By Adam Ratner, LCSW, MBA — Co-Founder, Grow Sport Psychology & Performance Improvement
I'll be honest with you: I have watched more World Cup soccer this month than is probably appropriate for a grown man with a full client load and three kids at home. But here's what I keep telling my boys — this isn't just watching sports. This is applied sport psychology in real time, on the biggest athletic stage in the world, with no timeouts and nowhere to hide.
In particular, this year's tournament in North America has been extraordinary. Not just for the goals and the upsets, but for the sheer volume of mental performance moments playing out in front of billions of viewers. If you know what to look for, you almost can't stop seeing it.
So, as someone who spends his days working with athletes and their teams on exactly this kind of stuff, let me walk you through what I've been watching — and more importantly, what we actually do about it.
Let me start with the number that stopped me in my tracks: in just 27 games across the opening week, the 2026 World Cup had already produced more red cards than the entire 2018 and 2022 World Cups combined. FOX Sports rules analyst Mark Clattenburg summed it up pretty bluntly: players are "making mistakes in and around the penalty area, in maybe a panic."
In maybe a panic. That's a sport psychologist's phrase if I've ever heard one coming from a soccer analyst.
The red card data tells us something important that goes beyond tactics or refereeing. It tells us that when the stakes are this high, when you are representing your country on the world stage, emotional regulation becomes the performance variable. Not pace. Not touch. Not fitness. The ability to stay composed and make decisions in the heat of a confrontation is what separates a player who stays on the field from one who watches the second half from the locker room.
Miguel Almirón and the Art of the Unforced Error
The most unusual example of this came from Paraguay's Miguel Almirón against Turkey in the group stage. Almirón didn't get sent off for a reckless tackle. He didn't elbow anyone. He covered his mouth during a confrontation with Turkey's Mert Müldür — a reaction to a foul near midfield — and under FIFA's strict new rule targeting hidden verbal abuse, referee Ivan Barton went to the monitor and showed him red.
Paraguay was winning 1-0 at the time. They finished the match with ten men. Almirón missed the next game suspended.
Now, I want to be careful here, because I'm not going to sit in my office in Naperville and pretend I know exactly what was said or what Almirón was feeling in that moment. But what I can tell you is what the research tells us about how elite athletes end up in these situations. Porat and colleagues (2004) and subsequent work on emotional regulation in sport consistently show that frustration accumulation — the buildup of small irritants over a high-stakes match — significantly increases the likelihood of reactive, impulsive behavior. Players don't usually explode from zero. They simmer, and then something tips it over.
The AASP-aligned intervention for this? A combination of self-regulation training and cue-controlled breathing. Work from Hanin's Individual Zones of Optimal Functioning (IZOF) model tells us that every athlete has an emotional range where they perform best — and that both under-arousal and over-arousal disrupt performance. Learning to recognize when you're trending out of your optimal zone, and having a quick physiological reset available (a breath pattern, a word, a physical anchor), is trainable. It's not soft. It's skill acquisition, exactly like learning a new passing pattern. Almirón has spent his career playing at elite club level and representing Paraguay on the world stage. He didn't need more talent. He needed a practiced cue that could bring him down four or five emotional degrees in a confrontation. Those four or five degrees might have kept him on the field.
His coach Gustavo Alfaro said after the game that he tried to cheer Almirón up, noting that his absence brought out "the fighting spirit of the team." Almirón, to his credit, apologized to his teammates. That's accountability. That's also a hard lesson to learn at a World Cup.
I've been watching Kylian Mbappé at major tournaments for nearly a decade now. The guy is a generational talent. And, I say what I'm about to say with nothing but respect: he looked like a player carrying something he couldn't name during France's semifinal against Spain.
The numbers were stark. Mbappé had the fewest touches of any forward in the first half — just 15. France's expected goals for the entire match were 0.3, their lowest in a World Cup match since 1966. When asked about the loss, he was honest: "We were too sloppy technically. Our first touches were not good enough." He said France "didn't have what it takes" and even acknowledged that Spain was simply better on the day.
There's real self awareness in that. And I respect it.
