Luke O'Nien scored a 94th-minute winner for Sunderland in the FA Cup at Shrewsbury last month. The following weekend, he was sent off early on in the home defeat to Swansea. Nothing illustrates the highs and lows of life as a footballer more clearly.

There was a time not so long ago when that would have been a major trauma for O'Nien, who has been open about the mental challenges that the game can present. Now, it is a teaching moment. Quite literally since he founded the Inner Game Academy.

Along with Rob Blackburne, his mentor and host of the Footballers' Mindset Podcast, O'Nien is looking to redress the balance in academy football. They are offering seminars, audio books and expertise focusing on the psychological needs of young players.

He hopes it will change the way people think about player development.

"I was in an academy from the age of seven and it was all about building a footballer from the tactical, technical and physical side," O'Nien tells Sky Sports. "That was it. Just that. We could all kick a ball and we could all run. It left me thinking, what was the difference between us?

"All I was taught in the academy was to train harder, kick more balls and lift more weights. It made no sense because if we all did this, then what separates us all from one another? I started to question things. As I got older, I realised there is this big void in the game. There is literally zero work on the psychological side of this sport.

"I feel like football is 80 per cent in the mind but from the moment I kicked a ball, I only had mindset conversations with my family who, luckily, recognised the absence of it. It's ludicrous to think that we spend 99 per cent of the time working on the 20 per cent of the game and one per cent working on the 80 per cent that is the foundation of the game. It is completely out of balance.

"What happened last month was all the training put into one. Football is about decisions. Split seconds. I got one right one week and one wrong the following week. One led to a winning goal. The other led to a red card. Both had good intentions which is what I judge my games on now. That is how I balance it in my head. The work I do with Rob has put things into perspective. I am no longer result orientated, I am process orientated.

"I had a call with the kids in our Inner Game Academy on the Wednesday after the red card. A lot of them struggle with fear of being judged and fear of mistakes. They carry these two fears onto the pitch and it handcuffs them. So we debriefed the hell out of it. We lived the judgment and the mistake that I made, going through it to see how I dealt with it and how they would deal with it. I want to fill that void in their education."

O'Nien's journey of self-discovery began four years ago when he met Blackburne. That not only led him here but transformed his thinking on and off the pitch. "It was the missing link for me as a player and a human," he explains.

"I was a jigsaw made of many pieces to this point but didn't know how to piece it together. But it was clear I had been missing a key part when my Sunderland career started negatively and there soon followed a bit of an identity crisis.

"I was trying to understand why I suddenly had no confidence, why I felt like I didn't belong. I had gone from Wycombe to Sunderland, which was a big step up. I made a few mistakes in front of 35,000 people and had been taken off on my debut after 45 minutes live on Sky. Not the dream start I hoped for.

"It really hit me hard for months. I had articles and negative social media coming out about me left, right and centre. There was talk of shipping me out in the January transfer window. Every person told me that if you do well here at Sunderland, you will have the best years of your life but I was far, far away from meeting those expectations. It was killing me. I felt like an imposter. I could not find a rhythm.

"I felt really low every single day and my default mode was to work harder. That had gotten me to where I was. I used to get in before everyone else and do more ball work, more gym work and more swimming. The whole lot. When everyone left to go home, I would do it all again.

"I was doing 8 until 5 when everyone else was doing 9 until 2. I was going home shattered after playing rubbish in training, repeating that process every week. For the first time in my life, it did not make sense. Until then, every time I worked harder it had got results.

"For three months, I was on the bench not playing. An awful performance in a behind-closed-doors friendly, which began to become the norm in my head, led to a chat with two people, the first-team coach Potts (John Potter) and the other being Rob.

"What I came to realise is that form is not a skillset but a mindset problem. It is a thinking problem. I had been working on my skillset for months but I was getting worse. The problem was in my head.

"That is the control centre. Muscles are simply dumb. The thing that initiates the movements is the brain. It is all to do with the mindset. I didn't just become a bad player overnight and my skillset and form just suddenly stopped. I became a bad thinker overnight which inhibited my performance. There is a big difference.

"I then worked with Rob, understood the power of the mind and I started to enjoy football more. I became a better person on and off the pitch and I know others need this help and support to bring out the best version of themselves too.

