By John Portch

Effective performance pathways will create space for outliers, according to Ken Lynch, the National Performance Pathways Manager at Australian Sailing.

“Not everybody will fit into ‘the box’ and there are many out there that comment negatively on sport ‘pathways’,” he tells the Leaders Performance Institute.

“While the term ‘pathways’ can be off-putting, looking beyond the concept and understanding that many sports are producing pathways that represent the many but are tolerant of the few is important. Getting clear on what ‘good’ looks like enables you to achieve this flexibility and offer time and resource to those with potential who may not quite fit the mould.”

Lynch argues that rigid, linear pathways are unlikely to be fit for purpose as a guide or for use as a selection tool. “Most performance pathways I have worked with are considerate of non-linear progression,” he adds. “They give athletes room to fail and learn and work with other athletes over extended periods to better understand athlete potential and how they respond to the various stimuli provided within the parameters of any well designed and applied framework.”

Can a performance model sustain both linear and non-linear progression? “I think that it has to if sustainable, repeatable success is the goal,” says Lynch, who explains that efficiencies come from an accurate understanding of the numerous factors behind what it takes to win.

“There are plenty of elements that contribute to sustainability that require attention and minimal resource to have impact in the first instance. For example, how are you succession planning your coach pool? How are you testing who has potential while adding capacity to your coach workforce?

“Many of these things can be achieved utilising existing platforms and, with the addition of a small level of investment, can become a significant contributor to your program. Even something as simple as how you treat your people can significantly increase the value proposition of being involved with your sport for no additional investment.”

This is the second of two instalments in which Lynch, a former teacher who has worked at sports organisations including the Irish Institute of Sport and High Performance Sport New Zealand [HPSNZ], discusses the space given to talent pathways in sport.

The first half of our interview explored long and short-term planning, as well as the need to be evidence-based in your practice and, in this second half, Lynch reflects on the need for patience and the need to ensure staff and athletes have ready support.

How important is patience in high performance and how can a performance manager buy themselves more time?

KL: Patience is extremely important in high-performance. When we think about how long it takes an athlete to achieve the required level to deliver an Olympic medal-winning performance or how long it took their coach to learn their trade, we start to understand the importance of patience and sustained, consistent support to be able to deliver these types of moments. The ‘flow’ of a system (insert link to part one) should see the right number of athletes and coaches on the right trajectory at the various phases of the High Performance [HP] pathway. Gaps in that athlete or coach population risk the ability to deliver the required consistency and performances over more than one athlete generation. This type of view and thinking should enable a system to identify and fill these gaps early and minimise the associated risks. Milestone targets and markers can support informing stakeholders and giving confidence that interventions are having an impact and that the progress towards pinnacle goals is on track.

How can you ensure that everyone is onboard when it comes to supporting your pathway?

KL: Building capability and effective system leadership takes time. When I arrived at HPSNZ there were three leaders in sports tasked with managing HP Pathways. Minimal direct investment into that area of the system required us to generate understanding in the value of the space to sustainability. Post generating understanding, we needed to build capacity and then develop capability. The system supported this movement by including HP Athlete Development as part of the annual review process, emphasising that demonstrating future potential was an important part of the investment process. Having people in various sports waking up in their sport every day thinking about development was a huge advantage – much better than an external probe or support dropping in periodically. These types of pathway roles are quite new to Olympic and Paralympic sport so the learning curve for many was quite steep. Very soon people shifted from managing the space to leading and driving it. This was a real turning point for many sports but it took six to eight years of consistent attention to achieve that. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but a lot of it still remains – not a bad effort!

What did you learn from that experience in New Zealand, where you worked for eight years?

KL: The learnings suggest that patience is required, as I believe it is, but there were many times in that six to eight years where we tried to move things a little too quickly or moved too far away from the capability build to be useful. Having built honest working relationships with those leaders their feedback helped us realign and move at a pace that was more appropriate. Bringing them with us was what enabled its success and was a good reminder to me around understanding tolerable pace and the intensity of leadership and support.

Surely tensions can emerge when the message is to be patient?

KL: It requires constant attention. Consider the markers that you lay down around the progression of something for the future. It’s important to be able to show progression. When you write a strategy across three cycles, the first four years of the cycle should see you working on all three strands:

• Current cycle (the next Games);
• Next cycle (the Games in eight years’ time) and;
• The eight-year plus plan (identifying and confirming the right type of athletes and coaches to deliver longer term).

All three areas of work should carry milestone markers and enabling the reporting of progress across each of them. Each will have projected targets to project against to understand how athletes and coaches are tracking against future performance targets rather than what it will take to deliver a performance in this cycle only. Previously, and perhaps currently in some systems or sports, perhaps those with less resource, only focus or can only focus on the current cycle and don’t turn their attention to the next one until they get to it.

How and in what ways can a performance manager support their staff?

KL: Another part of that constant, which I probably didn’t do in New Zealand well enough, is to continue to reiterate people’s understanding or support people’s understanding of the value and importance of what next cycle thinking is. Highlighting the progression so that people can see we’re having an impact and retain the interest and motivation to continue to support sustainability and the value of those with roles in this space. Most people are attracted up. Coaches are thinking: ‘how can I coach at the Olympics?’ Service providers may be thinking: ‘how can I work with the best athletes?’ There’s not many people in the world that place themselves in the high performance development space going ‘this is me. I don’t actually want to go up there. This is where my expertise is, this is where I can really deliver, this is where I can make a difference.’ Some that have lived in the ‘current cycle’ space have arrived at: ‘I’m better suited here, at this level.’ I think it requires a bit of system experience and guidance from people who lead in shepherding those with a real ability at this level to see their value to the system, the future and the repeatability of success. Quality professional development opportunities, effective planning and honest conversations are key ingredients to supporting coaches to realise their potential regardless of the level. The next step is ensuring we value and promote the work they do to highlight the important role they play in the system. These roles are critical to sustainability and have often been the forgotten ones in the past. Let’s value these people and these roles as they become a more prominent and important part of their sports.

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Joe Lemire

This story is part of our series on digital scouting. This piece, the conclusion to our soccer series, looks at the new sets of metrics available to coaches and scouts. You can read Part 1 on the growth of digital video here and Part 2 on how access to physical data has improved here.

Playermaker’s very first client in the United Kingdom was Fulham FC. This was a big get: Fulham had recently earned promotion to the Premier League for the 2018-19 season.

But there was a problem. Just two weeks after implementing the shoe-worn sensors, Fulham called Playermaker and said, “Your data is not reliable. It’s bad data.”

Someone from Playermaker’s team paid the club a visit where the Fulham coaches conceded that the day was “generally okay but look at this player: it’s abnormal. There’s no way he has so many touches and that he’s dribbling like this.”

“We’re looking at this, and the data is legit,” recalls CEO Guy Aharon of 16-year-old Harvey Elliott’s preternatural ball handling. “And he became the youngest player ever to play a Premier League game.”

Harvey Elliott’s impressive data from Playermaker’s shoe-worn sensors was initially thought to be a glitch.

