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Want To Be an Elite Soccer Player? Building Mental Toughness is Crucial. So is Losing. Here’s Why.

  • Updated: February 22, 2023
Building mental toughness is something that is absolutely crucial if you want to reach the top of the game. It is something that soccer players strive for. But it’s not an easy task, not even a little bit. It’s not easy because building mental toughness is at COMPLETE ODDS with our culture’s win-at-all-costs mentality.
Want to reach the top of the game? Mental toughness is crucial and so is losing, being challenged and doing hard things. Here's why.
What do we mean by that? The truth is that, building mental toughness means that you’re going to have to be OK with struggling, losing some games and doing really hard things. You are going to have to PURPOSEFULLY put yourself into challenging, uncomfortable situations. This means situations where you are NOT the best player on the field, environments where things are difficult, places where you HAVE to have patience and perseverance.

Here’s what that means in real life: 

No more playing the easy divisions just so you can dominate every match and call yourself a winner. No more staying on a team year after year where you’re the lead goal scorer or the clean-sheet keeper just because you are comfortable and enjoy being the best. No more making excuses when it comes to your individual training routine, getting your fitness up or learning to shoot better with your left foot. 

No more putting off that ECNL or GA League tryout because you’re worried you won’t make the team. You might NOT make it, true, but you WILL grow. Both in your knowledge of what you need to work on to improve your game, and in your mental toughness skills.

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Building mental toughness requires you to do hard things, there’s literally no way around it. You CANNOT become mentally tough unless you experience being in challenging situations, struggling through, and practicing working your way out of the adversity. This is where resiliency, drive and true, deep belief in yourself is born. And it’s the only place to building mental toughness happens. 
So, if you want to start building mental toughness, ask yourself, am I prepared to do these things? Am I prepared to NOT win every match? Am I prepared to leave the comfort of what I know and go up against new challenges? Am I prepared to forge my own path, do what needs to be done? Am I prepared to have my own back and work my butt off to overcome whatever obstacle gets in my way? Am I prepared to do hard things?
Are you prepared to start building the mental toughness skills that make elite players elite? Because this is WHAT IT TAKES to reach the top of the game.
If so, let’s keep going.

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The downsides of a win-at-all-costs mindset

Our culture’s win-at-all-costs soccer problem is an unhealthy and shortsighted obsession with WINNING when it comes to youth sports in general. Every player, parent and coach loves winning games, tournaments, state cup titles and national showcase events, I know that and I completely get it. Believe me, I prefer winning over losing just as much as the next person. But it’s naive to think that winning every match is what leads to greatness and becoming an elite player. 

{Related read: The secret to becoming great? Understanding that winning isn’t everything}

One of the big problems with this cultural mindset is that, when players are taught to idolize winning as the holy grail of life, a lot of bad things can happen. They become hooked on external validation, which means that their self-worth becomes completely attached to their performance and they are unable to see any value in themselves – or even feel good about themselves – unless they win. You can see how this can have negative, longterm impact on a player’s development. 
A young girl holds her hands over her face on the soccer field
I don’t want to give the impression that winning is a bad thing, because it’s definitely not. Winning brings with it reward for working hard and feelings of collective joy and accomplishment. It also gives you something to strive toward and reach for, it can be an extreme motivator. 
Players, coaches and teams can find immense satisfaction in winning, but the true value is in the PURSUIT of winning. So it’s not WINNING that is detrimental to youth soccer, it’s the win-at-all-costs mentality – this way of thinking that places no value whatsoever on losing – that negatively impacts individual development and player’s ability to develop resiliency skills.

Building mental toughness: why it's important

By participating in a win-at-all-costs mentality in youth soccer, we are setting our players up for long term failure because we are hindering their ability to develop the crucial skills necessary to compete at the highest levels of the game. Struggling and working to overcome difficult situations bring with it HUGE, irreplaceable value and that value is the development of a whole array of skills including resiliency, grit, perseverance, patience, motivation AND MENTAL TOUGHNESS.
Young black woman wearing headphones and sitting in an empty stadium thinking
Building mental toughness is a crucial skill of elite soccer players because “your level of success in sports is directly related to your level of mental toughness,” according to sports psychologist Patrick Cohn of Peak Performance Sports.
Mental toughness is without a doubt one of THE MOST VALUABLE assets of an elite athlete. It is a crucial skill necessary to compete at the top levels of the game. Because even at the top (or even more-so at the top) players are faced with extraordinary challenges and high expectations, all of which require the carefully cultivated and honed skill of mental toughness to focus, stay on course and perform well under pressure.
How are you ever going to be able to handle any of those pressurized situations at the topmost, premier level of the game if you never have had the opportunity to practice beforehand? The answer is YOU’RE NOT. You’re not going to be able to handle them. 

Building mental toughness is really important for youth players to start doing from a very young age because of this. But if you are overly focused on winning as your #1 goal, and not on the pursuit of self-improvement, you are inhibiting your own growth and ability to develop this skill. 

