Richarlison’s goalscoring form has been the topic of debate for some time.
Last season, there were caveats and some legitimate excuses as to why things were not going as planned for Tottenham Hotspur’s £60million ($75m) signing.
Back then, you could end a conversation about his goal drought with an optimistic, “Well, it’s bound to come good for him, form is temporary, class is permanent, he’s still banging them in for Brazil.”
But when the 26-year-old is in tears on the Brazil bench after being subbed off and is then very publicly — and bravely — telling the world he needs psychological help, it is clear this is a serious issue for which the solution is unlikely to be as simple as scoring a lucky goal off his backside.
As Richarlison alluded to in his post-match interview after Brazil’s 1-0 win over Peru, this is about more than football.
A few days earlier, he had missed a glaring opportunity during a 5-1 victory over Bolivia, ballooning a free six-yard shot over the bar. Having later been substituted, the camera panned to the striker on the touchline and he was in tears.
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“That sad moment wasn’t even because I played poorly,” he said. “In my opinion, I didn’t play a bad game in Belem, it was more of an outburst about the things that were happening off the field, which got out of control — not on my part, but on the part of people who were close to me.”
He spoke of a “turbulent time” in the past five months that “ended up getting in my way” and that things are now good at home and he is looking to the future.
“People who only had an eye on my money walked away from me.”
The issue relates to a personal situation involving his agent, someone Richarlison has been close to for the duration of his career, almost a father figure to him.
Brazilian football journalist Natalie Gedra has followed Richarlison’s career and knows him well. Reflecting on his revelation that “people who only had an eye on my money walked away from me”, she points out that this is, unfortunately, a recurring theme for Brazilian footballers.
“This is a very common story in Brazil that people approach you wanting money,” Gedra says. “These guys, they often didn’t go to school, they don’t know how to manage their careers. I’ve seen loads of Brazilian players go bankrupt because of people who approach them and take their money, and sometimes it’s people from their own family.”
His comments about wanting to see a psychologist have been big news in Brazil. As their first-choice striker for the past couple of years, anything he says resonates among a huge, football-mad audience.
It’s not as taboo a subject in Brazil as it might be in the UK, but for a footballer? Attitudes are changing and the reaction to Richarlison’s words has generated support rather than derision — as may have been the case before mental health was better understood — but it’s still unusual for a footballer to speak this way.
“But Richarlison is this guy who really sticks his heart out, everyone knows he’s very open and emotional.
“Him crying on the bench against Bolivia was a culmination of things and how he doesn’t bottle things up. Or if he does bottle things up they come out at some point.
“There’s a lot going on there. He’s not an older player, he’s not very experienced in that sense. Even the people who play with him in the national team say he’s like a kid — in a good way. He has this naive side and is very emotional. Always joking around. He has this side where he really lets his emotions run.
“He can benefit from it but he can also be harmed by it.”
There are specific personal circumstances to the plight Richarlison is enduring, but his place under the spotlight for his lack of goals is unlikely to be helping.
He has scored only twice in his last 30 appearances for club and country, with that barren spell coming off the back of being either a talisman at Everton or a prolific scorer for his country.
From the start of January 2022 to the end of the World Cup, he averaged a goal for Brazil every 63 minutes. To go from that to this is a real change of pace. So is Ange Postecoglou the kind of manager who can cajole Richarlison back into his best form?
Richarlison has enjoyed paternal relationships with managers. At Fluminense in Brazil, where his career began to flourish, manager Abel Braga epitomised the arm-around-the-shoulder approach that Richarlison thrives on.
It was a similar story at Watford and, then briefly at Everton, under Marco Silva.
Things were undoubtedly different under Antonio Conte, who didn’t seem to embrace or trust Richarlison, certainly when you look at how often he put the Brazilian in his starting XI (only 12 times in the Premier League and often on the right of a front three, not a preferred position).
Conte could show warmth to his trusted lieutenants, players such as Hugo Lloris or Son Heung-min, but Richarlison was probably lacking not just pastoral care but also motivation. He needs to feel the love — and that wasn’t Conte’s forte.
