A team that isn’t a friend: loneliness in team sport

“After the match everyone was hugging and shouting. I laughed along with them, and then I sat in the car for twenty minutes before I could drive home. I didn’t know who to tell that I’d felt completely alone all day.”

I hear sentences like this from people who, on the outside, are surrounded by others more than almost anyone. A team trains together every day, travels together, shares the changing room, the bus, the hotel, the team photos. From the outside, it is a picture of belonging. From the inside, it is sometimes a picture of something else: twenty people who share a goal, but not necessarily themselves.

Loneliness in team sport is rarely talked about because it seems contradictory. How can you be lonely if you are never alone? But loneliness is not about how many people are around you. It is about whether one of them truly sees you. In this post I write about why a team can be a place of great connection and, at the same time, a place of quiet solitude; what rivalry, transfers and a culture of toughness add to it; and what you can do if you recognise yourself here.

Lonely among twenty people

In the 1970s, the sociologist Robert Weiss distinguished between two kinds of loneliness. Social loneliness means you lack a network — people you spend time with, a group you belong to. Emotional loneliness means you lack closeness — someone with whom you don’t have to be anything other than who you are. One does not replace the other. A person with many acquaintances can be emotionally very lonely, and a person with a single close relationship can feel socially cut off.

An athlete in a team often has more than enough of a network. What is missing is something else: a place where they don’t have to play a role. In the changing room, the roles are clear — you are the reliable defender, the loud captain, the joker, the quiet professional. These roles are useful because they let the team function. But a role is not a relationship. Anyone who lives only in a role for a long time begins to feel that people know their function, not them.

Loneliness is not just an unpleasant feeling. In a 2010 meta-analysis of 148 studies with more than 300,000 participants, Julianne Holt-Lunstad and colleagues found that people with stronger social ties had, on average, around a 50% greater likelihood of survival over the follow-up period than those with weaker ones. The psychologist John Cacioppo described loneliness as a signal similar to hunger: the body telling you it lacks something it needs. For an athlete, whose body is their main instrument, this is especially worth taking seriously. You can also find a short explanation of the concept in the knowledge base under loneliness.

A team is not the same as friendship

Researchers of group dynamics in sport, among them Albert Carron and colleagues, have since the 1980s distinguished between two sides of team cohesion. The first is task cohesion: how much the members share a goal, how well they work together on the pitch, how much they care about the shared result. The second is social cohesion: how much they like each other as people, whether they spend time together outside training, whether they trust one another.

The two are connected, but they are not the same thing. A team can be superbly coordinated on the pitch and cold between people. It can also be the other way round — a team of friends who don’t know how to win. For loneliness, it is precisely this balance that matters: someone who lives in a team with strong task cohesion and weak social cohesion feels all day that they are part of something, and then realises in the evening that there is no one to call.

This is not a criticism of teams. A team doesn’t exist to be a group of friends; it exists to play. But a person who spends most of their waking hours in it needs more than the team gives on its own — and that “more” often has to be found elsewhere, or built within the team deliberately.

Your teammate is also your rival

In team sport, almost every relationship is double. The person you share a room with at training camp is competing for the same place in the starting line-up. When they play well, it’s good for the team — and bad for you. When they get injured, you feel for them — and somewhere in the background, a chance opens up for you. This is not a sign of bad character. It is the structure you live in.

This doubleness has a cost. Who will you tell that you’re afraid you won’t be good enough, if that very person is waiting for your place? Who will you admit to that your knee hurts, if it could mean the coach won’t pick you? Many athletes learn that it is safer to show nothing. In the short term, that makes sense. In the long term, it means you never show yourself fully to anyone in the team.

Alongside this, envy often appears — an emotion hardly ever discussed in teams because it seems disloyal. But envy in itself is not betrayal. It is information about what matters to you. You can read more about how to understand it without shame in the knowledge base under envy. The problem is not that you feel it. The problem arises when, because of it, you constantly have to hide part of yourself from the people you spend the most time with.

