“Let's look at what we have”: the De Giorgi phrase that hides a precise science.

How Italy's national volleyball team, with a perfect record at the 2026 European Championship, is applying (perhaps without knowing it) three of the most solid principles of performance psychology.

There's a phrase that the head coach of Italy's men's volleyball team, Ferdinando De Giorgi, has been repeating naturally for weeks: focus on what the team has available, not on what's missing. Put like that, it sounds like one of the many motivational maxims crowding sport. But if you look at it closely, with the tools of performance psychology, that phrase is anything but generic: it's the practical summary of mental mechanisms measured, studied and replicated by decades of research. And the best part is that we can watch them work in real time, match after match, on a path that has led the Azzurri to close the group stage of the 2026 European Championship with five wins out of five.

The match that explains everything: Italy-Slovenia

The clearest case is the match that closed the group. At 2-0 up for Italy, De Giorgi sends on the second line. Slovenia come back to a fifth set, on a knife-edge. Then, in the tie-break, it's precisely the substitutes who close out the match. Not the starters, not the “usual names”: those who had come on at a moment of apparently comfortable advantage found themselves handling the highest pressure of the match, and they responded.

Why did it happen? Not by chance, and not only through talent. Three psychological mechanisms explain why a team holds up — or collapses — in a moment like that.

1. The brain under pressure goes looking for threats (and needs retraining)

When tension rises, our attention doesn't behave neutrally: it tends to be captured automatically by everything we perceive as a threat. A psychologist would call it an attentional bias toward threatening stimuli, and it's at the heart of Michael Eysenck and Nazanin Derakshan's Attentional Control Theory, one of the most cited theories on anxiety and performance.

Translated to the court: if the team isn't guided, at a moment of difficulty the players' attention tends to shift by itself, and automatically, onto the problem — the opponents' comeback, the mistake just made, the crowd getting louder — taking mental resources away from what is really needed, namely executing the next technical action. Constantly saying “let's look at what we have” is, in these terms, a way of training attention in advance to stay on the task rather than on the threat. It doesn't remove the pressure: it changes where it lands.

What interests me is improving the quality of play but also the ability to react to difficulties, because in a long tournament it's extremely important — Ferdinando De Giorgi

2. Two ways of reacting to a problem — and one works better under pressure

In the 1980s, psychologists Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman distinguished two broad families of responses to stress. On one side are avoidance strategies: minimising the problem, distracting yourself, hoping it goes away on its own. On the other, approach strategies: actively tackling the cause of the stress, looking for concrete solutions. Subsequent sports research has confirmed several times that, under competitive pressure, approach strategies are associated with more stable performance, while avoidance tends to produce anxiety that accumulates instead of discharging.

“What we have” is, semantically, an approach question: it doesn't deny the problem (a player not at their best, a lost set, an opposing comeback), but immediately shifts the team's attention to the solution available at that moment. It's the difference between suffering a problem and using it as the starting point for a decision.

3. A group that believes in itself doesn't depend on a single hero

Albert Bandura, one of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century, showed that confidence in one's own abilities — so-called self-efficacy — is built mainly in four ways: through experiences of success, by watching others succeed, by receiving credible verbal reinforcement from an authoritative source, and by learning to read one's own physiological arousal correctly under stress.

The third channel — verbal reinforcement — is exactly what a coach does when they tell their players, consistently and not only in easy moments, that the resources available are enough. And if this message is addressed to the whole squad and not only the starters, the effect is that self-efficacy is distributed: when the substitutes come on, as happened against Slovenia, they don't bring with them the feeling of being a stopgap, but that of being part of the same team trained to trust its own resources.

Why “solving problems” isn't enough

One could object: after all, every team tries to solve the problems it meets. The difference lies in when this kind of communication comes in. A coach who talks about available resources only after the problem has exploded is doing emergency management. Someone who does it constantly, as a statement of method, is instead building the team's mental climate in advance — that is, changing how players perceive difficulties even before they appear, not only how they react when they arrive.

What we can take home

You don't need to coach a national volleyball team to apply these principles. They apply to a beginner athlete, to a youth-sector coach, to anyone who has to manage a group under pressure — sporting or not:

• Name the resources out loud, not just the problems. Before an important performance, asking yourself and the group “what do we have available” shifts attention from risk to solution.
• Train everyone, not just the starters. Team self-efficacy is built by giving each person, not only the strongest, real experiences of success.
• Do it beforehand, not during the emergency. Mental climate is built in training and in calm moments: in the critical moment, you can only harvest what was sown before.

Conclusion

A phrase repeated with conviction by a head coach can seem like a colourful detail in a post-match interview. But when you look at it with the right tools, you discover that behind that phrase there is a method consistent with some of the most solid findings of performance psychology. The team's perfect run, with its most delicate moment resolved precisely by those who came off the bench, isn't just a good sporting result: it's a case study in how the mental resilience of a group is built, day by day.

Scientific references

Eysenck, M. W., Derakshan, N., Santos, R., & Calvo, M. G. (2007). Anxiety and cognitive performance: Attentional control theory. Emotion, 7(2), 336–353. https://doi.org/10.1037/1528-3542.7.2.336 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2007-06782-011

Lazarus, R. S., & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, Appraisal, and Coping. New York: Springer Publishing Company.

Bandura, A. (1997). Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company.