Why so "moody"?

This week we delve in to the mood aspect within Lords of Football, how does the actions of a coach contribute to the moral and mood of the footballers that make up a team. What are the signs to look out for and the effects of players with positive or negative moods, continue reading to find out more.

Footballers are not robots as we too rightly know from seeing players exposing how they feel mistreated while at club X. They have their own minds, and with that comes expectations as well as personal and corporate goals.

These are elements that we wanted to incorporate within Lords of Football, namely an added sense of personalty in each footballer that you have to work with, same as in real life. The players can be anywhere on the scale of depressed to extremely enthusiastic, this is just the start. The overall mood of a player is created from a number of different conditions, that each footballer will be interested in to varying degree. They include: training conditions, coaching decisions, match results and individual performances to name a few.

Lets give you examples by way of some scenarios:

The obvious is the fact that a player is preforming well in a match and contributes to goals and has a big part to play in the overall great result of the match. A player who has a great interest in the teams overall preformance will have an increased positive mood, but on the other hand his team mate may have a negative mood, although the team is winning and doing well he is not actually having any individual success on the pitch leading to a negative mood.

What about outside of the match? One factor that can be of real importance to a footballer is the intensity of his training regime as well as the conditions he trains in. Some footballers maybe happy to train outside while it is snowing, but this will not be the case for all. Push them too hard with difficult training regimes and your footballers will surely let you know about it.

So why is it so important to keep your footballers happy apart from having a nice little smiling face above their heads? The happiness of your footballers can also boost their technical, tactical or physical abilities on match day. This goes the other way too, if they have a really negative mood this could decrease their abilities on the pitch and cause you to miss goal scoring chances or even contribute to losing the match.

There is a balancing act to preform with the mood of the footballers, you have to get the best preformance out of them but at the same time there is a need to keep their morals high as this will boost their abilities in a match. Its possible to train your team hard day and night to the extreme, this may be great for getting them up to the necessary standards before a big match. With depleted energy and a fragile mood is it effective to take such a strategy? Only you can decide what is correct for your footballers.