Every four years, the world stops. The World Cup mobilizes billions of people, concentrates decades of investment in athletic development, and brings together, in a single tournament, the most physically prepared athletes on the planet. And yet, teams still fail over "details": elite players freeze on penalty kicks, and stars vanish in decisive matches. It's not uncommon for technically superior national teams to be eliminated by opponents considered inferior — what explains this pattern?
The answer isn't found only in exercise physiology or performance analysis — it's also in behavior and psychology. Preparing an athlete for the World Cup takes far more than kilometers run, monitored sprints, or rehearsed defensive schemes. It also requires understanding how the human brain responds to extreme pressure, collective identity, and perceived threat — and, more than that, intervening on those mechanisms in a structured, intentional, evidence-based way.
The behavioral science literature applied to sport has accumulated enough evidence to support structured interventions in elite football (Gardner & Moore, 2012; Henriksen et al., 2020), grounded in models already established in the field (Michie et al., 2011; Michie et al., 2013). The question, then, isn't whether tools exist to map and change behavior under pressure in a replicable, evidence-based way — it's why, in so many contexts, they don't make it into the training microcycle with the same seriousness as training load monitoring or GPS data analysis. As long as behavior keeps being treated as a residual variable — something to address once everything else has been tried — performance under pressure will keep being explained by talent or chance, when science has been telling us for some time that it's something we can actually intervene on.
There's a well-documented paradox in elite sport: the greater an athlete's technical and physical preparation, the more visible the behavioral component of their performance becomes. At the level of excellence where every competitor is conditioned to their physiological limit, what separates those who execute under pressure from those who collapse is rarely VO₂max or sprint power — it's what happens "between the ears." Even elite athletes and coaches tend to say that in-game performance comes more from the psychological side than the physical one (Best et al., 2018).
One example of this phenomenon has a scientific name: choking under pressure. In plain language, something like "freezing up." It happens when the perception of extreme stakes activates neural mechanisms that, paradoxically, degrade performance instead of boosting it. Neuroimaging studies implicate reward and motor-control structures in this process: the promise of a high reward (a Cup final, a knockout-stage penalty kick) can recruit vigilance circuits that interfere with the automatic execution of highly trained skills (Tanaka et al., 2023). At the 2022 World Cup, for example, Belgium's Romelu Lukaku missed multiple open-goal chances in a decisive match watched by billions of people — an example cited by Wang et al. (2023) as a textbook instance of choking in a high-pressure context.
But choking is just the visible tip of the problem. Underneath it operates a deeper, less-discussed layer: the distinction between reflective motivation and automatic motivation. Reflective motivation is rational, planned, conscious — the athlete analyzing an opponent and setting a strategy. Automatic motivation is emotional, unconscious, and far faster. This distinction maps onto a well-known behavioral science concept: Systems 1 and 2, popularized in Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. System 1 corresponds to automatic motivation (emotional, unconscious, fast), and System 2 to reflective motivation (rational, planned, conscious). In contexts of extreme pressure, like a World Cup, it's automatic motivation — System 1 — that takes over, and it's heavily shaped by something physiology can never train: identity.
To understand this mechanism, we need to bring in a framework from social psychology, not sport science. Tajfel and Turner (1986) proposed that individuals derive a significant part of their self-esteem from belonging to social groups, and that threats to that collective identity trigger intense, predictable psychophysiological responses. When the national team that "is us" faces public failure, the body responds with what researchers call a threat response: elevated cortisol, narrowed attentional focus, impaired working memory, and worse decision-making. Moore et al. (2019), in systematizing the Challenge/Threat model, empirically showed that how an athlete cognitively and physiologically appraises a pressure situation — as a challenge or as a threat — measurably determines the quality of their subsequent performance. They found that appraising a situation as a challenge produces better performance than appraising it as a threat. In other words, adopting a growth mindset can support athletes' performance.
A growth mindset is the belief that we can develop our abilities by investing more effort, treating challenges and failures as learning opportunities, seeking help when needed, and trying new strategies when the current ones aren't producing the desired results. In other words, that our abilities aren't fixed traits, but things that can change — and that not only can we improve through effort, but improving gets easier over time. In education, decades of research on the topic show that adopting a growth mindset helps students persist longer on difficult tasks and achieve higher academic performance (Dweck, 2006). But more recent research shows it's not a silver bullet: to get better results, the environment — peers, teachers — also needs to support the adoption of a growth mindset, not just the individual.
Emerging research from one of this piece's co-authors (Best et al., 2026) shows, interestingly, that an athlete adopting a growth mindset doesn't on its own affect performance. What does affect performance is when the athlete perceives that their coach holds that mindset. The coach creates the system in which the athlete feels capable, has opportunities, and feels motivated — which is why the coach's perceived mindset ends up mattering even more. This research suggests that adopting a growth mindset isn't enough without an environment that supports it taking root.
