The winner of the fourth series of Traitors UK will not be the psychologist, either of the two barristers — one turned bestselling crime author — or the retired police detective.
The wild irony of The Traitors, the final of which will be aired on the BBC this evening, is that a social deduction game based around reading people, gathering evidence, and presenting a case never seems to favour people who have spent a career building those skills.
The aforementioned detective got the whole thing so spectacularly wrong that the only player she pledged her trust to was a traitor.
How can you look away? Almost 12 million people watched the series four premiere in the UK this month, and the U.S. fourth season has already beaten the premiere of season three. Outwardly, Traitors is a game of deception — the titular ‘traitors’ must eliminate the ‘faithfuls’, by murder and manipulation, while faithfuls must hunt out the traitors and vote to banish them — but it is really a proving ground for every soft skill ever listed on LinkedIn.
Each year, contestants from scores of different industries — diplomacy, medicine, politics, military, teaching — profess theirs has equipped them best to succeed on a show which offers a cash prize to the winning contestant. Which raises the question: how well would football prepare you for the Traitors?
There are parallels between both, according to Traitors UK series one contestant Dr Amos Ogunkoya, a GP and sports medicine doctor who was previously the club doctor at Luton Town (then in the Premier League) and Colchester United.
“When you’re in the castle, there’s so much noise,” he told The Athletic. “Everyone is throwing out theories. (The edit) focuses on one or two, but there are 10, 30, 50 every day.
“You have to trust your gut a lot more. When you’re working in the Premier League, I can’t explain to you how much noise there is. It’s global noise, and inside, everyone’s got people in their ear. Comfort in that noise and comfort in who you are is really important.
“Football environments are difficult things because, especially at the higher level, they induce — quite similar to The Traitors — a level of paranoia. For a lot of people at the top level, there’s a lot of competition: is (there) someone else in the shadows that wants to take that position from you? The people who rise to the top tend to be the people whom people like.
“The best faithfuls are the ones who adopt the siege mentality. It’s almost like a relegation scrap: ‘We know who we are, and everyone thinks we’re stupid, and everyone thinks we’re gonna go down’. That’s the best way you quickly suss out who’s on your side. I probably got murdered because I was (valuing) cohesion and leadership.”
Such is the cruelty of The Traitors, the game does not always reward those players the audience perceives as having worked the hardest.
Contestants must constantly walk the tightrope between self-preservation and confrontation. Some, like faithful Harriet in UK series 4, swiftly go in two-footed with their accusations, while others hide their suspicions from the traitors to stay in the game. That exercise in diplomacy — how and when to speak — takes place every day in dressing rooms up and down the country.
“Sometimes, there’s no other option other than to go for someone and really say: ‘That’s not on, you’re not behaving in the right way’,” said Wales Women centurion Helen Ward, now head of women’s football at Watford. “You have to bring it up, particularly if you are captain or head coach. You’ve got a responsibility to the rest of the group to call it out.
“I’ve really been lucky to have some brilliant team-mates, but there’s always the occasion where you think: what are they doing behind my back? If it’s another striker, are they trying to bring me down to other people to make themselves look better?
“There’s competition for places, but then there’s being a little bit sneaky about it.
“You know they’re doing things to elevate their own career, and that maybe comes with some behaviours that not everybody would necessarily agree with or do themselves. That certainly would come up from time to time in teams. If you’ve been around that and you’ve picked up on things that people do when they think no one’s watching, that could be a trait that lends itself well to solving The Traitors.”
Jake Brown, winner of UK series three, attributed his victory in part to skills gained as a Para Lion with the England cerebral palsy football team. Brown represented England at European and world championships and trained at England’s base at St George’s Park in Staffordshire. That ingrained consistency was crucial in the show, he said.
“If you change your behaviour or character a lot, that’s often seen as traitor behaviour,” he said. “I always used to think: one day, be loud; one day, be quiet. I was trying to get that see-saw balance.