Tottenham’s new manager is very different.
When Besart Berisha first started working with the Postecoglou, he had fallen out of love with the game.
The Kosovan striker joined Brisbane Roar in Australia in 2011 with his career at its lowest ebb.
Having initially started to make a name for himself with Danish top-flight club Horsens with 11 goals in 32 games as a 20-year-old on loan from Hamburg, the goals dried up, either at Hamburg, Rosenberg or then with Arminia Bielefeld in Germany. He netted just seven times in total across three seasons.
In Brisbane, he was a man transformed. Across three seasons he scored 50 goals, including 23 in that first season under Postecoglou.
The standard of the league may have been lower, but it was about more than just scoring. Postecoglou helped Berisha rediscover his love for the game.
“I felt that his man-management was completely different,” Berisha tells The Athletic. “I was 25 and had completely lost the love of this game. This is the moment Ange approached me and wanted me as his striker.
“Straight away he convinced me to fly from Europe to Australia to play for him. Just one phone call was enough to understand his way of coaching and convince me.
“After playing in Europe for so long, I needed a coach like that. I felt the trust straight away. He was the coach I needed to fall in love with the game again. I couldn’t stop scoring and became the best striker I could be.
“I had his trust and that was really important. The way he handles the problems every player has means the player doesn’t fall down. They stay on the right path to success.
“This is something special that he does. He makes players be ready and be there, and that was his way of coaching. I enjoyed every minute of his coaching.”
There are comparisons with Richarlison, not just in terms of the goal drought, but also in that both players have a great work ethic. Like Richarlison, Berisha was by no means a specialist technical player and might miss a few chances, but he would keep getting in good positions to get on the end of those chances.
Now 38, Berisha is studying to be a coach himself in Japan and doing some work at Postecoglou’s former club Yokohama F Marinos, where he is helping out the head coach, Postecoglou’s former assistant Kevin Muscat. Berisha is confident Postecoglou is the kind of man that Richarlison needs to guide him through this tricky spell.
Postecoglou doesn’t adopt a one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to man management — he is emotionally intelligent enough to work out what kind of guidance is required in each individual situation. In public, Posteocglou’s approach has been to remind Richarlison that his value to the team is about more than just scoring goals.
“A lot of coaches understand only the statistics — so if you score great, if you don’t you’re out,” Berisha says. “But Ange believes in you either way and you can feel it, you can sense it, and when he talks to you he shows you ways to do it.
“The way he managed me and talked to me was very patient and motivational. I remember my first game. I was very disappointed because I wanted to score but he said; ‘Listen, I don’t care about you not scoring. I just care that you do the work for your team-mates and the team and I promise you the time will come for you as well’.
“Those kinds of things you need because, unfortunately, this world is all about statistics and if, as a striker, you don’t score in a few games then you’re finished.
“It was really special with Ange. Throughout the season, you play bad games but you can still feel the belief from him and that gives you the confidence and comfort to keep scoring goals.
“He took the pressure off me when it came to scoring so I wouldn’t think about it anymore.”
“He will be great with Richarlison. He is the kind of manager who can bring players alive. You can see the results with the other players at Tottenham — it’s working really well.
Thinking is clearly something Richarlison is doing a lot of.
Paul McVeigh can completely relate to both of the main facets at play here; going through a tough time in front of goal, but also needing psychological assistance to deal with whatever is going on away from the field too — and trying to combine it all to become a better person and player.
McVeigh used psychology to try and maximise his performances over a 20-year career that spanned Spurs, Norwich City, Luton Town and Northern Ireland.
As a young kid at Spurs, he read his first book on the subject, something pretty unusual in the late 1990s and almost frowned upon.
He was also unusual in that he was open-minded. From being a young kid from Belfast with an inferiority complex to then making his Spurs debut as a 19-year-old up front alongside Teddy Sheringham, McVeigh immediately sought out a sports psychologist at the start of his professional career for what he saw as a logical step to improve himself.
“I don’t call it working on psychology, I call it working on mental performance,” says McVeigh, now a keynote speaker and globally renowned expert in elite performance who has delivered leadership programmes across the corporate world, for companies such as Microsoft, Barclays, PWC and Deutsche Bank.
