Top-level goalkeepers- what sustains their career?
Mats explains how the modern goalkeeper is able to keep playing at the top level for longer than those of his and previous generations.
“I was retired late for my generation. I retired at 37 – and in my time, that was very late. Today the profession is making it possible for goalkeepers to prolong their careers – normally you don’t have to get up early in the morning to go to work, you have more time to recover – you have better health organisation in the teams- and the experience for the goalkeepers is so important.”
“What you’re losing in speed in the body as you’re getting older- you’re recovering with experience. You know where the ball is going and what side it is on, you’ve lived in that situation so many times. This means that clubs are still interested in older goalkeepers because they know that the most important thing is not to be explosive or active- but that the brain is working.
Putting this with better physical preparation, the health systems, the better recovering times, means that these players get longer careers.”
What is the difference between a goalkeeper that retires early and one that prolongs their career? “That you’re enjoying it. The day you stop feeling like you enjoy the training- you’re not feeling challenged, you’re not feeling like: 'today, what’s going to happen?', you don’t have this feeling in the body like you’re still in your twenties. You need to feel this something special. When you go to training or a game and start to feel “another day, another job”, it’s time to finish.
“The person that doesn’t want to get better stops being good.” If you don’t want to develop, you stop being good. That’s simple. When you think you’re already good, you go quickly downwards.”
The inaugural goalkeeper summit
The first goalkeeper summit brought minds together to innovate and analyse goalkeeping, providing invaluable lessons for the attendants.
Olsson stated, “We all want to progress goalkeeping. We care about it. But we have different opinions, and that’s good, in goalkeeping, there’s not one way. With different types and sizes of goalkeepers, today we’ve mentioned: Andreas Palicka, Andreas Wolff, (Gonzalo) Pérez de Vargas and Niklas Landin, four different styles and kinds of goalkeepers, with different strengths. We can’t train them in the same way, they must be trained in different ways.”
“The best thing about the summit is that we come together and that we can learn from each other.”
Whether it is the importance of mental preparation for a goalkeeper, or the need to always look to develop to stay at the top, the world of goalkeeping is full of know-how that only the most experienced, such as Mats Olsson, can offer. Whatever comes next in the development of handball goalkeeping, be sure that Mats Olsson will be analysing it and hopefully sharing this wisdom with us again in the future.
Photos © Agentur DIENER