],[{"start":115.35,"text":"As youth academies have professionalised, today’s young pros are more mature than previous generations. Contrast Mbappé or Bouaddi (so far, anyway) with David Beckham and Wayne Rooney, each sent off in their first World Cup after cracking under pressure.  "}],[{"start":null,"text":"

"}],[{"start":131.79999999999998,"text":"Bouaddi will know his brilliance against Brazil is now irrelevant. Every few days, a footballer walks into the Roman Colosseum and has to prove himself again. Contrast this with pop singers who can live forever off hits produced when they were 20. The best footballers relish the unrelenting challenge. Lilian Thuram, a French world champion in 1998, said, “What is beautiful in football is this permanently putting yourself into question. Forgetting the match you played before.” "}],[{"start":162.29999999999998,"text":"Barcelona’s psychologists suspect the main mental attribute of successful athletes is an ability to put failures and triumphs behind them. Some players barely even celebrate trophies. They do not think about yesterday’s performance, or next week’s. Mbappé, unperturbed by a terrible first half against Senegal on Tuesday, scored twice in the second. Only now matters. "}],[{"start":184.1,"text":"Constant achievement requires living like a monk. There is now little room for rock stars at the top. English live wire Jack Grealish used to laugh at his fanatical teammates at Manchester City, with their obsessive prematch rituals. He marvelled that his Portuguese teammate Rúben Dias “does about 100” things before a game, “he has to go gym at a certain time, he has to do this, do that, whereas I’m just chilled, just eating beans on toast”. But whereas Dias is at the World Cup, Grealish is not, and was loaned by City to Everton. Top-class players short of ambition can chill for good money playing below the peak."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":222.3,"text":"The constant performers have unceasing focus. Even against Brazil at a World Cup, they can block out the noise of the crowd, hearing only their teammates’ shouted instructions. Thuram said that when a match ended, he always knew which team had won, but not necessarily the score. He sometimes forgot his team’s goals, because they were irrelevant to his defensive task."}],[{"start":243.4,"text":"People like that do not need managers to motivate them. Arsenal’s longtime manager Arsène Wenger told me: “At the age of 23, the top, top, top players separate from the rest. These are the players who have something more, in the consistency of their motivation, in their desire to push themselves. And money has not much influence on them.”"}],[{"start":263.95,"text":"These players are ego-driven: they want to succeed for themselves. Contrary to the business-book cliché, there is an “I” in “team”. Players do not need to like their teammates. Arguments and even fights in the changing room — treated as crises in the media — are unremarkable. In football, team spirit usually follows success, rather than causing it."}],[{"start":285.7,"text":"The professionalism of today’s footballers is unprecedented. But as characters they are less compelling than past mavericks like Diego Maradona and Paul Gascoigne. Few players today have a comeback story or redemption arc. In their own minds, they are the winners of a nonstop meritocracy, pursuing a daily excellence that simply isn’t required in most other jobs. "}],[{"start":315.2,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1781776514_6056.mp3"}