"I see it every day. When people hit bad form they turn to the training ground and work harder. When I hit bad form I turn to mindset now. As soon as I started doing that, I became more consistent, I have been playing my best football and I have had the most success.

"We never started football by being fear driven. We just played when we were kids. This fear just gets put into us through big moments like a Sunderland debut gone wrong, or getting released or poorly coached as a kid, where you have not learned the mindset tools needed to play with freedom and at your best.

"When I step out onto the pitch, the shackles are off me now. I see the game in a different way to how I used to. I used to play with a fear. I was just getting through games. It was always about not looking too bad and that is not a way to play football.

"You stop expressing yourself and become a prisoner of the game, a passenger. I was so nervous when I first played at Wembley, I forgot to enjoy it. The second time I was better, the third time I was man of the match and the fourth time we were promoted."

There are still setbacks, some of them more serious than a sending off against Swansea. A shoulder injury in the winter of 2021 had a bigger psychological impact on him than he had anticipated. It further underlined the importance of reaching out for help.

"My injury was one of the biggest things I have gone through. I thought I had high emotional intelligence but that injury absolutely wrecked me in terms of football and at home. I had no idea why I was feeling how I was feeling. I was a nightmare to live with.

"It was not until I had a huge breakdown in my basement and my partner called Rob saying, 'Luke needs help. I know how hard it is to connect with people because I was guilty of that. I tried to do it all by myself. I thought I knew all the answers. Now I know I never will.

"After that, I saw someone in the exact same place I had been. I saw him lose the plot but nobody else recognised it. I went up to him in the gym and asked him if he was OK twice. He lied to me twice. I phoned him in the evening and he said he was OK again.

"So I told him about my breakdown, that I was a volcano ready to explode. It was only when I told him that he admitted he was in a horrendous place too, exactly as I had described. He lied to me five times in all. I am OK with that but it shows the problem.

"The fear of the unknown, that is all football is. Am I starting? Am I getting a new contract? How am I going to play? Will I get injured? What will happen if I do? What do people think of me? Should I speak to the manager? These fears keep repeating themselves.

"You see footballers who get into trouble with alcohol or gambling when they retire. I genuinely think it is a lack of learning, a lack of understanding of the mindset of the game. If they learned the right coping mechanisms it would benefit so many people."

It scares O'Nien that had he not gone on this journey of self-discovery, his own potential could have gone unrealised. It might never have happened for him. And if it might not have happened for him, how many others never reconcile the mental side of the game?

"I could have been shipped out of Sunderland. Dropped two leagues. Never had four Wembley appearances. Failing at Sunderland would have been with me forever. I would have been left thinking I was not good enough when it was really just a mindset problem. A thinking problem.

"That I could have missed out on all that just from a lack of knowledge and understanding, which football has a duty to provide but doesn't, is unforgivable for me. It makes no sense. I want more people to have opportunities. I want to be that go-to person who can help people turn things around."

He is particularly worried about young players. "The car journey home is one of the biggest problems that we tend to see. I was lucky. My family would ask me if I had enjoyed it but I had friends whose family would not talk to them if they played badly," he says.

"Your identity is forced upon you. I was known as the kid from the Watford academy. Had I been released, I am no longer that. So who am I? If your identity is tied up with being a footballer and it stops, that is a huge crisis. We want to help people with that."

The Inner Game Academy is an opportunity to do so. The first cohort of players are already benefiting from this wisdom with audio books, a library of exercises that have helped O'Nien, regular seminars, plus talks from other famous figures within football.

The roster of guest speakers includes former international players and it is having an impact. "When the kids hear a player revealing that he had the same problems that they are having, you can see they are loving it coming from that different voice," he adds.

"There is no feedback going to the clubs. It is a closed loop. They are not there with their friends, their manager doesn't have to hear about it. I think that encourages people. We want to help thousands of players to become the best version of themselves.

"I love our calls, I find them fascinating. When people say they really enjoy their game again now because of this course or because we have helped them in any particular way, I get such a buzz from that. We have helped people find something in themselves. I just want us to help more people and see some changes in academies.

"I am so excited to see where it leads us."