The world of soccer data is evolving rapidly thanks to the proliferation of digital video, the growing accessibility of physical data inputs and now the introduction new devices and datapoints. Sensors such as Playermaker—which proffer physical data and, in a first, also metrics evaluating technical skills—are gaining a foothold in the scouting process, even if there’s a requisite learning curve to make sense of this new information.

Other new areas of information gathering include analysis of biomechanics using only smartphone cameras from AiScout and JuniStat, the democratized collection of physical data from SkillCorner and Track160, and the application of advanced algorithms to assess a player’s fit in varying tactical styles from SmarterScout and StatsBomb. Even the evaluation of the evaluators is being considered by thoughtful organizations such as 360 Scouting.

Players are getting more control of and context from their data from apps like BreakAway Data, which seeks to help prospects gain commensurate scouting interest for their talent. Presenting more true markers of talent helps minimize the need for multimedia skills in crafting highlight reels in hopes it reaches the right evaluator.

“Contrasting those is a very manual process, and making yourself stand out is based on selecting some good clips and being lucky if the right person looks at it,” says Ben Smith, Chelsea Football Club’s Head of Research and Innovation who also heads BreakAway’s international business. “But data has the ability to genuinely actually contrast you to people in a way that gives you, I think, a much higher percentage opportunity of actually being seen because it’s a marker of talent, rather than creativity in how you put together a CV or a visualization of who you are.”

Global soccer already suffers from the chasm between the haves and have-nots financially, but the gulf between clubs using advanced methods of scouting will contribute to the talent gap. The existence of scouting innovation doesn’t necessarily mean widespread adoption.

“People would be shocked if they saw the behind the scenes of Europe in terms of the way these clubs are run, not just from an operational standpoint, but from a sophistication,” says Jordan Gardner, Co-Owner and Managing Partner of Denmark’s FC Helsingør as well as an investor in England’s Swansea City and Ireland’s Dundalk FC. “So many decisions on recruitment are still made like, ‘I’m gonna go call my buddy, who’s an agent.’”

* * * * *

Data paired with video leads to visibility

Every year, the Reliance Foundation Young Champs, a five-star residential soccer academy in Navi Mumbai, scours India for the best 12 year-old players, offering them five-year scholarships to live and train at the academy. It’s a multi-pronged process of scouting trials all culminating in what’s a life-changing opportunity. Nine of the 10 players in its first graduating class two years ago received contracts to play professionally in the Indian Super League.

When the pandemic struck, however, RFYC had no ability to go see any young players in action. It sought help from a small London-based startup, AiScout, which uses Intel’s 3D Athlete Tracking computer vision technology to assess the physical movements of players.

From May to December, RFYC invited youth players to complete drills through the AiScout app. That helped whittle down the player pool to 400 who were invited to a regional trial. Eventually, the academy signed 19 players; AiScout was not the sole factor, of course, but 16 had participated in the virtual trials.

AiSCOUT is an AI-based platform that pro clubs are using to scout and develop amateur players based on uploaded data.

“Reliance Foundation actually found four players that weren’t even playing organized football,” says Richard Felton-Thomas, AiScout’s COO and Director of Sport Science. “They were just in rural areas, so scouts wouldn’t naturally find those anyways. That was a great test for the mobile phone as a system.”

The genesis of the app can be traced to the experience of Founder and CEO Darren Peries. After his son was cut from Tottenham’s academy, scouts from other clubs began calling him for more information. Peries had nothing to share outside a few mobile phone videos of varying quality.

“It just baffled him: here was a multi-billion pound industry,” Felton-Thomas says. “How can we sign a player for 100 million at 21 years old when, if they’re 18 or less, we’ve got almost next to nothing on them?”

Digital video was growing more available, but its analysis can be hindered when there’s limited information about the opponent and the level of competition. AiScout, a member of FIFA’s innovation program, entered as a source of objective data by tracking 21 points on the body, benchmarking the abilities of players at every level and every league and computing a National Rating Score.

Amateur players can upload videos and data to trial for a Premier League club.

Two Premier League Clubs, Burnley and Chelsea, have been involved as early partners. Just as Tonsser began assembling showcase teams based on user-submitted videos, AiScout used its data to select 24 players to compete against Burnley’s U18 academy team; the game ended in a 2-2 draw. An additional four players were deemed exceptional and invited for weeklong trials at Burnley. Across the entire soccer ecosystem, more than 20,000 users have submitted information to AiScout with 64 players who have been trialed, signed or recruited.

“The nature of talent development can be a bit random,” says Chelsea’s Smith. “So if we can have a technology to work at scale across vast areas, then that our scope and our reach is potentially very substantial.”

JuniStat is a Russian-founded app now based in the US and Chile that seeks to do the same, with a user base of 40,000 users, mostly from Eastern Europe and Latin America with a strong growth market in Africa. Co-founder Gleb Shaportov says there are now 21 pro clubs using the app with most of the players between the ages of 10 and 15.

Shaportov says JuniStat validated its technology with the Russian Football Union and has started the process of doing the same with Fifa this fall. “Directly from the smartphone, we can detect the skeleton of the player, and based on thousands of kids of the same age in our database, we are immediately tracking their performance. We get complex raw data from them, we analyze it and then we present the results to the user in an easy to understand and usable way.”

AiScout is working to create a mobile performance lab with additional technologies to gather physical data and is working with Chelsea as an R&D partner on cognitive testing and psychometric awareness. “Attention, spatial awareness, vision, or speed of processing—these types of things that you can, let’s say, ‘footballize,’” Felton-Thomas says.

The AiScout app is free for players, while scouts and clubs subscribe for access. Felton-Thomas says the mission is to create “an access-for-all, objective approach to talent identification,” no matter one’s hometown or finances. Results in the app can help secure a tryout or invitation to a showcase. “You’re going to have to prove yourself from there,” he says, “but we can get that visibility.”

* * * * *

Playing style metrics key tool for teams

Thiago Almada began playing for a local soccer club in his native Argentina at age four. He made his professional debut at age 16. By the time he was 18, in March 2020, and starting for Vélez Sarsfield, an AI-powered service called SmarterScout had flagged his Premier League potential, noting his skills in retaining the ball, winning ground duels and scoring.

Interest from major European powers in the Premier League, LaLiga and Ligue 1 all followed, with Manchester United and Manchester City among those reportedly in hottest pursuit. Almada instead opted for Atlanta United, signing for an MLS-record $16 million transfer fee.

A similar trajectory followed Almada’s countryman Julián Álvarez, whose performance at River Plate drew attention from the SmarterScout platform and later preceded a move to Man City. His data drew a “pretty stunning” resemblance to that of superstar Kevin de Bruyne and, the analysis concludes, “why Alvarez may be a better fit in the Premier League—and especially at Manchester City—than his physical attributes might suggest.”

SmarterScout is the work of Daniel Altman, a Harvard-educated economist who has been a soccer analytics consultant for Premier League and MLS clubs. The fully-automated platform ingests event data from 60 global leagues, enriches them algorithmically and then evaluates how well a player would fit in another league.

