As long as you keep a healthy perspective on it, there is absolutely nothing wrong with winning. Winning is great! It’s fun to win and it has value. It’s a reward for your hard work and it helps keep you and your team motivated to keep pushing forward and improving your soccer game.
The secret to becoming a soccer great player though, is understanding the difference between this type of winning and a win-at-all-costs mentality. A win-at-all-costs mentality is NOT what you want to have if you want to get the most out of the developmental stages of your soccer career.
When winning is the most important thing to a player or a team, they can easily get into a pattern where they are continually sacrificing learning opportunities in order to take home the W. Having a win-at-all-costs mentality might lead parents and players to THINK that they are the best, but really they are at a huge disadvantage. One that they might not be able to see right now, but one that is guaranteed to catch up with them in the long run.
Here’s an example: when you are wanting to bring something new into your game, you have to try it A LOT in games. And when you try things for the first time (let’s use the example of moving the ball through the pivot and switching fields) you are going to mess up more often than not. When your team is trying to learn to switch the ball to the other side of the field through central players, they are going to turn the ball over multiple times before they figure out how to do it. THIS IS OK, it’s good in fact! Trying something and failing multiple times is the first step when it comes to adding a new skill to your toolbox, whether individually or with your team.
If you are a win-at-all-costs team, you are probably NOT going to try something like this because you don’t want to mess up and lose the game. I mean, why would you do that? You and your teammates will not try anything new, or anything that you are not dominant at for that matter. Sticking to what you are good at and getting the win is more important to you than growing your game.
When you have this mindset, you stay within your comfort zone and don’t try new things that are challenging or hard. This is where you use your physicality to dominate others, not your soccer skills or decision making. This is where you create bad habits that are hard to break years down the road. This is where you think you’re going forward in your development, but you’re actually going backwards.
A win-at-all-costs mentality causes you to miss SO much opportunity to grow your knowledge of the beautiful game. Focusing on the process, the problem solving and fine-tuning the small details of the game is where expansion occurs. If you put all of your focus onto winning, and that is what you are thinking about all game, it’s impossible to be focused on the present and to see the game with clarity – all you see is YOUR NEED TO WIN.
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The difference of winning mentality at professional and youth levels
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 there is definitely a time and a place where winning really matters and a time and a place when it doesn’t.
The time when it matters is when you are playing professionally, aka when soccer is your job. When you are getting compensated and paid to play, winning and having success on the scoreboard become a part of your job responsibilities. The game is no longer development focused, its competition focused and results based. And this is absolutely OK at this point!
It’s OK to focus on winning here because everyone wants to do their job well, and for a professional soccer player that means winning games. Professional sports is a business and winning usually means your business does better and keeps the fans happy, loyal and engaged. For fans and players alike, having a win-at-all-costs mentality in professional sports is a huge part of the whole thing.
At the youth level, winning isn't everything in soccer
What we have to understand, and what we don’t do a very good job of as a society, is understanding that winning in youth soccer isn’t the same as the professional game.
It doesn’t matter if you are playing in a recreational league or at the highest levels of the youth game in the ECNL, Girls Academy, at ODP or even for the USYNT – YOU ARE A DEVELOPMENTAL PLAYER. You just are, no matter how good you are, you are developmental. You are a developmental player because playing soccer is NOT your job, yet. You are playing soccer to improve and grow your game, and to TRAIN for that job if that’s a part of your goals and plans.
If you are striving to get to the pros, hear this out – winning out your whole youth soccer career is NOT HOW YOU GET THERE. If you are always playing to win, there’s absolutely going to come a point where you get passed by players who have LESS wins but MORE depth to their game. Their ability to impact the game will have grown to a much greater extent because they’ve spent all these years focusing on improving the PROCESS and not worrying too much about wins.
A culture of winners and losers
The problem is that, at its core, our culture doesn’t view winning any differently in professional sports as compared to youth sports. And in America especially, we’ve been socially conditioned to hyper-focus on winning from a very young age. As a collective, we needs to do a better job of understanding the separate goal of youth sports and the goal of professional sports because most people don’t even know that there should be a difference.
On top of that, the messages that our culture and society send us are just impossible to hide from. As a soccer player, you might cognitively understand that winning isn’t everything in soccer, but then you are continually inundated with the opposite messaging and it becomes difficult to stay the course. Our culture congratulates and celebrates soccer players for wins and wins only.
