Drewe Broughton has worked with goalkeepers at the top of the game to help them embrace fear.
Header image: via Sky Sports.
“You cannot get to fearlessness without vulnerability. Vulnerability is the bridge to courage. If you’re looking for a courageous goalkeeper, you better start with vulnerability.”
These are the words of Drewe Broughton, aka ‘The Fear Coach’, a former professional footballer who works with players across the English pyramid, including two current Premier League goalkeepers.
Following a 17-year playing career that spanned over 20 clubs, Broughton went into rehab in 2011 for various addictions, broken by the game he once loved.
After a tough journey of self-discovery at the ‘Sporting Chance Clinic,’ six years later the former striker started up his business, ‘Sweat and Courage’. The aim was to help players and coaches in sport, as well as business leaders and CEOs, to understand the role of fear in high performance environments.
As a former number nine, Broughton can relate to the pressures facing goalkeepers, believing that there are inherent similarities between the two positions. He said: “I think if there’s any one position that is anything like being a goalkeeper, it’s a number nine because we’re both at clinical edges of the pitch. I miss a sitter in the six-yard box, which costs the team three points. He drops a cross and costs the team three points. So, there’s more synergy between a nine and a one, which I think enables me to navigate that.”
Last season, Broughton mentored players and coaches while working as the ‘High Performance Coach’ at Southampton. Under the management of Russell Martin, the Saints were promoted to the Premier League via the play-offs, displaying a brave, possession-based style each week.
The pressure on Southampton’s goalkeepers was particularly intense given the tactical demands on the team to persist with playing out from the back, regardless of the opposition press or poor runs in form.
Broughton’s approach was to encourage players to be truthful about their fears of potential outcomes in discussions ahead of important matches. Often, in-form goalkeepers are described as ‘fearless’ and ‘playing without fear’ by commentators and pundits due to the high-risk nature of the position, but Broughton was keen to acknowledge the dangers of so-called positive psychology.
He bemoaned the “high performance buzzwords” prominent in football, noting that they are counterproductive to truly understanding elite goalkeeper performance: “My approach is vulnerability, absolute vulnerability, aiming for courage, extreme courage. The goal is not ‘let’s be positive, rather let’s be courageous,’ but you can only get to courage through fear.
"Why would you need courage? If you weren’t afraid, you wouldn’t need courage. So, I don’t believe in fearlessness. It’s nonsense, it’s absolute nonsense.”
The 45-year-old emphasised the importance of enforcing your personality on others as a young goalkeeper, recalling an anecdote from his career when he played alongside a young Jordan Pickford at Darlington, on loan from Sunderland. Broughton said: “It’s funny because I played with Jordan Pickford when he was a young player.
"Visually, I can go back there where we were defending a set piece, and I was the main header of the ball. I was coming back, and he's come out of his six-yard box, two hands on me, pushing me - ‘****ing tighter!’ he screamed in my ear at 17 and I remember coming off that pitch thinking he’s going to be a top player.”
Observing the personalities of top goalkeepers is something that Broughton thinks is important for up-and-coming talents. For example, Alisson and Ederson, two of the best shot stoppers in world football, have found ways to remain authentic, while performing consistently well for elite clubs.
“You look at goalkeepers, look at the best — Alisson, Ederson, let’s take those two. You just take Ederson for the most extreme characters. You won't find any skin left on his body without scripture or tattoos. Do you want that in between your posts? You probably do. Why? He doesn't give a f***. He's loose as a goose. He's attached to his spirit. It's powerful. It's beyond any technique. Technique’s worthless. It's pretty worthless at the end of it all.”
For young goalkeepers coming through now, data and technology are used as tools to improve performance levels more than ever. This includes the use of ‘swivel-vision’ glasses in training by several Premier League clubs and the rise of specialist set-piece coaches in the hunt for marginal gains.
In comparison, is there a lack of attention paid to the emotional side of the game, especially for young goalkeepers? Yes, thinks Broughton.
“Goalkeepers, like being a striker, is all instinctive. When I wasn’t scoring goals, I could get easily seduced by the industry within the industry, which is data, stats, technique and analysis. I spent years in that well, spending fortunes of my own money. But actually, it was none of that.
“With goalkeepers, I ask them ‘What do you want to find?’, he added.
“’I want to find that performance in me, that effortless performance’ they’ll say. And I have to explain that we need to go into why it’s not happening, why it’s emotionally not happening. I’m not just going to shout, ‘believe in yourself!’”
Broughton’s philosophy is that goalkeepers have a choice when trying to find ways to unlock their potential - listen to their ego or remain authentic. In a football context, the ego is the voice inside a goalkeeper’s head, telling them that they have control over the outcome and that they can overcome dips in form through hard work and over analysis. This was the choice Broughton opted for in large parts of his career.
He works now listening to players and providing them with the tools to remain authentic in an industry which he believes turns its back on those looking to be vulnerable and truthful about their emotions.
A non-negotiable for Broughton when working with clubs and managers is therefore to have a cross-pollination relationship.
“If there’s stuff in one-on-ones with players that they don’t want to get back, they’ve got to understand that I’ve got to take some of that information back, so the coaches are more aware of what’s going on and we can get a solution. The minute I take anything back and the coach ever drops a player, I’m walking out of the training ground, I’m done. Because that was my experience as a player: you don’t show vulnerability, you’ll get exposed.”
Broughton has worked for the US Men’s National Team, Swansea City and Mansfield Town, among others. The first thing he does when working with new clubs and organisations? He shows them videos of Tiger Woods, Mike Tyson and David Goggins all saying that they’re terrified: “Is your career as good as theirs? Well, you might want to listen.”
Cultivating an environment where vulnerability is truly embraced, and goalkeepers can open up emotionally about their fears is where Broughton believes high performance can flourish.
