Players try to adopt cool, calm exteriors during a title race. If you ask them probing questions in pre- or post-match interviews, they will say they are simply “focused on the next game”.

But when things are going to wire, as it is with Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester City at the top of this season’s Premier League, what is going on in their minds?

The Athletic has spoken to those who have been there, done it and fretted along the way. This is the story of how it is done — and how to cope with the pressure.

Although sports psychologist Dan Abrahams tells The Athletic that the important thing for players is to focus on what they can control, that is much easier said than done. “Literally every time I got in the car after training, I imagined lifting the trophy,” Robert Huth says. “It was just my crazy little brain thinking about the ifs, buts and maybes.”

The German was part of the Premier League’s greatest upset, when Leicester City won the 2015-16 title against all odds. “Your mind starts predicting the future,” he says. “You can’t help but think about the end game.”

Leicester retained top spot from mid-January onwards and realised that dream — but others around Huth and his team-mates played a key role.

“I always felt like the staff — including Claudio Ranieri, who was brilliant — knew what was going on in our heads,” he says. “They let us dream but they also brought us back down to earth and set the tone when it was time to work. We weren’t arrogant to think we could do it, but you can’t help thinking about the best outcome. It’s human nature.”

Huth with the Premier League trophy (Shaun Botterill/Getty Images)

Alan Shearer — who won the title with Blackburn Rovers in 1995 — said in his recent column for The Athletic on the mental pressures of the title race that players are economical with the truth.

“They’ll tell us they have absolutely no interest in what the other teams are doing. Let me tell you something: it’s bulls***.”

Huth agrees. Especially when it comes to the order in which teams play. “It makes a massive difference,” he says. “When you’re in a tight race, it’s all-consuming. All you think about is your opposition. What are they doing? When are they kicking off?”

In the end, Leicester, who only lost three league games all season, were handed the title when Tottenham Hotspur blew a two-goal lead to draw 2-2 at Chelsea. The team watched together that night and along the way.

“I made a real point of watching the other games, be it Spurs or Arsenal (who finished as runners-up). I wanted them to lose, make no mistake about it. I remember watching the full 90 minutes of Liverpool against Spurs with Kasper Schmeichel and Danny Simpson and all we wanted was for Spurs to lose. They ended up getting a point. I was sitting there going, ‘Jesus, we could have done with them losing to give a bit more breathing space’.”

The reaction was more important, though. “We always managed to find something positive when something went against you,” he says.

“That’s key for these guys now. There will be a twist along the way, it’s not just going to be straight up for any team, so they have to find a positive.”

When Arsenal thought they had blown it in back in the 1988-89 season after losing to Derby County and drawing with Wimbledon, some players tried to avoid updates on Liverpool’s 5-1 hammering of West Ham United. Paul Merson went out for a curry but couldn’t resist calling team-mate Perry Groves. Lee Dixon’s dinner in Hertfordshire came with service from a gloating Liverpudlian. “The waiter came and told me at the end, ‘You’ve got to beat us 2-0 now… it’s not going to happen, is it?’,” he says in 89, Amy Lawrence’s book about that season. “And I went, ‘No’.”

Michael Thomas famously had other ideas when it was ‘up for grabs’ in the final minute at Anfield.

Defining head-to-head games on the final day of the season are rare, but clashes between title contenders earlier in the season provide a huge opportunity to deal a mental blow. “Leicester at White Hart Lane,” says Tottenham defender Ben Davies, recalling the 1-0 defeat at White Hart Lane in January 2016. “That’s the one I look back on. If we’d won that game things might’ve been a bit different because the gap after that (seven points) meant they were always that one step away.

“At the time people were like, ‘Oh (Leicester aren’t) going to be able to keep this up’. When they beat us we were like, ‘Oh… they’re in the mix now. This is a serious contender’.”

Davies trying to block Huth’s winning header at White Hart Lane in January 2016 (Dan Mullan/Getty Images)

Leicester’s results were strong, but the pressure showed inside the dressing room in different ways.

“It got a bit more quiet,” says Huth. “Normally changing rooms are buzzy with the music pumping, everyone’s relaxed and having a bit of a joke. Towards the last few games, people were a little more within themselves.”