But what struck me from a sport psychology perspective was the pattern more than the single game. This is a player who has, at various points in his career, struggled to replicate his club-level brilliance in the biggest international moments. He missed the decisive penalty against Switzerland at Euro 2020. In the 2022 World Cup final — a game in which he scored a hat-trick, which is insane — France still lost on penalties. And now he exits the 2026 semifinal with 15 first-half touches in the most important game of his national team's year.
What's happening? I'd point to something that sport psychology researchers call expectation burden — or more precisely, what happens when a player's identity and the external world's narrative about that played begin to weigh on the automatic, instinctual processes that make them elite.
Mbappé is not slow. His first touch against Spain was not mechanically broken. What research on attentional focus — particularly Wulf and Lewthwaite's OPTIMAL theory of motor learning — tells us is that internal focus (thinking about how you are moving) disrupts the automatic execution that athletes spend years building. When the stakes go up and the scrutiny intensifies, athletes can slip into a hyper-conscious monitoring mode that paradoxically degrades the very skills they've spent years automating. This is the definition of choking: not a lack of talent, but a temporary hijacking of automatic performance by conscious control.
The AASP intervention toolkit for this leans heavily on process-focused attention training and pre-performance routines. Research by Beilock and colleagues (2004) demonstrated that athletes who maintain an external attentional focus ("follow the ball" rather than "think about your foot") under pressure show significantly better performance retention. A well-developed pre-performance routine — whether it's a specific breathing sequence, a physical gesture, an internal cue word — acts as a mental reset that brings the athlete back into automatic mode rather than monitoring mode.
Mbappé said something after the loss that I found genuinely moving: "It was a dream for us to reach the final, to give our country this chance to dream, to make history. I can't quite find the words for it. Football waits for no one."
He's right. It doesn't. Which is exactly why the mental preparation work needs to happen before you're in the middle of a World Cup semifinal trying to figure out why your legs feel like someone else's.
Spain's 19-year-old winger Lamine Yamal is possibly the most exciting young player I have ever watched. The kid is genuinely special, in the way that makes you feel lucky to watch him. He started this tournament having already won Euro 2024, carrying arguably more hype per pound than anyone in world football.
And, then something interesting happened on the way to the semifinals: his captain had to tell him to calm down.
Rodri — one of the most composed, intelligent midfielders in modern history — identified something specific ahead of Spain's semifinal against France. Yamal, he said, was playing with "anxiety." Not fear, not panic, but the kind of anxious urgency that comes when a talented young player is trying desperately to prove something rather than simply play. "I think he needs to calm down a bit, that anxiety that sometimes he has to prove himself," Rodri told reporters. "He's very important to us. It's true that he's 19 years old and that we have to calm him down at certain moments."
Yamal's own response to the critics — particularly about his goal-scoring output — was actually quite mature: "If we win the World Cup, I think nobody will remember how many goals I scored or how many I didn't. I know that with my movement I draw a lot of opponents away. I won the Euros scoring a single goal." That's good cognitive re-framing. That's the right answer.
But Rodri saw what the box score couldn't: Yamal was pressing. Trying harder than the game required. And in sport, trying harder is often the enemy of playing better.
This is a concept called self-presentation motivation in the research literature. Work by Leary and colleagues on social evaluation anxiety in athletes shows that when performers are hyper-aware of how they are being judged — by fans, media, opponents, even themselves — they shift from a performance orientation to a self-presentation orientation. The goal changes, subtly but importantly, from play well to look good playing well. And that shift costs you.
The intervention here is what we'd call process goal training combined with mindfulness-based attention regulation. Gardner and Moore's research on the MAC (Mindfulness-Acceptance-Commitment) approach in sport has shown that helping athletes disengage from evaluative self-focus and re-engage with the immediate, in-the-moment process of play — not outcomes, not impressions — significantly improves performance under high-evaluation conditions.