If the paradox of elite performance is behavioral, the response needs to be too. The core problem is that most elite teams still treat preparation for these mechanisms as a side note — or worse, as the individual athlete's own responsibility. Fortunately, behavioral science offers a model we can apply here, one that helps us integrate behavioral science into the functions of elite teams in a systematic way.
The COM-B model (Capability–Opportunity–Motivation–Behavior), developed by Michie et al. (2011), is one of the most widely used frameworks for this approach. For any behavior to occur, an individual needs to feel capable (capability), have the opportunity (opportunity), and want or need to do it (motivation) — and the three components interact continuously. Applied to a sporting context, the model lets us identify, for example, whether an athlete who "freezes" on penalty kicks is suffering from a psychological capability deficit, a lack of structured training routines under pressure, or motivation undermined by fear of social punishment.
One example is Psychological Skills Training (PST) programs, consistently reported as an important part of preparing for optimal performance in elite sport (Zhang et al., 2024). The athlete-centered approach, grounded in empathy, respect, and authenticity, reflects the premise that athletes are capable of shaping their own behavior, given the right conditions.
Behaviour Change Techniques (BCTs), proposed by Michie et al. (2013), have been used to break interventions down into their "active ingredients," enabling replicability and scientific comparison across protocols. Their application in elite sport, while promising, is still occasional and predominantly led by sport scientists — suggesting that structured behavioral intervention remains an open field for interdisciplinary work. Unlike sport psychology, which has a well-established clinical scope covering athletes' emotions, cognition, and mental health, behavioral science broadens the field by taking observable behavior and its individual, collective, and environmental determinants as its object of study.
Through frameworks and tools like COM-B and BCTs, teams can build a structured diagnosis of why athletes do or don't adhere to what's prescribed, and design interventions that go beyond individual sessions to reach the squad as a group and the club's organizational environment. This isn't an emerging trend — it's a methodological need that remains underexplored in elite football.
Behavior, then, isn't a residual variable to be addressed once every other resource has been exhausted. It's a central, modifiable variable, one that can be diagnosed, systematically intervened on, and evaluated with the same scientific rigor applied to any other component of athletic preparation. Until that understanding becomes part of the structural culture of clubs, performance under pressure will keep being explained by talent or chance, when science increasingly shows that it's something we can intervene on.
Best, M. T. (2018, March). The psychology of high-level performance in elite youth soccer players [Conference presentation]. Eastern Psychology Association Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA, United States.
Best, M. T., Tibbetts, Y. T., Barron, K. E., Himmelberger, Z. M., Nesterak, E., & Hulleman, C. S. (under review). The power of perception: Growth mindset beliefs and their implications in elite youth soccer.
Gardner, F. L., & Moore, Z. E. (2012). Mindfulness and acceptance models in sport psychology: A decade of basic and applied scientific advancements. Canadian Psychology, 53(4), 309–318.
Henriksen, K., Hansen, J., & Larsen, C. H. (2020). Psychosocial environmental quality and athlete development: Current state and future directions. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, Article 1787.
Michie, S., Richardson, M., Johnston, M., Abraham, C., Francis, J., Hardeman, W., Eccles, M. P., Cane, J., & Wood, C. E. (2013). The behavior change technique taxonomy (v1) of 93 hierarchically clustered techniques. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 46(1), 81–95.
Michie, S., van Stralen, M. M., & West, R. (2011). The behaviour change wheel: A new method for characterising and designing behaviour change interventions. Implementation Science, 6, Article 42.
Moore, L. J., Vine, S. J., Wilson, M. R., & Freeman, P. (2019). Reappraising threat: How to optimize performance under pressure. Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, 41(1), 48–59.
Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1986). The social identity theory of intergroup behavior. In S. Worchel & W. G. Austin (Eds.), Psychology of Intergroup Relations (pp. 7–24). Nelson-Hall.
Tanaka, R., Ishii, Y., & Imai, H. (2023). A neural basis of choking under pressure. bioRxiv.
Wang, W., Gregg, M. J., & Liu, H. (2023). The impact of hemispheric activity priming on choking under pressure in badminton tasks. Journal of Human Kinetics, 89, 173–185.
Zhang, X., Rogers, M., & Werthner, P. (2024). Exploring a practitioner-athlete relationship and facilitated learning throughout a psychological skills training program. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, Article 1354129.
Enjoyed this? Subscribe to Café Comportamental for weekly essays in Portuguese, or explore more in Resources.