Rumor has it in Paris that Luis Enrique’s senior deputy, Rafel Pol, could already be brought in leave the club as soon as possible. We do not yet know if this is linked to the rather deleterious general atmosphere that emerges from this beginning of the adventure, with the strong maous imbroglio around the Mbappé and/or Luis Campos case, or if it is external reasons. Still, if we had had to appoint a member of the staff likely to take his legs around his neck, we would have rather bet on Joaquin Valdés. Why him ? Because it is the one who is responsible wherever Luis Enrique goes to manage the psychological and emotional aspect of the players. Suffice to say that at PSG, he is not likely to be unemployed.
But the task seems so hairy, with a team psychologically scarred by years of debacles and mental collapses in the Champions League, that it would be dizzying. On the other hand, if he manages to restore an ounce of confidence to this PSG, Joaquin Valdés will have finished the game. However, before working with the players, this graduate in sports psychology and former judoka seventh dan, was first hired by and for “Lucho”. This is what he still explains regularly when asked about Valdés, as when he took the reins of the Spanish selection. “The psychologist is me! “, he laughed during a press conference before the World Cup in Russia in 2018.
“The shrink is for me! »
Outspoken, willingly sanguine and provocative, the former midfielder has always had a strained relationship with the media, to say the least. And he quickly understood that to succeed in his new job as a coach, he would have to work on his relationship. Thus, when he took the reins of Barça, after getting his hands on the Cantera, he debriefed almost daily his media interventions with Joaquin Valdés. One of the few journalists to have the good graces of Luis Enrique, even to the point of counting today among his friends, Manfredo Alvarez, tells us.
“Luis Enrique is someone with a big character, who can quickly get on fire, and who needs to know how to manage and dominate his emotions to get his messages across, whether to the players but also to the journalists. Being a coach of big clubs or big selections exposes you publicly and very regularly. It is therefore an important aspect to master. And Joaquin Valdés helps him on these issues on a daily basis. They analyze its media passages and they define the moments when it is necessary to make a good word, the moments when it is necessary to go to the fight or the moments when it is necessary to dodge. »
Valdés also gives him advice on how to behave during a match, how to give such and such an instruction, how not to give the impression of being tense, at the risk of transmitting this tension to the players. It was he who managed, through discussion, to appease the tensions that have arisen between Luis Enrique and Leo Messiin 2015, when he decided to bench the Argentinian during a league match in January 2015. It was also him in part who made the feat possible against PSG in 2017 in the League champions during the comeback.
“Luis Enrique knew Joaquin Valdés at Sporting Gijon and they got hooked straight away. Lucho is someone who has always given importance to the psychological aspect as a performance factor. That’s why, as soon as he became Barça reserve coach, he offered to follow him on this adventure, and they have never left each other since, they are inseparable, ”says Alvarez. From Barça to Roma via the Spanish selection and PSG, the two men are inseparable. In Paris, an observer of the group describes them as “extremely close on a daily basis”.
If the head goes, everything goes
This relationship, and the fact that Joaquin Valdés is in a way the shadow of Luis Enrique on a daily basis, is not normal in a football environment that is always cautious about addressing psychological issues in depth. It is however a necessity for Marc-Antoine Verkrusse, the first psychologist to have worked on the long term with a pro club, Losc, it was between 2006 and 2017.
“It must be a long-term job and not be a one-shot story, a bang, something that was called upon in very specific circumstances. We remember Yannick Noah with PSG in 1996 during the Coupe des Coupes. He was there as a mental booster. For me, you have to go beyond that, with regular monitoring of the players, with several dimensions: psychological well-being, the development of mental skills in managing emotions, etc. But the clubs are still struggling today to pass the course in a sustainable way. Even me, in Lille, when the club had the will to take these questions seriously, it was always a job in the shadows, something a little hidden, a little masked. »
For him, it is an “anomaly” that the clubs are not yet convinced of the importance of working on the mental aspect of a group on a daily basis. “As all clubs have huge performance departments, with video analysts, physical trainers, physios, data analysts, nutritionists, it’s strange that the mental dimension is not yet appreciated to its fullest extent. just value. It is paradoxical because it is very often she who is singled out as an accelerator or brake on performance. It is one of the main factors of performance. »
This is also what Joaquin Valdés thinks, as he explained during a conference with students in sports psychology. “What does an athlete need to be at his best? Physical, technical, strategy and mental. And these four aspects are just as important as each other. If we do not take care of the psychology of the players, then the rest cannot work”, he posed by way of introduction.
Find your place in the group and gain the confidence of the players
To do this, the work of Joaquin Valdés relies heavily on observation. “To take the pulse of a group, you have to be present on the ground. I am a sports psychologist who is present on the field of play, during trips, matches, in the locker room, ”he explains. And once he feels that a player is not fully fulfilled, he tells Luis Enrique who then decides what to do next. “For Luis Enrique, most things are discussed collectively, so that each situation is resolved in the best possible way. The physical trainer gives his opinion on what he knows, the same for the assistant coach, for me on psychological issues, and in the end it is the coach who decides, who decides to act or not on this or that subject”, he detailed in front of the students.
This then involves individual interviews, informal discussions in the club canteen, or group exercises. Marc-Antoine Verkrusse: “In addition to the monitoring work, I did small workshops to give them marbles, scientifically validated techniques, relaxation exercises, breathing, mental visualization, a whole host of things that have made their mark. evidence in the field of emotion management. All that remains is to be accepted by the group, which is not always easy because the players have learned from the training center to hide their emotions and their weaknesses.
“You have to find the right approach and be accepted by the players, make them understand that it’s not a flaw to talk about your problems. There is always resistance to shrinks, something quite fantastical like we can know what you are thinking just by looking at yourself, these are societal representations of our profession, so it is important to explain things well in upstream so that the players perceive the interest of this work and trust the person. “In Paris, given the psychological liabilities of the group, it should not be complicated to make the players understand that it is in their interest to sit on the couch.