Transfers, departures and “don’t get too attached”

The second thing that deepens loneliness in teams is change. Players come and go, sometimes mid-season, sometimes without warning. Coaches are replaced. Anyone who transfers to a new club, often in a new country, arrives in a changing room where relationships are already set, where people speak a language you don’t fully command, and where a week later you’ll be expected to deliver results.

Many experienced athletes describe how, over time, they learned a quiet rule: don’t get too attached. If you get attached, every departure will hurt. If you don’t, you’re safe. The rule works — in the sense that it hurts less. But it has a side effect: when you protect yourself from loss, you also protect yourself from closeness. After a few years, what remains is the feeling that you’ve been part of many teams and none.

In a well-known 1995 review, Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary wrote that the need to belong is a fundamental human need — not just a pleasant extra. In their view, not just any contact will satisfy it; it takes frequent contact within a relationship that is stable and in which someone genuinely cares about you. A team often offers the first, but it can’t always guarantee the second, because the people in it keep changing. You can read about what belonging means and how it develops in the knowledge base under belonging.

When the role disappears, so does the space

The most painful loneliness in a team often shows itself when your role changes. When you’re injured, the team keeps training, keeps travelling, keeps celebrating — and you’re in the gym alone with the physio. When you’re not playing, you sit by the pitch, there but not really there. When the season ends, the shared rhythm that gave every day its structure disappears overnight.

In all these moments, the same thing shows: many relationships in the team were tied to the shared task. When there is no task, there is no reason for contact. Nobody is a bad person — everyone is simply busy with what the team needs right now. And you find yourself in an empty space where you would need exactly the people the system has carried on ahead.

If this part touches you in particular because your career has ended or is coming to an end, I have written about it in When the career ends: who you are when you’re no longer an athlete.

A culture of toughness and silence in the changing room

Team sport often has its own unspoken rule: you leave personal things at the door. The intention is good — a team needs focus. But when the rule spreads to everything that hurts, a silence forms in which everyone thinks they’re the only one who feels this way.

In 2019, the International Olympic Committee published a consensus statement on the mental health of elite athletes (Reardon and colleagues). Among other things, the experts stress that stigma is one of the main barriers that stop athletes from seeking help, and that sporting environments need a culture in which distress can be talked about. Loneliness grows stronger in silence. When everyone hides, everyone assumes the others are fine.

This silence is often especially thick in men’s teams, where vulnerability is most easily dressed up as a joke. I have written about why men seek help later in Men and therapy: why they come later and what stops them. Behind the silence there is often shame as well — the feeling that something is wrong with you because things aren’t going for you the way they are for others. More on this in Shame: the emotion that whispers “There is something wrong with me”.

What it sounds like when someone speaks up

We often think the first step has to be big — an honest conversation in front of the whole team. Mostly it isn’t. Mostly it is small and happens between two people. This is how it might sound on the bus after an away game (the conversation is composite, not a real person):

“You all right? You’ve been quieter all week.”
“Yeah, fine. Just a bit tired.”
“OK. I was like that for half a year after my transfer last year. I thought I was going mad because I had no one to talk to.”
“…Yeah. It’s sort of like that. Everything’s fine here, I just don’t really know anyone.”
“Shall we grab a coffee after training tomorrow? No talking about the match.”

The key moment in this conversation isn’t the question “you all right?”. The key moment is when one of them says something about themselves that has nothing to do with their role. In doing so, they tell the other: here, you can be a person too. Research on psychological safety in work teams, developed by Amy Edmondson, shows something similar — people dare to show uncertainty where they believe they won’t be punished or mocked for it.

Of course, you can’t change the culture of a whole team on your own. But you can create one relationship in which that culture doesn’t apply. Often that is enough for everything else to start feeling different.

Exercise: a map of your connections

This exercise takes about fifteen minutes. You’ll need a sheet of paper and a pen — leave your phone in another room.

