Ep. 193: Paul McVeigh - What Elite Footballers Can Teach Us About High Performance

Today, I am delighted to bring you my conversation with former Premier League footballer and now performance psychologist Paul McVeigh. Paul played professionally for the likes of Norwich City and Tottenham Hotspur and internationally for Northern Ireland. He competed with some of the sport’s best players and has taken this experience and developed his own methodology to performance psychology which he applies in his work with leaders and teams. He is also an author, having written The Stupid Footballer is Dead which discusses how football at an elite level is played every bit as much with the mind as it is on the pitch.

You certainly don’t need to be interested in football to get a lot out of this episode, but if you are, you will find it even more fascinating. Paul shares more about all this in this episode, including:

· The day he began his professional career at Tottenham which also happened to coincide with the first day of World Cup-winning colleague Jurgen Klinsmann;
· How he started to apply psychology as a professional footballer at a time when sports psychology wasn’t something very common;
· What he learned from being on the same pitch as Cristiano Ronaldo;
· What former Chelsea great Gianfranco Zola told him about Diego Maradona;
· The decision to retire as a footballer to do what he does now;
· The differences and similarities between elite footballers and high-performance leaders
· Much more