It gets even more confusing when we see quotes like “winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing” from Vince Lombardi. Or “the person that said winning isn’t everything, never won anything,” from soccer legend Mia Hamm. The thing is, and the thing that our culture doesn’t understand, is that both of these are talking about the elite levels, the professional game. NOT the youth game.
This line from an article titled ‘What’s Wrong with Winning?’ on the Box to Box Soccer blog describes the whole situation perfectly: “The allure of a winning record is hard to resist in favor of developing soccer skills. Many clubs and many coaches will claim to value development over results, but very few actually walk the walk.”
This couldn’t be more true when it comes to describing the soccer culture here in the US at this moment in time. An easy example is the number of coaches who don’t move their teams up to tougher divisions because they don’t want to lose.
Whether it be in a tournament or league play, your team should always be positioned in a spot where they will lose some, tie some, and win some. This is the sweet spot for development and growth. And if you get so good that you are winning out the division? Move up next year and start over at the bottom. Challenge yourself and your team to rise to the next level. Yes, you are going to lose games. But man are you going to improve.
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Challenge yourself NOW, to be the best LATER
The youth game is where you NEED to lose. You NEED to struggle, and you NEED to be challenged. You NEED to have obstacles to overcome if you want to GET to that elite, professional level. Overcoming adversity and building your resiliency skills are just training for playing at top level of the game, and if you don’t get that training, you will be really bad at dealing with it once you reach the pros.
I heard this piece of advice once and it’s always stuck with me, it’s something that I remind my own players about quite often. If you are focused on playing collegiately or going pro, you want to be the BEST PLAYER when you are 18, PERIOD, not necessarily the player with the most wins under their belt. When you’re 18, nobody is going to care that you lost that tournament final in 9th grade or that your team went 3 years undefeated – they are only going to care about what type of player, and person, you are RIGHT NOW.
If you only focus on winning during your youth soccer career, you are doing yourself a major disservice. And if you can’t see that now just wait, it’ll be quite easy to see when you’re 18.
Sacrificing W's for self-improvement
Something that never gets talked about much but is glaringly obvious to me, is that in youth soccer (and specifically at the very young ages) the bigger, faster, stronger more athletic kids ALWAYS win. Even if a team has a coach who is teaching them good, foundational soccer skills: at the lower levels of the game, good soccer often loses out to speed and strength and raw athleticism.
It is quite common to be a team that spends a lot of time working on learning elements of the game (such as keeping possession as a team, controlling the ball and connecting passes) and still loses a lot of games. In fact, you might be REALY great at these things, but be losing matches because the opponents are simply physically bigger, stronger, faster teams and you can’t do much about it. It can be frustrating for sure, especially when those teams win and they don’t even have that much skill or game awareness.
This is where reframing the culture needs to come into play. Players (and their parents) need to have the understanding at an early age that winning isn’t everything in soccer, and that sacrificing some wins is what MUST DO if you actually want to focus on development and progression of skill.
And if you are ON the team that is winning by running the opponent over – sure, the win might make you feel good about yourself in the moment, but what is this doing for you in the long term? That team you just beat? Their passing looked WAY better than yours. And they are doing things you haven’t even tried yet (recycling the ball through the back, building out, combining, etc.) Don’t you want some of that in YOUR game?
Winning CAN'T be everything (if you actually want to enjoy playing soccer)
As we mentioned earlier, winning isn’t bad, it’s pretty nice in fact. I think we can all agree with that. That W is REAL rewarding after a long week of hard work with your team. The enjoyment you get from playing well and having success because of it is incomparable. It’s that teamwork, that collective play, that MAGIC that keeps you passionate about the game. Not the win, the win is just bonus. Your joy is coming from your pursuit of improvement.
"There is so much pressure on young athlete's these days, it can be easy for them to lose sign of why they are competing. You hear people talk about how they gave up everything to reach their goals, which always makes me think: where's your passion and joy? This mindset makes winning a matter of life or death. It shouldn't be. It's OK to fail and move on. The most important thing is to hang on to joy."
I love this quote from Megan. Megan Rapinoe is a fighter and she wants to win the match every time she sets foot on the field. Being a competitive, invested player and wanting to win matches is a really essential piece of being a good soccer player and part of what has led to Rapinoe’s success. But when the win doesn’t happen she still has this attitude that winning is great, but losing is OK. She has had this mentality from a very young age and has managed to carry it with her into her professional career.
