“We beat Andorra but I got absolutely lambasted,” Steve McClaren says, recalling, in his words, the ‘toxic’ environment that England had become at the height of the Golden Generation era and the impact it had on his then young family.
“My wife was worried at how bad it got, the nation being against me. She said: ‘I think it may be affecting the kids at school’. I thought ‘Wow, I didn’t realise that’.
“So I pulled the boys together in the kitchen and said to them: ‘Look, we’ve got to the tipping point – if you want me to, I’ll get out of the situation and get away from all this stress. I can resign if it’s becoming unbearable, if you’re getting bulled.’
“They just looked at me and to a boy, they all went ‘Don’t be stupid, Dad – school’s great!’ My wife said ‘Oh no’ and I said to her: ‘There you go, a reason to stay in the job!’”
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“I saw my Dad get put under all kinds of criticism but honestly, it’s not real. It’s not the life I lived,” he tells i. “It’s funny, people talk to me like I’m the victim sometimes but I’ve been absolutely fine! The narrative around football isn’t real and my Dad isn’t the person you think he is.”
Perhaps it tells you much about the mentality of the McClarens that far from being put off by their father’s experience at England, they have embraced the cut-throat world that brought them all to the table in the family home in Yarm 14 years ago for that emergency conference.
Oldest son Joe is currently head of recruitment at Derby while Josh, the youngest son, is an aspiring sports psychologist. So, why put yourself through it when you’ve seen how unforgiving it can be?
“I don’t know, I’m an idiot,” Josh laughs. “I think it’s something when you’re in that world. When Dad is presented with something that most people would fear, he feels the fear and does it anyway.
“It’s something common in elite sport. It’s about being uncomfortable with the way things are and being more comfortable pushing yourself.
“When I see Dad’s career, people criticise him for his failures he had with England or later on. But I don’t think people understand from my position how amazing it is to strive for that career and how inspirational that is when you see it first hand.”
We’ve convened to talk about football’s “final frontier” sports psychology and their excellent podcast ‘McClaren performance’, which tackles that subject every week.
Josh brings theory from years of formal training while dad Steve has the ‘real world’ experience of life on the training pitch in some of the biggest jobs in English football.
“Mentality and psychology will be huge in football over the next ten years,” Steve, who now has a role as one of Fifa’s technical directors, says.
“Look at the four cornerstones of football – with Academies we’ve built players with such good technique, tactically players have never had so much game intelligence and physically the game is quicker than ever before. It’s the last piece of the puzzle. The next ten years will be about mentality and training that.”
Steve was an early adopter and pioneer of psychology, introducing Bill Beswick to that iconic group at Manchester United that dominated English football. He later worked with Steve Black, the man hailed by England World Cup winner Jonny Wilkinson as a ‘genius’.
“Football has changed in its approach to psychology since I started working with Bill but actually not that much. I’m really surprised about that,” Steve says. “Look at the reaction when Ralf Rangnick appointed a psychologist. It was almost like a scandal – what are they doing?
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“I think there’s still a stigma. Players will talk about working with a sprint coach to improve their speed but, although players will work with a psychologist they almost whisper about it. We have to change that.
“It’s not for everyone, you have to want to do it and be ready for it. But anything that makes you a better person and a better footballer, why not embrace it?”
It is not just about helping players cope. The message that comes through as we chat for nearly two hours is there are real performance benefits to training the brain and at the moment it feels like football is only scratching the surface.
Josh, for example, worked with Sunderland’s first team during his Masters degree. “I wanted to get a bit more insight into why players make the decisions they do when they’re in full flow,” he said.
“We got them to measure the hierarchy of the team and then measured baseline testosterone levels. The more popular the player was the lower their baseline testosterone and the less popular he was, the higher his testosterone was.
“It feels like there’s so much work we can do there.”
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But he wonders whether Premier League clubs would be ready for that sort of integration of coaching and psychology. “The sports psychology role is not yet defined,” Josh says.
“We started from scratch at Newcastle, building a culture on the foundations of sports psychology and Becky’s been brilliant. If you look at the results it’s working. But getting into an established Premier League side requires trust and as a profession we probably need to build that.
“There’s so many good people doing the job already but probably as a profession we can get bogged down in theory. We need to sell the role better, show the evidence for how it works. And we need to tell the stories as well.”
Steve can testify that it has helped some huge stars in his time. “The Nevilles, the Keanes, they want to know: ‘Will it make me a better player?’ And it does.”
But it is not just about elite stars: “Academies have a duty of care and absolutely the support needs to be there.”
Their podcast is part of the mission, Josh’s idea to take the message to a new audience. “I am a big reader and learner but I think to a new generation, podcasts are the way they learn,” Steve says.
“This isn’t about making money or anything like that. If we can help one person out there, convince one person, then we’ve done what we set out to do.”
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