This type of data application is showing dividends at all levels of the sport. Popular analytics provider StatsBomb has more than 150 client clubs from the Champions League on down to the fifth division of English soccer—but it has fewer clients at the lower level than before.

Last season, three of the four clubs in England’s fourth division, League Two, to achieve promotion to League One were all clients of StatsBomb. A fourth team reached the playoffs but narrowly failed to advance.

“We were told at some point that that would never happen: it’s too far down, they won’t want to spend budget on that,” StatsBomb Founder Ted Knutson says. “And obviously I’m a CEO and I’m a salesperson of this stuff, but the fact is, that surprised me.”

From those clubs on up to the Champions League clients, everyone receives the same data. “They get offered the same stuff,” Knutson says. “It’s a bit of a democratization of data science.” StatsBomb’s platform helps to make bespoke additions to a roster, helping avoid what Knutson has described as clubs building a “Frankenstein monster of a squad.”

He adds, “It’s not just counting numbers of how many tackles did this person make: ‘Are they positionally correct on a regular basis? Are they used to playing in a high line because we need guys that are comfortable in our tactical system that we’re definitely not going to change? We have this manager for another three years—we really like him—so we want a center back that fits in with him, as opposed to us going out and finding what we thought is the best center back in the market.’”

Firms like SmarterScout and StatsBomb are building on top of event data, a record of key moments in the match that are typically relegated to what happens around the ball: shots, passes, tackles and so forth. The tracking data that encompasses player speeds and distances is much harder to come by, which is where SkillCorner has found a niche extracting that dataset from broadcast.

“We’re still very much at the top end at the moment, but we have a lot of interest coming from academies,” SkillCorner GM Paul Neilson says. “The challenge when you get to that part of the market is the way that the video is filmed, the way it’s captured, the way it’s shot, is inconsistent compared to the professional level. Once you get into the academy structure, the position of the cameras, the vertical height, the horizontal distance from the field, the type of the cameras—is it manual operator or is it going to be smart cameras, Pixellot or Veo or Spiideo? And it’s just so much variation.”

SkillCorner is working on adapting its algorithms to meet that need while also teasing an evolution in analysis that will eclipse that information. Neilson says his team is developing its own set of next-level analytics to quantify defensive pressure on the ball, field awareness, the ability to find open space and more.

“To be honest, this is more important than physical data, because this is really about gaining intelligence and decision making,” Neilson says. “It’s not just the legs and how much they run. It’s the brain behind the athlete as well. And I think this potentially is the next big breakthrough for scouting and recruitment.”

* * * * *

Using video and data to scout the scouts

A decade ago, Marco van der Heide was an attacking midfielder for Cambuur, which at the time competed in Netherlands’ second division. Over parts of two seasons, van der Heide scored four goals in 16 matches, but a bad concussion prematurely ended his professional career.

When he had recovered, Cambuur hired van der Heide as a video scout, specializing in opposition analysis. The head coach then joined the staff at AZ Alkmaar—best known in the US as the club Oakland A’s executive Billy Beane has advised and invested in—and brought his former player with him.

On the side, van der Heide began collaborating with Sander IJtsma, a surgeon by day and proprietor of data-driven soccer analysis site 11tegen11 by night. Their video and data skills were a good combination but, noting the demands of IJtsma’s occupation and his interest in growing more quickly, van der Heide started his own video scouting company, 360 Scouting. And he set out to change the way the industry hires its evaluators.

“A lot of clubs still, very strangely, select scouts for their club because most of the times they are players who used to play at the club,” van der Heide says. “This is how I came in at Cambuur as a video analyst, but after that, I also showed that I had the required quality. But I wouldn’t have had this opportunity if I wouldn’t have played the club—which is good for me, but actually kind of weird because they should be selecting just on quality.”

To build out his startup—which currently has two clients, Cambuur and a Champions League participant he’s unable to divulge—van der Heide developed an application that explicitly told candidates that there was no need to send a résumé or cover letter. All that mattered was completing a video assessment. Initially, 350 applied, which got trimmed to 50 for a second assessment.

“Then there was the moment to ask them who they are, which age they are, et cetera,” van der Heide says. Among the six he eventually hired after eliminating the noise and bias of the process were a 41-year-old teacher and father of two and an 18-year-old student.

360 Scouting is now beginning to pivot from consultancy to platform. Van der Heide has continued his hiring practices to find local scouts who can do video and live scouting in four leagues this season: Poland, 2.Bundesliga, LaLiga 2 and the Eerste Divisie, the second division in the Netherlands. He hopes to grow to 50 leagues within three years using a network of quality, local scouts even if many are hobbyists.

“If clubs are finding people to scout players, then they’re also looking for undervalued talent,” van der Heide says. “So why wouldn’t they apply the same intention to finding the scouts themselves?”

* * * * *

Evolving data requires patience

Even when a club is willing to invest in data, it needs requisite patience in the process, too. Gardner, the owner of FC Helsingør in the Danish second division, says the minimum timeline for seeing improvement is two to three years. That was especially true at the club he purchased, which he described as having “basically no scouting infrastructure at all.”

“What’s interesting in the European soccer space is, with the promotion and relegation system, you can have an organization that is like a Single A baseball or even a summer league baseball team, and you have a couple of good years, and all of a sudden you’re in the majors,” Gardner says. “The infrastructure and the way the club runs is doesn’t catch up fast enough.”

Making the use of data more accessible could ease that prospect. For now, data analysts are still typically required to mine spreadsheets to find value. Bringing it within the realm of a coach’s expertise is an essential next step.

“Data, certainly across football, is making an interesting transition where it’s getting closer to performance and so performance practitioners rather than data specialists are starting to take more meaning from it,” says Smith of Chelsea and BreakAway Data.

Playermaker’s data captures a player’s foot-to-ball interactions including ball touches.

The earliest adopter of PlayerMaker in the US was the University of Pittsburgh women’s soccer program. Coach Randy Waldrum says he understood it would take a few years to develop proper context for the metrics. Incidentally, the overall quality of the program has improved considerably, so the baselines keep evolving, too. The shoe-worn sensor, which provides physical and technical data, helps solidify what he’s seeing and, at times, can serve as a tiebreaker between two players.

“We now have a pretty good system in place and a pretty good file on what the average distance is players should be covering per position, the kind of touches that are required,” Waldrum says. “We can even get into some of the positions, whether it’s more right foot or left footed—those kinds of things.”

When PlayerMaker launched, it sold only to professional clubs and college teams, but when the pandemic struck in March 2020, several clients asked about obtaining individual units that its disparate players could use for training. Aharon, the CEO, told those clubs, “Yes, sure, we can.” Shaking his head, he hung up and called his COO, “Hey, this is something I just committed to that we need to deliver.”

“For us as a company and as an industry,” Aharon says of the pandemic, “it shortened what could happen in three, four or five years from now and it happened in a few months.”

This article was brought to you by SportTechie, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SportTechie content in the field of athletic performance.

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Joe Lemire

This story is part of our series on digital scouting. This piece explores how access to physical data has improved in soccer scouting. The next article will look at the new sets of metrics available to coaches and scouts.