“It’s good that Richarlison feels able to talk publicly about this,” he says. “It reflects how society is changing and how football is evolving, although as someone who benefited greatly from football, it has adapted very little to what I consider to be the most important element of performance.
“As footballers, we work on technical ability, physical ability, athleticism, social issues… and then you have what’s going on in your head.”
Richarlison will get help. Spurs don’t have full-time staff in this area but they have experts and professionals to call upon if players ask for support. Some players also have their own psychologists they work with away from the club.
Having played football for decades and then after retirement worked as a performance psychologist for seven years at two Premier League clubs, McVeigh, who was the first Premier League player to qualify with a master’s degree in psychology, knows the huge benefits of mental improvement in the sport. But he says it’s a sport that has yet to catch on to those benefits.
“Most big businesses are based on people and they look at how to maximise performance,” he says. “If you take a business where the majority of people who work there are, say, trained accountants who have the same technical levels and are basically at the same level, why don’t they perform to the same level? It comes back to mindset, attitude and psychology.
“It’s the same in football. To play Premier League football, they’re all elite athletes, whether it’s Richarlison or Harry Maguire, who’s under the spotlight right now. To get to that top 0.1 per cent of the game, they’re all technically and physically outstanding, so why the differential in performance? It comes down to the mental side of it and mindset.
“How many footballers are actively working on that on a daily basis? I stopped working in the Premier League five years ago because it was so undervalued, either by players or coaching staff. It’s still probably the least-valued thing at a football club.
“It’s such a shame football hasn’t embraced the mental side of performance as it has with sports science.”
McVeigh has delivered psychology sessions to footballers at the top of the game, down to academy kids. In his experience, he says, in a room of 25 players, five will love and embrace it, five just won’t be interested whatsoever and the majority have a curiosity, but still need to be won over, like he had to sell the idea of psychological performance to them.
It’s one of the reasons he left the industry.
Richarlison is an outlier in that not only is he keen to embrace psychological benefits to improve his performance, but he’s also willing to talk about it. That is why his quotes during the international break felt significant.
Why don’t footballers either talk more about it, or embrace psychology in private?
“They definitely see this as a barrier,” McVeigh says. “In clubs, it’s a challenge. If a player goes to see a sports psychologist, they may have something in the back of their mind where they don’t want to tell them everything in case it gets back to the manager who has to decide whether to play him in the next game or not.
“That’s a constant fear for a player.
“It happens all the time that players don’t report injuries because they worry about losing their place, or they might need to play a certain number of games to trigger a new contract, whatever it is. That’s always happened and always will.
“You can say the same about admitting you’re struggling mentally too — that’s why he’s been incredibly brave here.”
Trying to apply McVeigh’s expertise to an individual case is impossible without knowing the specifics of Richarlison’s mental state and the background to his personal issues but, generally speaking, McVeigh says the Brazilian needs to change his current pattern of thinking.
“You need to understand the person,” he says. “People and players are generally ruled by two things and one is the fear of failure. In football, that’s fear of losing, of not performing, of not having enough money to look after your family — and that can be hugely motivational.
“The other is a drive to be the best. From a psychological perspective, it’s like night and day. One is a state of fear, you’re constantly worrying about your reputation, your performance, your place in the team, your international career, whatever. That’s a challenging way to live.
“The people trying to get better, improve, get the most of themselves, that’s very different. There are rabbit holes of different theories and models within the field of psychology.
“Richarlison’s probably tying himself up in knots, things aren’t going well, he’s not playing well, he can’t score, it’s almost a cycle of defeat and failure. You need to break that habitual thinking pattern.
“That could be on the training pitch, or mental rehearsal, or looking back at clips of the best games he’s played, whatever it could be there are so many ways to switch that mindset.”
A goal against Sheffield United on Saturday would help, but for Richarlison, a player who looks like he has the weight of the world on his shoulders, this is about so much more than that.
GO DEEPER
This is the Richarlison you don't see
(Top photo: Justin Tallis/AFP via Getty Images)