The high stakes were having an effect. “I went through my routine even more: what to do, who to mark and where to be on set pieces and other situations. I knuckled down. It intensified,” Huth says. “You don’t want to be the guy who lets down your team-mates because you were a little bit lazy or you forgot to be in a certain position.”

Shearer has written about “walking around with a constant, irritating companion” when he competed for titles with Blackburn and Newcastle United. “Wherever you go, whatever you do, it’s right there with you, chirping away,” he says. “There’s no hiding place from that piercing, nagging voice forever reminding you exactly what’s at stake.

“At Blackburn, every setback would fuel that little voice: ‘Oh my god, we’ve f***ed it, we’ve messed up, game over’.

The former England captain admitted that when it came down to the final games of the season, that little voice “was more like a blaring scream”. It meant he couldn’t sleep. “After games, my brain wouldn’t stop whirring, replaying everything I’d done or could have done. You go to bed and it infiltrates your brain. You toss and turn because sleep doesn’t come.

“I would catch myself doing rudimentary maths, working out all the possible outcomes and permutations. Burning up all that emotional energy was exhausting.”

Shearer’s strike partner at Ewood Park, Chris Sutton, was on the same wavelength on and off the field. “I never played with a footballer who doesn’t care,” he said in a recent BBC interview. “In title run-ins, some players mask it and portray an attitude like they don’t care, but everybody does — deeply. It’s all you think about. You don’t sleep well.

“If things weren’t going well (in a rival’s match), you get up and go to the toilet and think that by the time you come back something would have changed. Just change something — make a cup of tea, go outside, just change the routine. It obviously has no impact at all.”

There’s science behind it. “The closer you get to ‘D-Day’ in a title race, as Shearer says, the volume of that critical voice inside your head with unhelpful, negative emotions will turn up,” says Abrahams, a leading sports psychologist who has worked with elite players. “There’s a great deal of things that are out of your control. Control is a prime source of stress response.”

Shearer won the Premier League with Blackburn (Getty Images)

It doesn’t just have an impact off the field. “It delivers a lot of performance anxiety,” Abrahams says. “Not only do you have an inner voice that can distract, slow your anticipation and damage your awareness — it also impacts your physical functioning.

“Basic things like your first touch, your ability to close, see and find space or get on the end of crosses go. It plays on perception and physical coordination, so it’s an enormous challenge for players.”

So how do you guard against that anxiety? “Take players’ minds away from outcomes,” says Abrahams. “Be less pressurised on themselves around performance, but much more in tune with the controllable process they’ve got to execute.

“A striker might think, ‘I’ve got to score, it’s the run-in’. Take their mind away from that and focus on things that help them score like runs and movement, things they can control. Specific, controllable, positive plays or cues.”

But mental fortitude needs work. “(Teams need to) put these in place before any kind of pressurised situation at the back end of the season,” he says. “My argument when I sit in front of a manager: this starts in pre-season.

“Players themselves become the most powerful psychologists and this is what needs to be trained all season to reinforce the messages across the team.”

Abrahams also works with golfers, as a former pro himself, but it’s different to football. Only when taking set pieces — inherently individual moments — is there time to stop, focus on your routine, a point on the ball and your breathing. “Football works in seconds, but the brain works in milliseconds, so the brain trumps football for speed every time.

“When people say, ‘Football is so quick, how can it be a psychological sport?’, I would argue that football is as psychological (as golf), if not more so, because if you go missing as a player, that’s going to make an enormous difference to your team’s ability to execute a tactical plan.”

While Abrahams extols the virtue of creating “great leaders”, the ultimate aim for that team, according to Abrahams, is “a shared mental model” combining game plan and mindset. “What do we do under pressure? We’re dominant. We’re relentless. We’re focused. We’re confident. We’re calm. Action-based words that we want to embody as a team with physical cues, self-talk and body language.”

Controlling the voices in your head is one thing, team performances are another — but what happens when rival managers try to influence you with mind games? You certainly want your manager to take the sting out of the situation.

In the build-up to his famous “Love it” rant, Kevin Keegan advised his players to keep calm and carry on. He stopped interviews and their regular Monday lunch meet for pasta and beers to avoid bumping into journalists.