Two days after Arsenal routed Everton in its final fixture of the 2021-2022 Premier League season in May, the pitch at Emirates Stadium was back in action. Arsenal’s first team players had scattered for the summer break, but 22 unsigned teenagers—17 boys, 5 girls—gathered for drills and scrimmages in front of the club’s academy coaches.

Each of these young players had been invited for the tryout based on data collected by a small sensor suspended between the shoulder blades in a black compression harness. This GPS device from STATSports carried Arsenal branding and enabled anyone who bought the device, which retails for $350, to vie for a spot in this showcase.

Players were judged on the data collected by the Fifa-approved wearable carrying the GPS transmitter, accelerometer, magnetometer and gyroscope. They produce 16 metrics including a bespoke Pro Score, all of which are shared with Arsenal staff and can be compared in the accompanying app to anonymized data of current Arsenal academy players. This provides an incentive for users to train and exposes a Premier League club to potential talent that may have been overlooked.

While the ease of access to digital video has aided scouts in making subjective evaluations of prospects’ playing ability and style, the growth of GPS devices in the consumer and youth markets is helping objective physical data be incorporated into that process—not as the sole determine factor, of course, but as another vetting tool.

“Just to make clear, obviously, the ability to play football is the most important aspect of any player who plays for Arsenal Football Club or any football club in the world,” says Barry Watters, the head of sports science at STATSports. “Even if they’re technically and tactically very good, are they physically capable of performing at the top level?”

This marked a major evolution in scouting standards. Sport scientist Chris Barnes currently consults with Catapult and Uefa but previously worked with several clubs, building what some consider the first sport science department in the Premier League when he took on that role with Middlesbrough in 1997. He notes a clear rise in the adoption of objective data in scouting and recruiting over the past 15 years, which was not the standard practice for decades before that.

“The way that traditionally recruitment was performed, certainly in the UK, is you would have a troupe of middle-aged or elderly men in oversized coats who would stand on the side of a field and make some paper notes on players,” Barnes says. “And if they created sufficient interest in the coaching staff, eventually one of the more senior people would go, and it would be done so subjectively.”

The leading GPS brands have made entreaties in the consumer market. STATSports makes its Apex Athlete Series wearable—with and without Arsenal branding—and Catapult tried first with its PLAYR device in 2018 and then with Catapult One in 2021. Other smaller brands, like Sports Performance Tracking, FieldWiz and SoccerBee are also available.

The Catapult GPS device is used in academies to measure a player’s performance across load, speed, endurance and position.

At the upper levels of the sport, league-wide data-sharing agreements are common. What’s collected by optical tracking systems Second Spectrum, ChyronHego, Stats Perform SportVU, Hawk-Eye and the like are disseminated freely within the clubs of the top leagues. There’s less cutthroat competition at the academy level, so Barnes says there’s some degree of informal data sharing.

But getting one’s hands on that physical data has been “very difficult, historically,” says AS Monaco Technical Director Laurence Stewart. “I’m a big believer that some information is better than no information, as long as we understand the right context around it. [It’s] definitely more difficult the younger you get, and there’s less coverage and sort of openly available information on the younger players.”

* * * * *

Chris Barnes had never stepped foot in Nigeria until he reported for his first day of work in December 2020 as Sports Science Director at Vandrezzer FC in the second division. There, he introduced Catapult’s PlayerTek device, with Vandrezzer touting itself as the first club in the country to use a GPS tracker and to have a sports science department. It also added Veo’s AI-powered cameras. All of the national teams in the African federation, CAF, have been using GPS for a few years—first FieldWiz and now PlayerTek—piquing the interest of the professional clubs on the continent.

Vandrezzer had a pair of precocious talents, defenders Felix Oloye and Samuel Edoho, that began attracting outside interest from clubs in Denmark and Poland. The longstanding challenge of scouting across countries and leagues has been finding a way to compare contexts of league quality and physicality. That’s where the PlayerTek GPS devices played a role: both players exceeded the physical requirements of the European clubs, although the transfers ultimately fell through for other reasons.

“They wanted the training data that we’ve got on these two young players before they make a decision as to whether they’d take them on trial. So it really was at the center of the recruitment process,” Barnes says. “What the Danish and the Polish teams were interested in was essentially tempo or intensity. So, within the games themselves, they’re looking at what we would call a relative data—can they can they maintain high-intensity actions, accelerations, decelerations, sprints, and repeat them consistently over a period of time?”

The enterprise optical tracking systems such as Second Spectrum, ChyronHego, Stats Perform SportVU and Hawk-Eye have been available in top leagues for several years with data-sharing agreements so that each member club had access to everyone else’s match data.

Increasingly, such systems are trickling down to smaller leagues. Second Spectrum, for instance, reached a deal with the Danish League in October 2021 to install its solution not only in the first-tier Superliga immediately but also in the country’s second division in the near future. Similarly, the recent MLS deal with IMG Arena includes a provision for tracking to extend down to MLS Next Pro next year. And companies like Track160 have entered the market to offer more affordable alternatives.

In the absence of in-venue cameras, companies such as SkillCorner are generating similar datasets of physical performance using only broadcast video. Liverpool was its first customer, and now it culls footage from 50 global leagues to retroactively produce tracking data, which clubs can then import to existing systems such as Catapult’s SBG MatchTracker and Hudl’s Sportscode.

“If you’re looking at a player in Uruguay, historically there was no way to get data on that player,” SkillCorner GM Paul Neilson says. “Well, guess what, now we’ve got SkillCorner tracking data, bring it into SBG and you can really understand that player and the decisions they make, their movement profile, how they respond to different triggers, different situations, how aware are they of their teammates and X, Y and Z.”

To date, SkillCorner primarily works at the top end, informing clubs’ decisions in the transfer market, but it is working to adapt the product for different video sources to accommodate lower tiers, such as academies. Compatibility across systems so that video and physical data can be reviewed in tandem is important, too.

“We see a very similar thing happening in human performance as we did in recruitment a few years ago when we acquired Wyscout, which was more and more match analysts were moving from just analyzing games to recruiting players, and they were using the same tool sets,” Hudl SVP of elite sports Sam Lloyd says of acquiring Wimu, the wearable tracker used by FC Barcelona, the Spanish national team and all of Liga MX. “So it just made total sense for us to have both tool sets under the same umbrella and make them easier to use.”

Youth soccer players were given the same tech as the pros, and if their stats were high enough, their data could get them recruited to academies.

StatsBomb is an analytics provider that has devised its own proprietary metrics, combining computer vision techniques with some manual input. It serves more than 150 team customers while ingesting data from more than 90 leagues, helping create those league benchmarks.

“Part of it is baselining the whole league and how physical something is, so that you know, ‘Where can we recruit from?’” says StatsBomb CEO Ted Knutson. “That’s something that scouts always talk about, ‘Oh, that’s a physical league, so they’ll do fine here.’ And you get proxies for it. But you won’t need proxies anymore.”

Before Track160’s entry into the US market, the Israeli company held a number of focus groups, using its system to track players and then sharing that data. Many of the young players immediately started getting competitive, comparing top speeds and other metrics. The parents were all eager to garner more exposure for their children and, in time, they’ll be able to make relevant comparisons and projections.