Yamal's own instincts, by the way, are decent here. He said in an earlier interview that when he's not at the training ground, he lives like a normal 19-year-old: "Hang out with my friends, look after my brother, play PlayStation, go for a walk." That kind of psychological detachment — the ability to genuinely switch off — is one of the most underrated mental performance skills in elite sport. Research by Balk and colleagues on recovery in elite soccer found that mental detachment between training and competition sessions is a significant predictor of well-being and readiness. Yamal's PlayStation habit might be doing more mental performance work than anyone realizes.
The most puzzling performance of the tournament for me was France against Spain. Not because France lost — Spain is excellent — but how they lost.
France came in as the favorite to win the World Cup. They were organized, dangerous, and had been the best team in the tournament for much of the knockout stage. And then against Spain they produced 0.3 expected goals — the lowest total for France in a World Cup match in sixty years.
Mbappé himself noted that "even when we recovered the ball, our first touches were not good enough." His teammate Rayan Cherki put it more bluntly: "In so many ways, France was missing everything today. Truly, everything was missing today."
Everything. Not one thing. Not a tactical adjustment. Everything.
What Cherki described, and what the data confirmed, is what sport psychologists recognize as collective efficacy breakdown. Bandura's foundational work on self-efficacy extended to team settings shows that collective beliefs about a group's ability to perform can be self-reinforcing in both positive and negative directions. When a team starts performing below their capability, self-doubt spreads. Communication deteriorates. Players begin operating in self-protection mode rather than collective performance mode. And before long, everything is missing.
The research-based fix for this isn't a halftime speech, unfortunately. It's upstream work — the kind of team psychological preparation that includes shared mental models, clear role acceptance, and systematic resilience training. Beaumont, Maynard, and Butt's research on team psychological skills interventions found that teams which engaged in structured mental performance work around cohesion and shared confidence showed significantly better psychological readiness under pressure than control groups.
France, as a collection of individual talents, is extraordinary. As a collective psychological unit, something broke down against Spain that no amount of talent could paper over. And that's the honest story of a lot of World Cup exits.
I want to come back to what started this piece: the record number of red cards, the moments where the mental game became the decisive variable, the places where talent wasn't the issue but psychological preparation clearly was.
The 2026 World Cup has been a living demonstration of something I believe deeply: that the physical and technical preparation elite athletes receive is extraordinary, and the psychological preparation, while improving, often still lags behind. Universities of Gloucestershire sport psychology researchers put it well in a piece this tournament: "Success on the world stage may depend not only on talent, but on the ability to withstand and adapt to the invisible pressures of the modern game."
The invisible pressures. That's where mental performance consultants live.
Every player I've mentioned in this piece had the talent to produce better outcomes in the moments where they didn't. Almirón has played in the Premier League for years. Mbappé is one of the greatest players of his generation. Yamal might eventually be the best player on the planet. France has more individual talent than virtually any team in the world.
And yet: panic in the penalty area, 15 first-half touches, anxiety that needs a captain's calming voice, an entire team's collective confidence dissolving in ninety minutes.
These aren't talent deficits. They're mental performance deficits. And they're workable. That's the part I want people to take away from all of this — not that elite athletes struggle, but that the gap between where they are and where they could be is bridgeable with the right tools and the right support.
The AASP framework — attention control training, process goal setting, pre-performance routines, emotional regulation skills, mindfulness-acceptance work, collective efficacy development — gives us real, research-backed ways to close that gap. Not to eliminate pressure. Not to make sport frictionless or safe. But to give athletes the skills to perform closer to their ceiling when it matters most.
Which, at a World Cup, is every ninety minutes.
I'll be watching the final this weekend, almost certainly on the couch next to my kids, pointing out things that have no business being pointed out during what is supposed to be a fun family activity.
But I'll also be watching with genuine admiration, keeping an eye out for the athletes who manage the invisible pressures well, for the moments of grace under fire, and for the growing recognition across world sport that the mental game isn't a nice-to-have. It's the game within the game.
And it's very much learnable.
Adam Ratner, LCSW, MBA, is the Co-Founder of Grow Wellness Group and Grow Sport Psychology & Performance Improvement, based in Naperville, IL. He works with athletes and teams at every level on mental performance, well-being, and sport transition. To learn more, visit growwellnessgroup.com.
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