Manchester United Brings Sport Psychology to Every Employee

Manchester United knows more about pressure than most. Two years of cost-cutting under co-owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe have reshaped the Old Trafford workforce by roughly 450 roles, and the club is now turning from balance-sheet repair to the harder work of rebuilding how its people perform.

Now, with around a dozen of its players scattered across this summer's World Cup for nations from Portugal to Brazil to Morocco, the club is investing in something harder to cut: how its people think.

On 17 June it named Mindflick, a performance psychometric company, as its first Performance Mindset Partner, a multi-year deal reaching every corner of the club.

"At an elite club, performance is shaped by far more than talent alone," says Kirstin Furber, People Director at Manchester United, who frames the work as building composure "when expectations are at their highest".

Chief Executive Omar Berrada frames the club's revival as progress "both on and off the pitch", and a mindset programme reaching every desk is unmistakably an off-pitch play.

The psychometric built in elite sport

Founded in 2013 by performance psychologist Dr Mark Bawden with co-founders Dr Pete Lindsay and former England cricket captain Sir Andrew Strauss, Mindflick turns lessons from elite sport into a psychometric platform that maps how people think, communicate and respond under pressure.

Mark ran the psychology programme for Team GB at London 2012, and that same science now reaches United's Men's, Women's and Academy squads alongside its leadership and office staff.

"Elite performance does not happen by accident," says Mark, who calls the rollout "practical, scalable and lasting" rather than a one-off workshop. Each employee gets a profile and a shared language for working together, the kind of common vocabulary that survives reorganisations and manager changes alike.

Manchester United's people bet

Kirstin arrived as People Director in August 2025 from Channel 4, with earlier spells at BBC Worldwide and 20th Century Fox, and reports to Omar. She inherited a workforce that had absorbed two brutal rounds of layoffs and the cultural whiplash that follows.

Spending on a mindset platform for the people who remain is a deliberate move not a perk. It is the people function's attempt to rebuild trust and performance at once. Kirstin casts it as proof of intent, saying the partnership shows "clear investment into our people" and a commitment to "a strong, inclusive culture".

When sport science reaches the org chart

Tools born in elite sport are migrating into corporate HR, where leaders want pressure and communication treated as trainable capabilities rather than fixed traits.

English swimmer Adrian Moorhouse's Lane4 took Olympic performance methods into corporate leadership development, and the sport-bred MTQ48 "mental toughness" test is now a fixture of workplace resilience programmes.

The approach is not without sceptics, and psychometric profiling invites fair questions about validity and how employee data is used. Handled well, a common vocabulary for how colleagues think can speed up teams and soften conflict. Handled badly, it risks flattening people.

Manchester United has spent two years proving it can take pressure off the balance sheet. The harder task, the one Mindflick is hired to help with, is teaching several thousand people to perform under it.