“They’ll be able to benchmark players between the same age group, same gender, compare it to other regions,” says Track160 CEO Eyal Ben-Ari. “They could even tell the player, ‘Look, if you want to play in the Bundesliga 3, that’s the level that you’d have to get to. And if you want to be recruited to Division I in the US, that’s the threshold.’ Eventually, we’ll see more of that, but that will require some time to collect historic data.”

Barnes used to work at West Bromwich Albion of the Premier League when they used event data from sources such as Opta that quantified matches based on granular detail of shots, passes and touches. Barnes and the WBA data scientists created models based on their own clubs’ wearable data and the event data to find, say, the best fit at right-side midfield for their tactics. It would share percentage matches and also, crucially, compute financial value of the players to guide the targeting of realistic options for a smaller club. But that had limitations.

“The biggest challenge you’ve got as much as anything else, though, is probably 90% of the meaningful event data is when you’ve got possession of the ball, and that’s probably great when you’re trying to recruit midfield and attacking players,” Barnes says. “But of course, a little bit more difficult when you try to recruit defensive or strong defensive midfield players. But here’s where, if you can access the wearable data—and it’s becoming increasingly possible with league-wide deals because then it’s shared—you can actually build timestamped and time coded pictures, which will give you information related to events.”

* * * * *

The largest undertaking in elite development soccer is beginning this fall. US Youth Soccer, a nonprofit affiliated with the national federation, announced plans for its new Elite 64 league, which will include 64 boys teams and 64 girls teams at each of six age groups for teenage players. Assuming 23 players per roster, that’s roughly 17,500 soccer prospects from Bangor to Burbank, all competing for national trophies and recognition.

Each participant will receive both qualitative and quantitative data, from USYS partners ProScore and STATSports. ProScore uses its own evaluation metrics to assess key moments of the match while STATSports will be providing the same GPS technology that the Arsenal invitees used. In this case, instead of being tethered to just one pro club, the users can share their data with any college coaches or pro scouts.

“That’s where we can see the consumer product overall going as well—the ability of the individual user themselves to be able to share that data with whatever third parties they want, be that scouts or coaches so that they can see what they’re physically capable of,” says Watters, the STATSports sport scientist. “They share everything else already. They share video reels, they share anything. There’s a lot of data.”

This remains a largely new frontier for wearables in the US, so building appropriate benchmarks will take time for each MLS academy and college program to gain an appreciation of what they’re looking for and what physical output is appropriate. “So that we can see what good looks like, but it all must be put in the context of the type of team they play for,” says Watters, adding that eventually the STATSports app can use those recommendations to serve as a “virtual coach” for players without access to top club programs.

“Most actual high schools don’t have the budgets to do that, [but] lot of the youth clubs do,” University of Pittsburgh women’s soccer coach Randy Waldrum says of GPS device. “It’s not where it needs to be yet, but we’ve certainly—over the last five, six years—seen it start to grow.”

US Soccer signed its own major partnership with STATSports back in 2018 to incorporate the devices through the federation, including the youth national teams. The US Soccer High Performance Director at the time, James Bunce, previously held that role with the Premier League and was a proponent of bio-banding, a concept of grouping players on teams based on physical maturity and age rather than sorting strictly by birth year.

GPS devices can help play a role in determining those selections, along with other inputs of physical data. US men’s national team Coach Gregg Berhalter says that his pool of players are receiving regular assessments from his own staff and their respective club staffs to formulate a holistic view of each athlete.

“Everything. Body screens, motion screens. The breadth of data that we’re collecting on these players is pretty impressive,” Berhalter says. “Not only that, we’re working together with their clubs to import data from what they’re doing at their club level into our system. So we can piece together where a player is at physically when he comes into camp.”

Over in the UK, STATSports outfits Rising Ballers FC, a youth club for unsigned players. Several of its alumni have gone on to sign with pro clubs and academies where there’s greater maturity of physical data. That’s where the Premier League and other overseas circuits are ahead, Barnes says, because the academies have been “running in a structured way for 15-plus years.”

New avenues of entry remain possible, such as through Arsenal’s partnership with STATSports. Of the first 22 players to trial at Emirates, none has yet signed, although one of the female players continues to be closely scouted and the Arsenal staff says it saw “flashes of brilliance” from the prospects.

“For us, the golden ticket obviously is if someone does get picked up,” Watters says, “but I think even the ability to allow these end users to be able to get in front of these people was absolutely brilliant and all the kids and everything loved it.

This article was brought to you by SportTechie, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SportTechie content in the field of athletic performance.

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Joe Lemire

This story is part of our series on digital scouting. This piece explores the growth of digital video in soccer scouting. The next article will look at how access to physical data has improved.

Grêmio, a soccer club that plays deep in southern Brazil, is annually competitive in the country’s top division, but it struggled through its 2021 season. Playing in front of paltry Covid-capped crowds, Grêmio finished in 17th place, allowing its most goals in a decade and suffering relegation to the second division.

Those top-line results, however, obscured a hidden talent. A hemisphere away, French Ligue 1 side AS Monaco received a midseason alert about a young Grêmio defender. A one-named wunderkind named Vanderson, who plays right back, was starting and logging significant minutes at the age of 19, while contributing tackles, pass interceptions and goals on some brilliant free kicks. Such production triggered an alert within Wyscout, the Hudl-owned scouting service widely used in pro soccer.

AS Monaco employs a scout in Brazil, but it’s a massive country that was still contending with Covid travel restrictions. The scout couldn’t get there right away, but the club had access to plentiful data and video resources to some preliminary vetting before the AS Monaco scout—and, subsequently, Technical Director Laurence Stewart—got on a plane to see Vanderson play in Porto Alegrense.

“That’s an example of a player that it would be a lot more difficult for us to sign if we’ve not been able to do a lot of that prior work [before we travel] and see them play in different contexts and in different scenarios,” Stewart says. “So we have quite a diligent process that we have to go through, in a way to tick as many of the boxes as possible before we look to recruit a player.”

Monaco ultimately completed a $12.1 million [£10.4 million] transfer for Vanderson in January and, by February, while still four months shy of his 21st birthday, he became a regular starter on a club that finished third in Ligue 1.

The recruitment of Vanderson is a perfect case study of modern digital scouting in soccer: a quick, data-infused process to sign a young talent.

“What is becoming more prevalent after the pandemic, after Covid, we’ve seen that a lot of organizations are shifting their demographic of players that they recruit, so the average age of players recruited is dropped,” Stewart says. “What that does is brings a pressure around there being a time sensitivity to the way that you work.”

The global pandemic gave clubs a rare respite long enough to step back and re-evaluate processes, all while cutting into revenues from diminished match revenue. One trend that accelerated as a result was the speculation on younger players. Stewart says the window to evaluate prospects has shrunk, on average, from two seasons to one and now, at times, only half a season.

Getting players younger allows a mid-sized club to reap the benefits of a few productive seasons before, as the player reaches his prime, transferring him on to a mega club for an increased profit. Prospecting earlier also lessens the financial risk. It’s little surprise that one of the other rumored suitors of Vanderson was Brentford, well known for its hearty embrace of analytics.