Megan’s found the sweet spot with this attitude. We don’t want to avoid WINNING, because we want to be competitive, but we do want to avoid a win-at-all-costs mentality that undermines development. We want to avoid the mindset that tells us that winning is the only thing there is and that nothing else matters (not even your own wellbeing and happiness). Because not only is that wrong, but it sounds like a miserable way to live – only allowing yourself to be happy if you come out on top.
Limiting beliefs & mental toughness
If you TRULY BELIEVE that you MUST win every game, all the time, then you have a limiting belief that is holding you back from maximizing your potential on the soccer field and in life. The limiting belief is this: that you NEED to win in order to have success, feel good about yourself, and be someone worthwhile, etc.
This limiting belief prevents you from enjoying yourself on the field, having fun, thinking positively and being grateful (unless of course you are winning). Your entire life is all conditional upon getting that W on the weekend. If you think about it, that’s a very unstable and precarious place to be living from, as just one loss can send you tumbling and into a very negative and self-defeating place.
Soccer players that are able to keep a healthy perspective on winning are typically players that are mentally tough. Mental toughness is something that gets built through resilience, challenge and overcoming obstacles – and these things just aren’t happening if you are winning all the time.
{Related read: The 3 key pieces to building up your MENTAL TOUGHNESS in soccer}
When you have limiting beliefs and are NOT mentally tough, you only have two possible outcomes for every game: you are either a winner or you are a loser. You have the attitude that you can’t celebrate anything other than a win, even if you played excellent, had some great balls and communicated well. You don’t allow yourself to feel success or accomplishment unless you walked away a ‘winner’. This does a number on your confident too, believe me.
With this type of mentality, it doesn’t matter WHAT you did in the game (even if you connected the most passes you ever had, nailed a beautiful cross, or defended like a beast) – if you didn’t win you are nothing. Right? Absolutely NOT. This is just what you’ve been conditioned to believe.
Since we’ve been socially conditioned to believe in the limiting belief of the importance of winning, in order to take responsibility for our own development, we sometimes have to force ourselves to step outside of the bubble and see things for what they are. If we are one of the really lucky ones, we have a coach or a parent who already sees things this way and can guide us. But a lot of the time its up to us and it starts with simply being self-aware enough to recognize what is going on and chose to do things differently.
Results are a byproduct of the process
The results are the byproduct of the process: this is the secret to understanding that winning isn’t everything in soccer and to becoming a better soccer player.
Breaking the game down into smaller pieces and having the patience to pursue and get better at the PROCESS is how you redefine winning and come away feeling successful, even on the days when you lose. When you define success as achieving smaller process goals, and work hard towards those smaller goals, you set yourself up to come away from each and every game with something positive.
Focusing on the process and not the results is something that can be done at both the individual and team levels. A team for example, might choose to focus on things such as getting numbers into the box when in the attacking third, or moving the ball into the opponent’s half at least 10 times this game.
These are examples of process goals. They are things you can focus on and work to achieve. Things that you can work towards no matter what the score is.
Team process goals don’t have to be quantifiable, but they tend to work best when you can count them and have team discussions around that. Something that I personally do with my teams: I have hand clickers and I have my teams count the number of connected passes and the number of disconnected passes in each match. This keeps the bench involved in the game, gives them purpose in the moments they aren’t playing, and allows them to lead even when they aren’t on the field. It also gives the group something to rally around and challenge themselves to do better when we take the field for the second half.
Individually, process goals might look like controlling the ball with your first touch, connecting forward progressing passes (aka packing points, see below) or scanning the field every time the ball goes out of play. Whatever your process goals are, they should be tied to small pieces of the game and they should be set before you hit the field.
{Related read: Packing points. What they are and why you should be using them}
Understanding that winning isn't everything in soccer WILL make you a better player
Understanding that winning isn’t everything in soccer shows you are self-aware, growth-minded and you KNOW that patience to pursue and work on the smaller pieces of the game is what will get you to your long term goals. You also understand that struggle is a prerequisite for achieving greatness and that the pursuit of self-improvement is a MUST-HAVE skill.
Sometimes you need to lose NOW, to win LATER. Because if you win it all NOW, you aren’t being challenged enough, you aren’t growing enough, and you’ll be losing LATER when you don’t have the skills you need. So remember, unless you are playing pro ball, winning isn’t everything in soccer. Growth, self-improvement, joy, hard-work, resilience, progression IS.
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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