{Related read: The 3 KEY pieces to building mental toughness as a soccer player}

If you spend your entire youth soccer career in unchallenging environments where you never experience hard things you will not be building mental toughness in soccer. By overvaluing winning and focusing on thing else, you are getting in your own way. If you truly want to be the best, you need mental toughness and by pursuing nothing but the W’s and the external validation that comes with them, you will get NONE OF IT WHATSOEVER.
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The value of losing

Now, let’s not be mistaken. The message here is NOT to purposefully go about losing, that’s not what we’re talking about. What we’re talking about is focusing on the pursuit of winning via self-improvement and progression, and all the while being able to find value in all the wins AND loses that happen along the way.
The value of losing is the act of being challenged, struggling, working hard and overcoming. The value of losing is that it is where you GROW. The value of losing is in that you are GAINING.
Coach talks to his team in front of an open goal explaining a practice activity that they are about to do
Soccer players that aren’t able to see the value in losing can easily find themselves in a self-critical, self-defeating place where their confidence is shot and their self-esteem is in ruins because they lost a match this weekend. Their self-worth is completely wrapped up in the outcome of the game and they truly believe that they aren’t worth anything because they didn’t win the game. This is NOT a fun mindset to be in. 
Players that find value in losing are able look at the situation differently though. Yes, they will still be disappointed (which is perfectly OK, we’re all human and our feelings are important to acknowledge) but they also have the self-awareness and the growth-mindedness to reframe.
By seeing the loss from a different perspective, they are able to reflect on the game in a way that is constructive and focused and uses the experience as a guideline for where they can improve. They value the loss because it exposes their weaknesses, weaknesses that they then can take to the training field and work to improve upon. This is mental toughness in a nutshell.

{Related read: Getting dominated in a hard game can be REALLY GOOD for you; here’s why}

Mental toughness is more than handling a loss

Mental toughness isn’t just about rebounding after hard games, it’s also about being able to stay in your own personal optimal performance zone even as the world around you threatens to distract you with pressure and expectations. Mental toughness is how players continue driving forward, even in the face of seemingly unsurmountable obstacles. 
Female soccer player with her hair in two braids standing with her hands on her hips during a soccer game
In other words, mental toughness is an athlete’s ability to CONSCIOUSLY make decisions about how they respond to difficult situations and how they handle performance pressure. 

Mental toughness happens when you have a healthy striving mentality (aka understand the value of BOTH winning and losing) AND have consistently done enough mental skills training to be able to RESPOND (intentionally choose your actions, words and thoughts) and not just react(lose control, get upset, half-ass things, blame others, give up, etc.)

Mental toughness is:
  • being able to regulate your attention and focus, under pressure, in any circumstance
  • being able to see positive and helpful perspectives on difficult situations
  • no matter the circumstance, being able to get back up and continue onward
  • overcoming adversity again and again and again and again

{Related read: Resilience in soccer; How to BOUNCE BACK stronger than ever}

If you aren’t constantly being challenged then you are NOT building mental toughness. And this is where you start to get bypassed. You’ll get passed by the player who has spent their whole career intentionally WELCOMING challenge and obstacles as a way to grow, expand and improve their game. You’ll get passed by the player who IS building mental toughness and isn’t afraid to lose a bit now in order to win later. 

How to get mentally tough in soccer

Now that we understand why building mental toughness is a necessary skill for being a peak performer, how do you do it? How do you develop mental toughness in soccer? How you gain a mental edge on your competition?
You start by a forced changed of mindset. You start by letting go of the win-at-all-costs mentality and learn that you will be OK if you lose some games. In fact, you will be more than OK because you now know that you can dig into the loss to see what you can learn about yourself and where you need to improve. 

You face challenges. You face road blocks, obstacles and brick walls. You get underestimated, overestimated. You lose your starting spot, you don’t get signed by your top school. You purposely try out for a really hard team, you play on tougher teams with players that are better than you. You recover and rehab after injury. You struggle, oh boy do you struggle. And then you get back up. You rebound, you bounce back. YOU OVERCOME. You become ELITE. 

Portrait of Jenn Ireland, Mental Skills Coach at Expand Your Game

Hi everyone! I’m Jenn and I create content to help female soccer players and coaches maximize individual and team potential by developing healthy mindset skills. Join other subscribers and sign up for the newsletter for all my best tips and advice!

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Picture of Hi everyone!

Hi everyone!

I'm Jenn, a USSF C-licensed youth soccer coach, mental skills coach & founder here at Expand Your Game. I created this site because it is the site I needed when I was a soccer player.

About me: I am a former newspaper photojournalist who loves downtempo electronic music, guacamole and books of every sort. And of course soccer! On days off you can find me researching tiny farms in Portugal , tossing a frisbee for my dog, or tending to my growing collection of indoor plants.

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