“We have to be agile and ready to know our assessment and know our profiles in a shorter period of time,” Stewart says, “so that’s where we need technology to help us be more intensive in that process.”

The pandemic forced teams to embrace online scouting

Victoire Cogevina, a former player agent and now the Founder/CEO of Gloria, began the company a half-dozen years ago with an intention of using the app to aid scouting. She’d partner with leagues who would subscribe to gain access to new recruits. The idea, she says, was that the players matter most, so if you build a product they want to use, the clubs and leagues will follow.

Before the pandemic, the foothold data analytics had gained in the tactical decisions of many elite clubs has been well documented, but that embrace lagged behind in scouting, which largely remained a bastion of older, more subjective methods. (Gloria has since pivoted to a larger purpose, serving more as a social and community-drive app centered around the beautiful game with grand plans to become titular sponsor of the new women’s league in Spain.)

“The pandemic was this kind of a slap in the face for clubs understanding that a vital piece of their business, which was finding new talent, and also a vital piece of their revenue share [from transfers] was something that they can do in a much more efficient way than they had done,” she says. “And they were so closed off because, by the way, in 2018 when I was speaking to clubs, they thought I was an alien.

“I remember having conversations with clubs that were forefront, big brands—obviously smart in their decisions—and they were very much against the idea of online scouting. And when you told them, ‘Hey, it’s going to be just a few years when you’re going to change your business dramatically. They were like, ‘No.’ They had a ton of excuses around it. So when the pandemic happened, immediately I got a ton of phone calls from all of those clubs that I had once been in their boardrooms and offices and, ‘Hey, remember what you pitched me? What are you doing now?’”

For a national federation like US Soccer, whose remit is to monitor professionals across the world and millions of youth players across a sprawling country, the centralized collection of video and data at its headquarters in Chicago has become essential. Men’s national team Coach Gregg Berhalter says he can keep tabs on his player pool—collecting video and performance data—for every match they play, no matter the league or country. Much of that infrastructure helps scout the players.

“Very similar,” Berhalter says. “We’re able to watch our youth teams through the platforms that were created that houses video, but also youth scouting, sharing methodology—all that stuff, technology makes it a lot easier.”

Some clubs shifted toward digital scouting more organically than as a result of the pandemic. Two years after Monaco won its first Ligue 1 championship in 2017, the club finished 17th, staving off relegation by a mere two points, and churned through managers like a tipsy tourist burns through chips at the Monte Carlo poker tables. In 2020, Monaco modernized, investing in data, a new training facility and key hires, such as Stewart, Sporting Director Paul Mitchell, and two key US Soccer Federation personnel, Performance Director James Bunce and technology guru Tyler Heaps. The club is now significantly younger and more fit.

Monaco has been a fairly prolific spender since a new ownership group took over a decade ago, but the trend lines toward data, video and youth can be seen throughout the sport. Hudl SVP of Elite Sports Sam Lloyd says that, historically, recruitment was the product of scouts and agents. But now a “golden triangle” has emerged, and “data is as important as scouts and agents,” he says, noting that the Wyscout usage skyrocketed during the pandemic.

Wyscout provides data regarding performance, patterns of play and tactical strategies for coaches, teams and players to analyze.

“The biggest change that’s happened because of Covid is it’s mobilized the much smaller organizations to become literate with data and data scouting,” adds Lloyd, noting that the bigger clubs were already investing significant resources in the practice. Tools like Wyscout narrow the funnel of players for more targeted scouting trips. “The rest of the football pyramid,” he says, “it’s opened up ways in which they can scout not just from where they can drive to in a single day.”

Tonsser gives scouts access to larger pool of players

Four years ago, a group of teenage strangers gathered in Paris. Each was summoned on the merits of the videos and stats he had uploaded to a Danish soccer app called Tonsser, borrowing the local nickname for a gritty, high-effort player who maybe succeeds in spite of some technical deficiency. This group—from disparate backgrounds and no experience as teammates— played a Paris FC youth team to a 2-2 draw.

That result was “very motivating for us,” recalls Tonsser Co-Founder and CEO Peter Holm. It led to a more formal showcase program called Tonsser United, an ever-changing roster of previously overlooked players who would gather and compete in tournaments against organized club teams.

“That started actually as an experiment, maybe to challenge ourselves bit,” Holm says. “It was more like a question, ‘Can players from outside the academies, found through an app, compete with established academies?’”

With a user base now of 1.4 million players, mostly aged 13 to 19 and living in Europe, Tonsser subsequently entered a squad in the Vinci Cup, an under-15 tournament later that year. A photo advertising the event shows the logos of all 16 participants, including the storied crests of European powers like Manchester City, Paris Saint-Germain, FC Porto—and a turquoise circle with a soccer ball centered the middle, a logo looking like it had been hastily selected from a clip art catalog.

Tonsser United acquitted themselves well, winning or tying its first several matches and drawing distinction for its surprise performance in the tournament recap, noting how the players all met each other on Thursday before playing four matches together on Saturday.

The concept of the club has continued, with a new roster each time, and Holm reports that 40% of its alumni have gone on to sign with professional academies through this alternate route, at least in part because of this new exposure.

“That helped us incubate the idea of how can you create a concept of a football club that is born out of values, born out of a vision, rather than born out of geography,” Holm says. “Because football clubs today, they have a stadium, a physical presence, and usually you have fans out of legacy, because where you are born or you fall in love with it from afar. What we wanted to create was a more of a concept of a football club that anybody can support because they want to support the underdog.”

A product like Tonsser helps players at the beginning of their scouting journey. While the use of Wyscout and other tools are used to identify a match with a single pro prospect like Vanderson, Tonsser works in the reciprocal: select a whole roster of players higher up the talent funnel and make it easier for scouts to see a larger pool. It integrates with national federations to ensure player identities and data quality, but an integral part of its methodology is to seek the “wisdom of the crowd” in which peers vote for those who turn in the best performances, Holm says.

“That’s really the trenchant analogy that we use for football,” he adds. “So instead of asking the coach or experts in football, we flip it to the community to help them generate data points.”

The app has been in the market long enough that some professional stars used it in their youth, most notably Erling Haaland, Manchester City’s newly acquired prized striker. Holm quickly notes that “we can take no credit” for helping the upward trajectory of his career, though “it’s just fun and inspiring that he’s used the app,” but there are a few case studies where Tonsser seems to have played a role.

Frankfurt’s Jesper Lindstrøm was a heavy user as a teen. In four years, he went from Tonsser’s Player of the Season to Bundesliga Rookie of the Year. After a friend played a match with the Tonsser United showcase team, a young French player named Alexis Kabamba downloaded the app and fared well in a friendly. That led to a contract with Ligue 1 club Stade de Reims and subsequent appearances with France’s U17 national team.

“My experience is that so many players that we don’t know just fall off the edge of the cliff, for one reason or another, because they don’t have the opportunities, they lose motivation, think they’re not good enough,” Holm says. “They don’t have the right environment to bloom. And that really what we’re trying to provide with Tonsser United. There’s always a second chance.”

