The Emotional Game - Self Compassion

 There are various important implications in the findings of Leary, Tate, Adams , Allen & Hancock's (2007) study in relation to the concept of the emotional game.

Firstly as self compassion has been found to moderate reactions to distressing situations, perhaps a high level of self compassion would be highly useful for a goalkeeper. As a goalkeeper, a player will receive a lot of stress from shots and physicality within the box, and also the distress of conceding a goal, in a sense letting the team down, could also be labelled 'a distressing situation'.So in that sense, high level of self compassion would definitely assist a goalkeeper deal with both the stress of having to prevent goals and deal with goals that have already been conceded. Especially the case for when the goalkeeper himself is at fault, which is true for the .gif below, a legitimate goal. 

Self compassion would be particularly appropriate, as high self compassion would also make the goalkeeper more accepting in his role, as it is very obviously his own fault and not that of his teams, that he let the ball slowly roll into the goal. 

Fixing Fernando

 The recurring theme of Fernando Torres' lack of confidence and how to augment it comes up once again, but the findings and experimental conclusions from this self-compassion paper, do suggest that if Torres was to blame himself, whilst still being kind to himself, it might foster a better increase in performance than being high in self esteem. If  he is solely high in self-esteem without being high in self-compassion, he may blame the other players for their poor performances and not passing him the ball, which might fracture relationships and the team's unity. If he is self compassionate instead, he will recognize his own shortcomings and adjust his play-style to better suit them. He may wish to emulate Dimitar Berbatov, a player both high in self compassion (noticeable by his playstyle, doing the things he's good at but not pushing it), but also high in self esteem as demonstrated below.