Why Leadership Is A Mental Game: The World Cup’s Biggest Lesson
Why Leadership Is A Mental Game: The World Cup’s Biggest Lesson
PLUS: How To Have An Elite Performance Mindset
July 19, 2026
“Argentina played with more risk, played with more rhythm. Played with a feeling, maybe, that they have nothing to lose any more, which freed them up and held us back, because we've obviously played suddenly with a feeling that we have a lot to lose.”
\- Thomas Tuchel
Until this morning (I’m starting this draft on Thursday), I was determined to avoid writing about the World Cup again.
However, my intended follow-up on purpose is going to have to wait a week. I'm breaking my own rule because last night's England loss contains vital information and insights any leader can learn from, irrespective of who they support and whether they even like football or not.
In simple terms, lessons from sport are frequently transferable to business because it’s like a living laboratory. We’re able to observe high performers in real time, operating in high pressure situations. A World Cup semi-final fits that bill perfectly.
What we saw was how an elite coach believed it was emotions that decided the outcome, not tactics. And the stats bear that out - England had just 12% of possession after scoring. No post-match stats or AI analysis can explain that.
This is why leadership at the highest level is a mental game.
THE SCIENCE
Those players weren't consciously deciding to stop passing to each other. Nobody does that on purpose at 1-0 up in a World Cup semi-final.
Manfred Kets de Vries is a psychoanalyst and INSEAD professor who's spent decades studying leadership under pressure. He argues that most of what drives behaviour in high-stakes moments sits below conscious awareness.
Neuroscience explains the mechanism. Yale's Amy Arnsten has shown that under acute, uncontrollable stress, a flood of adrenaline and noradrenaline impairs the prefrontal cortex. This is the part of the brain that acts as your executive function and allows you to maintain composure, so it’s physiological as well as psychological.
It's not that the players forgot how to pass. It's that the capacity to execute what they already knew literally went offline. And the crucial insight is that in a team dynamic it rarely affects one player in isolation. Sigal Barsade's research on emotional contagion found that a state like that can spread through a group in what she terms a ripple effect.
THE PROOF
Understand the science and suddenly stats that seem to defy all explanation, such as a team containing some of the world’s leading players only completing 2 passes in 19 minutes, start to make sense.
You don't need football to see this pattern. Researchers Timo Vuori and Quy Huy spent years studying Nokia's collapse from the world's dominant smartphone maker to an also-ran, and found the same mechanism at work.
Leaders were nervous of competitors and shareholders. Middle managers were afraid of their own bosses. That contagion spread through the organisation.
It wasn't a case of people knowing the truth and hiding it. Shared fear reshaped what people at every level actually believed was happening, so leadership ended up with a genuinely distorted picture of where they stood.
It meant key decision-makers convinced themselves they were in a stronger position than they actually were. Nokia's failure had plenty of causes, strategic and structural, but Vuori and Huy's research points to something usually left out of that story: the impact of unconscious behaviours moving through the organisation.
THE APPLICATION
There’s been a huge amount of noise around the topic and a deluge of ‘expert’ opinions. But I think the real relevance to our world is what happens after the noise dies down.
You can ignore the nonsense about "it's in the DNA", or the oh-so-simple solution that putting on an attacker instead of a defender would have fixed everything. Life and leadership are complex and messy.
So I haven't got a neat, packaged solution for you this week. Instead I’m bringing my hard-earned insight, for you to interpret as you see fit.
What I've got is a coaching mindset, formed from years in corporate leadership roles and sharpened by studying the psychodynamic model of coaching at INSEAD, which focuses heavily on unconscious behaviours. Finally I’ve got the proof that comes from our work at PPL with a wide range of entrepreneurs and executives.
If you can develop these skills, there is no question you’ll become a better leader:
1\. Interpret emotions as data. There's a temptation to only judge a team's performance from results or productivity tools. That rarely tells the full story, because numbers are a lagging indicator. Emotions are a leading one. Tune into what your team is actually feeling, and you're reading what's coming, not just confirming what’s already landed.
2\. Design the right conditions. Moods are infectious. A team's state doesn't stay contained to one person. We know from Barsade’s research that it spreads, even before anyone's articulated what's happening. That means your job isn't just managing your own state under pressure, it's actively creating the conditions for the state you want the team to be in.
3\. Treat mistakes as portals of discovery. The instinct after a setback is to move past it fast, because it makes you feel uncomfortable and vulnerable. Resist it. The most useful thing you can do with a mistake is sit with it long enough to understand what it's actually revealing, not just what went wrong, but why.
4\. Curiosity is a superpower. The simplest explanation is rarely the real one, so be prepared to dig deeper. There's almost always more happening beneath the surface than anyone's saying, including the people it's happening to. Invest time in really understanding what’s playing out. Then you can treat the cause rather than the symptom.
Bravery and vulnerability are two sides of the same coin, and both start with you, not your team. You can't read what's unconscious in a team if you haven't learned to read it in yourself. That's where a coaching mindset begins.
Go well.
J.
🔥 LIVE BETTER, LEAD BETTER
The best content I researched this week:
1. Author and performance coach Steve Magness tackles the same subject in his latest newsletter and I’m strongly aligned with his perspective. Again, you don’t need to be a sports fan to benefit from his insights on the psychology of performance.
2. Watch this 53-second video of endurance athlete and podcaster Rich Roll speaking about the lost art of connection… and how you solve it. It’s indispensable if you truly want to lead your team well.
3. Finally, Dr. Alok Kanojia, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist, shares how to actually have an elite performance mindset. Worth 30 minutes of your time as he has some great provocations and contrarian views that will challenge your thinking.
Share this with a fellow leader - we’re stronger together.
If this was forwarded to you, join hundreds of other top-level executives and entrepreneurs by subscribing here.
The Prime Performance Program
