Norwegian former defender Jonatan Tollas Nation played over 300 games for Aalesund and Valerenga. The ex-Norway youth international, who retired in 2022, is supporting academy players by providing them with a mental training app to improve their performance.
By Jonatan Tollas Nation
I want to make people understand the value of mental training, as I think there is a big misconception in sports surrounding this issue. Mental training helps players optimise their performance. All athletes can benefit from it, not only the players who are struggling.
It is my passion to empower players. I teamed up with a sports psychologist and three experts from the tech industry to develop our app Mindbuddy that enables young players to start mental training without needing to visit a sports psychologist.
During my career, I fought for player welfare. As a club representative of Aalesund and Valerenga, I collaborated with Norwegian player union NISO.
I had to quit playing at the age of 32. I had several knee injuries and was struggling with my knee cartilage. When my contract with Valerenga expired in 2022, the club doctor advised me to retire, also because he knew I was studying. Naturally, I was down and disappointed; I loved playing football. At the same time, I was ready for the next step.
A knee injury had pushed me towards studying in 2019 after five unsuccessful attempts to make a comeback. I was still in pain. It urged me to look for online studies, through NISO, and start preparing for life after football. I started studying twice during my career: Innovation, Leadership and Entrepreneurship, and Business Administration. The last course helped me a lot, as I learned the basics of business. I also started some companies with siblings and friends, including real estate development.
When I was injured or had a difficult moment in my career, I could focus on something else and spend my energy on it. To me, that’s healthy. I wouldn't have done it if this was taking energy from football. On the contrary, it gave me energy and a safety net in bad periods.
I got the idea for the mental training app after retiring from football. During my career I tried six different mental coaches, and I had difficulties working with the first five. The last one really helped me. She was pragmatic and that worked for me.
There are various techniques, such as visualisation, goal-setting, meditation, box-breathing, and she simply asked me which techniques I would be interested in working with. She said to focus on the two that work for me and forget about the three others. For me, goal-setting and visualisation worked well. It helped my performance so much. I used to be nervous going into games, but when I started doing these things, I felt much more confident when stepping on the pitch.
A huge part of your performance is correlated with your mental well-being. Some of the biggest players are nervous before games. I’ve heard Erling Haaland talking about how nervous he is going into matches or before key situations in games. I read that even Lionel Messi gets nervous. However, it is a misconception that you need to fix that. You’re not going to fix it. You just need to do like the best athletes do and find your strategies to deal with it.
During my last year at Valerenga, I knew 10 to 15 other players on the team were regularly in touch with our mental coach, just like me. But when our head coach asked in the dressing room which players were visiting the mental coach, only two raised their hands. It made me realise that this stigma about players talking with a psychologist was still there.
So many young players were struggling to take the step from the junior team to the senior side. A handful of players refused to practise or play matches because of their challenges. Earlier in my career, I had never seen this. It is very sad because football is supposed to be fun. Nowadays there is tremendous pressure on young players, much more than when I was young. You have all these scouts and clubs watching you. On social media you see players scoring great goals and you start comparing and thinking that you’ll never be good enough. I can imagine how personally stressed out I would have been at that age.
In Norway, we don’t have many sports psychologists or mental coaches in youth academies. We don’t train them mentally, which is a paradox, as from 13 to 19 your brain is more changeable than at an older age. It can have a great impact on their performance, but also in life.
It motivated me to do something. A couple of weeks after I retired, I started putting the pieces of the puzzle together. I realised we need to give players the opportunity to have access to a tool without having to knock on the door of a sports psychologist, without everyone thinking that you are struggling with mental health issues. We can change that with our app, Mindbuddy.
Learn more about the Mindbuddy app
I reached out to sports psychologists. I was afraid they would think I was stealing their clients, but they showed a lot of understanding, helped me and were not afraid of losing business. I also met with clubs to understand how they operated and whether they would be interested. We also surveyed 250 parents to get an understanding of how many players were struggling; around 32 percent mentioned their son or daughter experienced challenges.
We are testing the app right now. We launched it with three clubs earlier this month; more clubs are interested but we’re first focusing on these three. We will have 180 academy players using our app for two months, so we expect to get the relevant feedback before advancing.
Our app is a self-regulating tool that makes it easy for players to apply techniques such as setting match goals, visualisation, conscious breathing, mindfulness, and building your own match routine. To avoid any misunderstanding, if you are experiencing mental health problems as a player, then you should speak to a clinical psychologist instead of using Mindbuddy.
We are also using artificial intelligence to make the app more personal. Players can use it whenever they want: before or after training, before or after games. If I had this when I was young player, it would have helped me a lot.