My Placement in the Elite Performance team at the Premier League has been a fantastic opportunity to contribute to a project using both my academic and professional skills and experience. The project aims to gain understanding of psychology in football academies, and provide tools and guidance to help shape good practice in this space. Even though my work with the Premier League started off as a placement, it developed into an ongoing collaboration.
Motivation behind the Placement
I am a Sport Psychologist by trade, and was working at a football club while completing my PhD part time. Through my role at the club I was invited to take part in the first stages of the Premier League Psychology Project. It is 12 years since the Premier League introduced the Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP) and with it the requirement for Category One Academies (the top tier of the English academy system) to employ a Sport Psychologist. The project was initially looking at how clubs were using psychologists, what barriers practitioners might be facing, and how the discipline might be advanced in the academy system. I attended two engagement days at the Premier League, and through that connected with the Head of Elite Performance and the Psychology Project Lead, who I later approached to explore the possibility of a placement.
Aims of the Project
I came on board part-time in the final year of my PhD, as the project entered its third phase. The current aims of the project are to gain better understanding of psychology in the academy setting, and develop actionable outcomes in each of the four key areas; Understanding the First Team Landscape, Confidentiality and Record Keeping, Scoping tools for Academy Management, and understanding the ‘Shared Space’ of Player Mental Health and Wellbeing. The team at the Premier League are keen to provide tools and guidance that are useful to academies, and align with the needs of staff in clubs. The aim is that these tools will have value in helping the academy system as a whole grow their understanding of Sport Psychology and, in turn, help to overcome common barriers face by Sport Psychologists working in clubs. As a practitioner myself I could see a lot of value in the project, and my recent experience ‘on the ground’ has been particularly useful to the project as a whole.
Key Activities and Collaborations
I report in to the Psychology Project Lead on a regular basis, and work alongside members of the Elite Performance team, including the Performance Support Manager, Player Health Manager, and Head of Elite Performance. The majority of my work is done online, with regular online meetings and a flexible schedule. The work has included written contributions to guidance documents to help clubs understand rule changes, and ‘one pager’ summaries of professional standards of confidentiality and requirements in different disciplines. I have had input on developing a scoping tool to help Academy leaders understand how the scope of a practitioners’ job role might impact their hiring decisions, and an accompanying ‘user guide’. Finally, we are in the process of designing and running an interdisciplinary engagement day at the Premier League for staff working in the ‘Shared Space’ of player mental health and wellbeing. This work has involved internal collaboration across departments at the Premier League, with the Player Care and Safeguarding departments, as well as external collaboration with partner organisations including Kitman Labs, (who design the player management software platforms widely used by academies), and PGAAC (Professional Game Academy Audit Company, who audit English football academies).
Personal and Professional Development
The Premier League as an organisation are very much focussed on the broader performance strategy, and therefore this has been an invaluable opportunity for me to work on a more strategic level. However, I’ve also added value to the project as a Sport Psychology practitioner with recent experience in the role, that wasn’t available ‘in-house’. My experience means I am able to ‘join the dots’ between the strategic thinking, and what the impact might be at club level, for the practitioners navigating those polices and tools in their day-to-day. Everyone I’ve worked with has been very welcoming, generous with their knowledge and experience, and happy to have me involved at different levels of the project. Football is not an industry that is known for its job stability, and I actually lost my job at the club level during the project. Luckily this didn’t affect my placement, and the team at the Premier League have been incredibly supportive, as well as being invaluable as a network and connecting me with potential new opportunities. Being involved in the project has been an excellent way for me to use the skills I have developed over the course of my PhD in new ways, and be able to apply them to an ongoing project at a strategic level. However, it has also allowed me to contribute to overcoming some of the barriers I faced in my work as a practitioner, and hopefully improve the future of the discipline of Sport Psychology in youth football.
Placements Showcase