“One of my managers at England used to tell me: ‘KISS — Keep it simple, stupid’. I took that saying into the castle with me. The first couple of days: don’t do anything complicated. Normally, the first thing you think about is the best. That saying goes on the football pitch: the first pass or the first action you see is normally the best course of action.
“When people start to get banished and murdered, that’s when you need to think outside the box, and think a couple of days ahead. If I say this, how will people react? If you’re saying something without a long-term goal in mind, you might get caught out.”
Coaches and managers, of course, must be alert to the moment the courage of their convictions tips into delusion. By the same token, the most galling reverse came in the UK final of The Celebrity Traitors. Ted Lasso star Nick Mohammed formed an early alliance with former England rugby union player Joe Marler based on their shared suspicions of comedian and traitor Alan Carr, only to falter and banish Marler at the final round table in favour of Carr.
“My jaw dropped when that happened,” said Jay Sadler, the head coach of WSL 2 side Portsmouth Women. “I couldn’t believe he changed and switched on someone that he formed an alliance with.
“Elite managers have that strength in their convictions and they know exactly what they’re chasing. Sometimes, you look and think, do we stick? Do we need to have more adaptability to win? I’d rather look back and be glad I made a bold move that I felt strategically was the right one than stick with the same, hoping for a different result.
“The difference is I’ve got a multidisciplinary team that I can lean on — analysts and assistant coaches that I know are here for the right reasons. Can you trust everyone on The Traitors? That’s why I think you have to be a little bit more cut-throat with sticking to your own game and your own guns than in football. If you are going off limited information, stick to what you know and stick to your gut.”
The most galling example of misplaced trust came in the UK series two finale, when disability model Mollie Pearce’s friendship with traitor and eventual winner Harry Clark won out over a more logical alliance with faithful Jaz Singh.
“The interesting thing is they all think, after being together for three or four days, that they know each other inside out,” said Stephen Warnock, the former Liverpool and Blackburn defender turned BBC and Sky pundit.
“You haven’t got a clue who you’re talking to, but people do get blinkers on and forget it’s a game. That’s the one thing that footballers would definitely remember, and I think they’d be quite cut-throat if it meant axing someone or calling someone out. The other side of it is if you had someone who is an ex-captain or a senior player going into the Traitors, they could be seen as a little bit bossy, commanding and trying to lead people. That could be seen as a positive or a negative.”
Warnock pointed out that footballers may have years together compared to the weeks Traitors contestants spend in the Scottish castle. That makes for a more delicate and significant balancing of emotions. Equally, football coaches tread a constant line: building an honest environment while protecting the group, which sometimes necessitates a kind of deception.
“What I’ve learned now is that football management is a bit like acting,” continued Sadler. “You’re going up in front of the cameras and the media want to talk to you, but you already know what you want to tell them — you just manipulate whatever questions are asked and give the answer that you want to portray to the players, staff, and stakeholders.
“The biggest thing in leadership is being honest and being able to build trust. Deception kind of conflicts with that. (In the game), the balance will be key.”
It is rare that a post-game interview will be as confrontational as a Traitors roundtable, but journalists must be able to ask the hard questions while preserving long-term relationships.
“With football, you know it is just a game, but when it starts getting nasty, or things aren’t going their way, (managers) are still people, so it’s a fine line to tread,” said Sky Sports presenter Michelle Owen.
“(With) The Traitors, I can’t believe this year how there have been so many things (discussed at the roundtable) and then the next day, no one mentions them. You need to bank stuff in your memory. In our job, those little things are so important.”
Ultimately, though, The Traitors remains such a difficult show to navigate. Everyone thinks they’re good at reading people until somebody proves them wrong — a bad business partner, a dishonest spouse — and those instincts are tested in a game whose premise often feels illogical.
“You have to be comfortable being wrong,” said Ogunkoya, which sums up the irony of the game. “In any professional sport, you make mistakes, adjust and you don’t have an ego when it comes to it. People can go in (the show) and think they’re good at reading people, become really rigid, and that makes them easy to trick.”
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Soccer, Sports Business, Women’s Soccer, Culture
2026 The Athletic Media Company
