In Australia, an establishment called the Well-Being Science Institute runs the world’s first government-accredited training programme for the well-being of elite athletes. In Jonathan Harding’s new book, Soul: Beyond the Athlete, Steve Johnson, one of the experts from this institute, says that “well-being will be to sport what strength and conditioning was 30 years ago”.
Jonathan Harding, an Englishman who has lived in Germany since 2012, plying his trade as a specialist German football writer, is very concerned about the well-being of athletes of all description, elite or not. His first book was Mensch: Beyond the Cone, an analysis of the German coaching system, and according to him, the inevitable question that arose after the publication of Mensch, was whether anyone even cared about the people behind the players. This intrigued him and he started talking to people in the world of football—coaches, scouts, physiotherapists, professors, former athletes, sports scientists, academy directors. His conclusion? Not enough people cared. That was when Soul was born.
“I wanted to produce a piece of work that showed there was reason to be hopeful, ways in which we could change, and hope that ultimately people in positions of power would become more aware and do something about this, because they don’t have any excuse not to, really,” explains Jonathan.
Success vs well-being
{{/usCountry}}Success vs well-being
{{/usCountry}}As a person privileged enough to write about football for a living, Jonathan wanted to make a difference with the publication of Soul, something he could look back on in later years as evidence of at least trying.
“For me, the seduction of endless development is problematic,” he says. “When you tell people to get better all the time, you’re not far away from telling them that they’re not good enough. This is a great line from Rick Cotgreave [a performance expert interviewed for the book] which I keep repeating. This is basically what professional sport is now. Think about what it does when you get to the end of a career [in it] and you have no idea who you are outside of that context.”
Jonathan uses American football player Tom Brady as an example. “Look at the statement he made: ‘I’m coming back because there is unfinished business’. He’s won seven Super Bowls; he holds almost all the records. He has a lovely family. He should just go and spend time with them! That he doesn’t want to says everything about his psyche. In The Man in the Arena [a 10-episode sports documentary about Brady’s experiences in the Super Bowls], he even admits that he’s gone to an extreme, and I think that’s where I’m worried—I would take a lot less sporting success from individuals and clubs for the greater well-being [of the athletes].”
It took Jonathan around three years to find some answers and put them together for the book, which covers Denmark, Sweden, Germany, England, Switzerland, and North America at both the youth football/academy level and elite professional level.
The good fight
‘Well-being’ is a rather ambiguous term, a situation exacerbated by it not producing tangible results, unlike improvements in speed, strength, or health markers. This, together with the fact that no one solution fits all, something Jonathan realised during the process of writing the book, means that it is harder to convince those in the boardroom focussed on results, performance, profit, and good PR of the importance of well-being. The author has a suggestion formed from his research and interviews.
“As much as it’s the antithesis of this work, you have to convince people that it will lead to improvements in performance,” he says. “If you go to the boardroom and say, ‘I think we should do this because it’s the right thing to do,’ most people will laugh you out of the room. But I think if you go in and say, ‘if we do this we’re going to secure a greater legacy for the club; just the way people will talk about us will change’, that may work. Secondly, and this is priceless because you cannot buy it, you will see a performance increase. Think about it. If you look after the people and their people, you’re more inclined as an individual in that situation to invest more yourself.”
The concern here is, of course, that player care will stop at being simply a box-ticking activity. “Sport is unfortunately full of buzzwords, but not always the actions that reflect those words,” says Jonathan.
He’s encouraged by knowing that there are so many more people than he previously thought who are fighting the good fight at all levels, though he acknowledges that he doesn’t hold a lot of optimism for the future of the elite men’s game where the belief that only money matters has been institutionalised. Instead, his optimism is for other areas of the game, such as lower-league teams, teams in the second and third divisions, teams in smaller countries, and also, strongly, for the women’s game.
“I have a lot of optimism that they [the women’s game] could do things differently and start to look at things differently,” he says.
More than the sport
Soul questions whether we can play sport at a high level and still nurture who we are as people. The book doesn’t claim to have all the answers—indeed, the answers are complex and without shortcuts—but it does make an impassioned plea for sport to choose to look after the human beings who play it.
Even though we are very much at the beginning of our understanding about human development in sport, athletes are not—cannot be—treated as one-dimensional. In Old English, the word ‘soul’ was ‘sawol’: the “spiritual and emotional part of a person”. Today’s word ‘character’ hails from the Old Greek ‘kharaktēr’, which means “imprint on the soul”. Our soul is the essence of who we are. What does it mean when sport doesn’t have any place for it?
“What I want to achieve with Soul is just to show that it is possible,” says Jonathan.
From HT Brunch, October 1, 2022
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