Affordable video opens more global opportunities

Some aren’t afforded a first chance. Africa has been underscouted, but the proliferation of quality, affordable video—and the platforms for distribution—is granting the continent’s players more exposure. Lloyd says Hudl has begun contracting more frequently to record tournaments and then upload the footage to Wyscout.

Hudl’s focus camera was installed at Rio Tinto Stadium, home to the Real Salt Lake soccer club.

After Hudl shared video from a tournament in Cameroon, for instance, and club scouts were able to compare the analysis with the benchmarks of players already in their academies. Several then flew to Cameroon to recruit those young players. The same was true for some matches in Zambia, which led to interest from elite clubs like Villarreal and Porto.

“There’s more justification for the travel expense, whereas sending a scout on a whim to Zambia—it seems crazy, doesn’t it? Who’s going to do that?” Lloyd says. “But if you’ve watched him five times, you’ve got the data to verify he’s above and beyond what you currently have. That becomes an easy trip, doesn’t it? Because now it’s, ‘Let’s get him before these other teams work it out,’ rather than, ‘I hope to go and find a good 15 year old in Zambia.’ That’s not a good trend.”

Chelsea FC star midfielder Kevin de Bruyne, a recent Premier League Player of the Year honoree, sponsors his own youth tournament, the KDB Cup, in his native Belgium. The event already invites many of best U15 players, gathering them for elite competition—and easy scouting. But whether it’s due to Covid or budget concerns, travel still isn’t easy for everyone, so the KDB Cup began a two-year partnership with automated camera company Veo to provide coaches and players match analysis and broadcast the matches for free to 104 countries.

There are several AI-powered camera systems in use—Veo, Hudl Focus, Pixellot, Spiideo, PlaySight, Trace and more—but more manual efforts remain the norm.

“Some of it is automated capture, but the vast majority is still one guy standing on a scaffold with a video camera,” Lloyd says. “Times haven’t changed that much, unfortunately, but the automated capture is definitely making it more easy and more available.”

Wyscout users can view related videos for a team, player or game as well as download clips and make their own analysis.

Longtime UConn men’s soccer Coach Ray Reid, who won a national championship in 2000, used to employ video and scouting services such as InStat and Wyscout was the beneficiary of several impact recruits from Europe he otherwise never would have recruited. Kai Griese and Bjorn Nikolajewski arrived from Germany, and Mateo Leveque matriculated from France. Reid calls Leveque—the 2021 Big East Freshman of the Year—“one of the best guys we’ve ever recruited.”

“It helps you figure out if you want to go there, if you want to fly to France to see a young man,” says Reid, who recently retired from coaching and became a Senior Strategic Advisor for optical tracking company Track160. “It’s a good first step.”

This article was brought to you by SportTechie, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SportTechie content in the field of athletic performance.

By John Portch

• What traits drive your selection process?

• How do you promote accountability within your team?

• How important are EQ and IQ in your environment?

‘We will figure out who you are’

Lieutenant General John Daniel Caine of the US Air Force is the Associate Director of Military Affairs of the Central Intelligence Agency [CIA]. Back in 2020, he spoke about Special Operations Forces [SOF] recruitment at the Leaders Sport Performance Summit in Charlotte. At the time, while still ranked Major General, he was serving as the Director of the Special Access Program Central Office of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment.

Caine walked the audience through the rigorous assessment phase, which went some way to explaining why the numbers of candidates who progress to the selection phase are low. That said, when they make it, they reach a “crucible” that can last for weeks and months and which has the express purpose of imparting basic combat skills and testing for essential character traits.

He said: “We’re seeking a war fighter first and foremost who’s humble, who’s credible, who’s approachable.” He later joked that it was akin to the search for unicorns. “I say a unicorn but not really,” he added. “This is what we seek in our recruiting efforts, this is what we measure in assessment. What we continue to strive for in selection is these traits along with many others.”

Authenticity

It is no less true of the military than any other walk of life. “We’ve seen hundreds and hundreds of examples of people who come in and just try to pretend that they are somebody who they aren’t – I’m sure that you see the same thing in athletics, right?” said Caine. “But eventually we’re all fallible and we show ourselves. We’re going to figure that out and it’s always better to own it, own who you are, than to pretend to be someone who you are not.”

Humility

Of humility, Caine said that candidates must be, “humble to the point where they do not drink their own Kool-Aid. And we’ve all seen egos in sports and there’s egos in the military as well and SOF, but is this person at their core DNA humble? Do they realise that ‘this is a chapter in my life. It may be a big chapter but it’s just a chapter in my life’?” They must embody confidence but not cockiness, and remain selfless to a fault.

Credibility

Candidates can demonstrate credibility in several forms. Caine said: “Do they take the time to self-study? Do they take the time to clean their weapons? Do they clean up team gear before they do their own gear? What is it that makes them credible with their teammates, brothers and sisters?

Approachability

Caine refers to a sense of humour paired with equanimity. He said: “What is their attitude like when ‘the suck’ is on them? Are they still approachable? Do they retreat into the corner of the team room? Do they go off by themselves or do they maintain a positive attitude?”

Collegiality

Caine said: “Believe it or not, collegiality is a big thing we look for. What is the rapport between teammates and are they collegial with each other?”

EQ and IQ

Caine explained that EQ and IQ are essential for navigating the volatile world and complex networks of an SOF operator. He said: “[We value] the ability to adapt your leadership style, take advantage of the limbic signals, the non-verbal signals that are presented in a scenario that these leaders may be facing; and then be able to take action accordingly based on what they’re seeing and observing, not just what they’re hearing.”

High absorption, low reactivity and high coping skills

How do the traits desired by SOF stack up against those desired in sports? We explored this theme with Leaders Performance Advisor Edd Vahid, who also serves as the Assistant Academy Director at English Premier League club Southampton.

What personality traits do you need to see in youngsters at a football club? What are some of the ways you can measure for those?

In recent seasons our Psychology team have been reviewing an Academy player’s ability to self-regulate and maintain task focus. Specifically, this has involved subjective assessments of a player’s ability to absorb into a task (being present), demonstrate a healthy level of reactivity (avoiding being over-reactive) and have sufficient coping skills. The optimal profile would be a player who displays high absorption, low reactivity and high coping skills. Additionally, it is important that a player demonstrates a commitment and desire to add value to the team. Feedback from a range of disciplines helps presents an insightful picture of how this manifests in reality. 

To what extent is there room for personality outliers on football pathways? Is there a safe level of risk?

A core element of our coaching philosophy is to be person-centred. Therefore, our ability to embrace a diverse group of personalities is critical. With younger players it is important we seek to understand their intent and not default to judging them solely on their actions. Ultimately, we are responsible for creating an inclusive environment that affords different personalities the opportunity to progress. Whilst there has always been an appetite to understand and support different individuals, the recent increase in ‘individual development coaches’ perhaps reflects a clear aim to be explicit with this approach.

