A Parallel Approach to Performance and Sport Psychology Work in Esports Teams

This perspective paper argues that esports teams should employ two distinct staff roles, a sport psychologist and a performance coach, working in parallel rather than combining these responsibilities in one person. The authors are motivated by the limited literature on best-practice applied sport psychology in esports, the growing number of teams hiring psychological support, and confusion caused by inconsistent role titles across the industry. Their central claim is that separating the roles reduces ethical problems, particularly around confidentiality and conflicts of interest, that arise when a single staff member serves players in both a counseling-type capacity and a coaching or selection capacity.

The proposed model assigns the sport psychologist individual, confidential consultations with players, ideally held by practitioners with credentials from a recognised representative body and bound by an ethical code. The performance coach, a role with no formal definition or protected title, handles day-to-day group activities such as observing team processes, providing education, implementing routines, and tracking health and performance habits. The authors note that the coach typically attends all team events, including scrimmages, while the psychologist may not be contractually required to do so, and that the psychologist should remain neutral during player trials.

The paper emphasises role awareness as essential to the model's success, recommending an initial team meeting to explain responsibilities, decision-making structures, and confidentiality boundaries, with management and coaching staff accepting the arrangement. The authors offer this as a perspective informed by analogies to traditional sport and by ethical and professional literature, rather than as an empirically tested framework. They conclude that further research, including qualitative approaches such as grounded theory and phenomenology, is needed to evaluate the approach and build an evidence base for esports psychology practice.