Then he blew his top after a key win at Leeds and took Sir Alex Ferguson’s bait. Ferguson had accused opponents of trying harder against Manchester United in the title race.

“We were just, like, ‘What has he done?!’,” recalls former Newcastle centre-back Steve Howey. “He is telling us not to give anything away and he has lost the plot. We were all wondering what they’d make of that at Old Trafford. We were naive and Kevin was naive as well. That said, we probably loved him even more for how he reacted. He wore his heart on his sleeve and we wanted to win it more for him.”

Howey (left of Keegan) said the Newcastle players couldn’t believe Keegan’s rant (Stu Forster/Allsport/Getty Images)

Newcastle faltered after that as Manchester United claimed the title by four points. Ferguson tried similar the season before when Blackburn held a six-point advantage, suggested they would need to do a ‘Devon Loch’ — a racehorse that led the 1956 Grand National but fell on the final straight — to be caught.

Dalglish’s response? “Isn’t that an expanse of water in Scotland?”

Shearer was grateful for Dalglish’s approach: “In those circumstances, it helped to have Kenny as our manager. He had seen it and done it at Liverpool and had dealt with Fergie’s mind-games. His deadpan demeanour helped drain pressure away from us.”

Ferguson’s words still cut through. “We were all listening and chatting about it in the dressing room and he knew that; knew how it would have pressed our buttons and wound us up, getting under your skin,” says Shearer. “He was a master of the art.”

United’s 1-1 draw at West Ham ultimately allowed Blackburn to claim the title despite losing 2-1 at Liverpool.

Blackburn, like Leicester, went against a school of thought established by the late leading psychologist Albert Bandura.”He spent his life researching this and he would say past experiences are your number one source of self-belief,” explains Abrahams. “If you’ve done it in the past, it demonstrates you can do it again. It’s a very simplistic way of looking at it because clearly teams win and lose, but it does help them.”

City will lean on that as they go for four in a row this season. It wasn’t like that in 2011-12 when they relished taking on the establishment.

“I was watching everything, absolutely everything,” Micah Richards, who played 29 of City’s league games that season, said in an interview with The Athletic in 2022. “I read everything, too. We used to love it. ‘He’s (Ferguson) at it again’. ‘Noisy neighbours’. We loved all that. We didn’t come out and do many interviews. It was all respectful. But in the changing room, we would say to ourselves, ‘We’re better than these’.

“We just had the edge of… not caring, not worrying. (Manager) Roberto Mancini knew exactly what he was doing, too. Against Fergie, he was just fearless.”

Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest cared little for reputation when they won the top division as a promoted side in 1977-78 and followed it up with back-to-back European Cup victories.

“He was a psychologist,” says Martin O’Neill, part of that all-conquering team. “He believed that time away from the football club was as important as time at the football club. You were expending an awful lot of energy during a game — physically and psychologically.

“Clough said bring your passports in on a Monday and you’ll be away until Thursday. We loved it.”

This season, Arsenal’s winter break to Dubai led to 10 wins from league 11 games after just one win in five. This was a page from Clough’s book. “We formed relationships and a camaraderie,” says O’Neill. “Show me a winning side and they’ll have a decent camaraderie. Show me a losing side and the chances are they’re fighting with each other.”

But sometimes the fight to stay in the starting line-up, mixed with a title race, inhibits rational thought. “It’s tunnel vision,” says Robert Snodgrass, who won three promotions during his career, including with Leeds United in 2010. He says longer-term ankle issues followed as a result.

“The right thing to do would have been to step aside. Was my ankle more important than promotion? I lost the ability to decide and had 10 to 12 years of ankle issues trying to chase the objective or promotion.

“I had this mindset that I needed to do something long term, try to stay in the team, how you’re portrayed in the team, be a good team-mate… it’s tunnel vision.

“When you’re chasing a title, you’re completely obsessed. It can change your life, your family’s life, everybody else around you, your team-mates, the staff, people at the club… it’s a hell of an obsession.

“You want to be successful, but nobody speaks about the pitfalls if you lose or it doesn’t happen.”

(Top photos: Getty Images)

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