Frankfurt Galaxy in ELF: Mental Difficulties for Football Players

AThomas Kösling is particularly looking forward to the days ahead of the Frankfurt Galaxy. Not because it is particularly about American football, the sport in which head coach Kösling and his team play for the European title and in which he spends most of his everyday life. But because exactly the opposite is the case.

“I have given my players Tuesday off until next week. You should do something completely different, think of something completely different.” He himself also wants to try to switch off completely, to completely break away from the exhausting back and forth in the European League of Football (ELF).

“This can get pretty ugly”

Kösling explained all this in a remarkable press conference after the important home win against the Cologne Centurions on Sunday, which was particularly remarkable because the Galaxy coach addressed a central topic in addition to the usual analyzes and routine sentences on topics such as satisfaction and goals that he had not spoken in this form before: A handbrake was still on somewhere in his team, said Kösling, and that was not only to blame for the fact that the start of the season was so messed up, but that his team got into the games themselves , who won it in the end, mostly got off to a rocky start, and found it difficult to find the necessary rhythm.

This handbrake, said Kösling, “is somewhere in the mental realm. I hope the guys use the coming days to find out where exactly. And that they manage to solve them.” Because only then, and that was in a way Kösling’s closing argument, “will we be able to get our horsepower onto the road”. Says: to achieve the ambitious goal of defending the title for the season.

Galaxy currently has a record of four wins and three losses. In the well-deserved 46:14 (20:14) against Cologne on Sunday, the team showed once again that they are capable of playing exciting and, above all, successful football when everything that should come together comes together. But because only the three winners of the respective conferences and the best runner-up in the entire league qualify for the play-offs, the way back to the ELF final is still long and difficult for last year’s winner.

The previous defeats, all against competitors for the play-off participation, remain a major burden. Any further bankruptcy would probably mean the final end of the title dreams, and guests in Frankfurt in the further course of the season will be the previously undefeated Vienna Vikings.

“Going into the season as champions, with great expectations from all sides, then losing the start right in front of this great crowd of 7,000 or 8,000 spectators, that created uncertainties,” said Kösling. The enormous pressure, the public and media observation, the omnipresence in social media – not all of his players would be able to fully cope with it. Especially not if they were confronted with hate comments on Instagram and Co.

“My players are all amateurs, they don’t make millions, they’re not trained to consistently ignore things like that. And that just goes through to the cabin. Suddenly things are being questioned that have never been questioned before.” This is one of the reasons why Kösling recommends his team to look for the handbrake in their heads in the coming days so that, if possible, they can use their full potential after the forthcoming weekend without games unfold. The football-free time should also do the injury-plagued Galaxy squad good. For the next game at the end of July against the Panthers Wrocław in Poland, Kösling expects some players who were absent at the beginning of the season to be back on the field.

One of the outstanding figures there against the Centurions on Sunday, defender Daniel Josiah, a native of the football city of Frankfurt, also sat on the podium at this press conference, right next to Kösling. Could he confirm his coach’s assumptions? That the pressure in this new football league, which is much more prominent in the media, is different than what many players have been used to; that the stage in the stadium and above all in the digital world is bigger, along with its negative side effects?

“Yeah,” said Josiah, “this can get pretty ugly.” “Fortunately” he himself has not yet been sent hate messages or anonymous insults, but he knows of some teammates who have done so. “Somehow you have to find a way to deal with it, talk about it with your teammates and the support team.” So that the uncertainties don’t get too big and the handbrake doesn’t end up being too tight.

But he also wanted to report “something positive”, said the 24-year-old at the end of the press conference. “The platform that this league offers us also has its beautiful sides. For example, my grandma can now see me on TV every Sunday. That’s a wonderful thing.”