1. Draw three circles, one inside the other. In the inner one, write the people with whom you don’t have to play any role. In the middle one, people you get on well with but wouldn’t tell everything. In the outer one, everyone else you spend a lot of time with.
2. Next to each name, write what the relationship depends on. On playing in the same team? On training at the same time? Would the relationship survive if you transferred elsewhere tomorrow or got injured?
3. Look at the inner circle. How many names are in it? Are they all tied to sport? If the circle is empty, or holds only people from the team, that is not a judgement on you — it is simply information about where you are now.
4. Choose one name from the middle circle you would like to have closer. Think of one small step: a message that isn’t about training, an invitation for coffee, a question about how things are at home.
5. Take that step within the next three days and write down how it felt. Don’t expect a big change straight away. Closeness grows from repetition, not from a single conversation.

If the exercise shows that you can’t fill the inner circle at all, or if you feel a lot of sadness while doing it, that is worth taking seriously — not as a failure, but as a sign that you need someone you can talk to about it.

What the coach, the captain and the club can do

Although this post speaks mainly to the athlete, loneliness in a team is not only a personal matter. Those who lead the team can change something too:

• They don’t leave a new player alone with a formal introduction. A good arrival also means someone who invites them to dinner in the first weeks and shows them the city.
• Injured players remain part of the team — at meetings, at shared meals, in the group chat. Not out of pity, but because they are still members.
• Conversations about wellbeing don’t only happen when something is already wrong. A short question — “how are you, not as a player but as a person?” — carries a different weight when it isn’t asked only after a crisis.
• The captain and senior players set an example. When someone with status admits that they found things hard, they give others permission too.

For questions about team dynamics, leadership and group chemistry, the right person is a sport psychologist who works with the team as a whole. That isn’t my field — I work with a person and their relationships, not with a team and its results.

Where this doesn’t apply

I want to be honest about the limits of what I’m writing.

Many teams are genuinely friendly. Lots of people from team sports have their closest lifelong friends among their teammates. If that’s how it is for you, there’s no need to turn it into a problem. Loneliness in a team is not the rule, but it is more common than it looks from the outside.

Loneliness can also be a sign of something else. If you don’t just feel alone but nothing brings you joy any more, you sleep badly, you have no appetite and you withdraw from everyone — including people outside the team — it may be depression. In that case it is wise to see your GP or the club doctor first, who can refer you to a psychiatrist. I have described when a psychiatrist is the first step in When you need a psychiatrist first: signs that therapy is not the first step.

Sometimes the problem is anxiety, not the team. If you avoid group situations because you’re afraid of how others will judge you, it may be social anxiety, which needs its own treatment.

And if exclusion, humiliating rituals or violence are happening in the team, that is not loneliness you can fix with a coffee. Tell someone you trust, and the club’s management. If you are having thoughts of not wanting to live, call the crisis line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 in Slovenia (every day from 7 pm to 7 am) or the Samaritans helpline Samarijan on 116 123 in Slovenia (24 hours a day); in an emergency, 112.

How psychotherapy can help

Psychotherapy is not a substitute for friends. But it can be a place where, for the first time in a long while, you aren’t in any role. Where you don’t have to be reliable, strong or funny. That alone often brings relief.

In relational family therapy, in which I am training under supervision, we are also interested in where your way of being with people comes from. The rule “don’t get too attached” is often not born in the changing room. It is born earlier — in a family where you had to be strong, where people moved away, or where love came when you were successful. The team merely confirms it. Once you recognise the pattern, you can slowly begin to learn differently: first in the therapeutic relationship, then outside it too. I also work with English-speaking clients, in person in Ljubljana.

I have described in more detail when the right person for an athlete is a psychotherapist and when a sport psychologist in Psychotherapy for athletes: when a coach and a sport psychologist aren’t enough. In short: when it is about your performance in competition, the right person is a sport psychologist; when it is about you as a person and your relationships, psychotherapy can help.

What to remember

• Loneliness isn’t about the number of people, but about whether one of them sees you without your role.
• A team can be strongly connected around the task and, at the same time, weakly connected between people — loneliness is born in that gap.
• Competing for a place, transfers, injuries and the bench are the moments when relationships tied to a role wobble fastest.
• Closeness grows from small, repeated steps — one relationship in which you’re allowed to be a person can change a great deal.
• If loneliness comes with a loss of joy, poor sleep or thoughts of not wanting to live, see a doctor or call for help.