In partnership with

By Sarah Evans

The focus of our third Leaders Meet of 2022 was around the dynamics of performance pathways and how to effectively manage the transitions of the athletes throughout. We also highlight the need to ensure psychological safety, particularly the notion of learner safety within your teams and staff throughout the pathway.

Session 1: Performance Pathways Part 1: Creating Effective Transitions

Speakers:

John Alder, Head of Player Development, Welsh Rugby Union

Helen Reesby, Head of National Performance Pathway, Lawn Tennis Association

Transition experiences:

• When have you managed transitions well? When the transition is anticipated, you can prepare and make plans. When you can engage in mentoring, learn from others, and have great support. You have time to understand what you need based on your values, and understand what is right for you.
• When have you not managed a transition well? Dealing with something with that it out of your control, such as a career-ending injury.
• Biggest lesson learnt was the importance of speaking about it. We need to be able to sit, and address the issue. This might not be what you want to do, but it is essential. From an external point of view it might seem as though you have transitioned well, due to looking to what’s next and making plans. However, it is essential to not presume anything. It’s very easy to assume someone is OK based on their exterior, but you won’t truly know until you ask.
• Importance to reflect on both positive and negative and not to stray away from either, as we can take huge value out of both.
• Recognise the ending of one chapter and embracing the start of something new. And the importance of understanding our identity and how that impacts our transitions.
• The role of your support system in helping you cope with transitions. Very important to have key people to support you in processing the emotions around the transitions in order to help manage the phase effectively.

Effective transitions:

• What is a transition? Moving from junior to senior, injuries, changing position, location change, essentially an experience which stretches and requires change. The process of exiting something and entering something new or different and making this, hopefully, as seamless as possible.
• Who is going through the transition, what resources do they have, how does it fit into their learning and where are they heading? What skills are required going into it?
• Having the readiness and ability to meet the demands of the next stage.
• Two elements to a transition: performance-ready. What are the demands of that next stage, do you have the tools to be able to step up? Person-ready: have you got the personal skills, are you ready for the lifestyle change? Are you personally ready? You often see one or the other.
• We prepare them well for the anticipated change especially making them performance-ready. But often what we don’t spend enough time on is preparing them for the unanticipated transitions which inevitably will happen, and these are often the person-ready skills.
• ‘Prepare the child for the path and not the path for the child’.
• Have the athletes got the resources to deal with the new challenges or changing environment?
• Smooth transitions or not? Recognising which transitions might be used as good bumps in the road to aid in their development.
• Team sports: experience transitions together but it might feel different for each person. The importance of understanding how things impact individuals differently and the challenge of the coach to recognise what is best for each player and how they are experiencing that change (identity, curriculum, direction of travel).
• In individual sport, how do you scale? Helen believes in a person-first approach with tennis being a highly individualised sport. There is a scale of transitions – they range from large transitions to small fry. The individualised approach is so important in terms of presuming and assuming.
• Gender-specific in tennis – understanding differences in genders. Still person-first as you can’t just group the genders but what are the general differences to be aware of?
• Parent involvement – in tennis they have to be heavily involved (time and resource). It’s easy to get frustrated by this, but they have a major influence on the transition and the support of the athletes, if you can engage with them and take them on the journey with you, they can be incredibly valuable.
• Social cultural context and how that mediates transitions – what are the dynamics at play in the environment that can impact a transition? In many squad-based teams and sports, you can have 50 people including staff and athletes.
• The importance of role clarity on the field and off the field.

Session 2: Performance Pathways Part 2: The Different Stages of Psychological Safety

Speaker:

Tim Cox, Managing Director, Management Futures

Psychological safety:

• “Psychological safety is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes” – Dr Amy C. Edmondson.

Why it matters:

• You want people to be able to think clearly, to make connections, share insights, bring ideas and learn.
• As a leader you want to simultaneously increase intellectual friction and decrease social friction.
• Google Project Aristotle: the number one determinant of team success was psychological safety.
• Wellbeing.

Social pain & the brain:

• Whilst social pain and physical pain can have similar characteristics, they are not the same experience.
• They share some of the same underlying neural substrates.
• The common experiential element is the affective component of pain – the distressing experience associated with these threats motivates individuals to terminate, or escape the negative stimulus.

Four stages of psychological safety:

• Inclusion safety: I feel valued and a sense of belonging. Safe to be myself. This is a pre-condition for the other three.
• Learner safety: I feel safe to ask questions, seek guidance ask for help, admit mistakes, and be vulnerable.
• Contributor safety: I feel safe to share my ideas, and trusted to act on my initiative.
• Challenger safety: I feel safe to challenge the status quo.

Inclusion safety – key concepts:

• What it should take to be included – two things:
• Be Human
• Be Harmless
• And yet…
• Sometimes we extend partial or conditional inclusion safety. Sometimes we revoke or withhold it.
• ‘We like to tell ourselves soothing stories to justify our sense of superiority’.

Learner safety – key concepts:

• The moral imperative to grant learner safety is to act first by encouraging and inviting the learner to learn.
• Failure isn’t the exception, it’s the expectation and the way forward.
• The most important signal in granting or withholding learner safety is the leader’s emotional response to dissent and bad news. How are your reacting, because the learner is watching us?
• The prejudiced mind is wilfully blind. Do you genuinely believe they can?
• When the environment punishes rather than teaches, whether through neglect, manipulation of coercion people become defensive, less able to self-diagnose, self-coach and self-correct. That opens people up to the risk of real failure – the failure to keep trying.

Contributor safety – key concepts:

• A toxic environment shuts down performance because people worry about psychological safety before performance.
• Speaking first when you hold positional power softly censors your team.
• Inviting people to think beyond one’s role expresses greater respect and grants greater permission to contribute.
• It’s the leader’s role to recognise the difference between dissenting and derailing behaviour and manage the boundary between the two.

Challenger safety – key concepts:

• Challenger safety democratises innovation.
• The more unknowns the leader eliminates through transparency the fewer the sources of stress for the individual.
• Nothing shuts curiosity and exploration down faster than a small dose of ridicule administered at just the right time.
• Deprive your team of challenger safety and you dedicate the team to the status quo.
• Assigning permission for dissent from the outset takes away the natural fear associated with challenging status quo.

Six ways we can increase psychological safety:

• Build trust and belonging.
• Put it on the table – discuss it.
• Model openness and honesty.
• Make it easy to speak up.
• Praise it.
• Constructively challenge fixed positions.

Model openness & honesty

• We forget how scary we are. Our power silences people.
• We don’t question our list of whose opinion counts.
• We send ‘shut up’ versus ‘speak up’ signals.
• Watch your language.

Make it easy to speak up

• Ask open questions to seek input, but make them specific e.g. What do people think we should be paying more attention to?
• Red teaming / Brains trust meetings.
• Use small groups or 1:1 conversations.

Session 3: Performance Pathways Part 3: An Insight into the FA’s Approach

Speaker:

Phil Church, Senior Coach Development Lead, The Football Association

• Individualisation: we’ve certainly moved into a landscape where individualisation is key in relation to developing coaches and players. We have what we call a talent map, where we can look at who might have potential. We have boots on the ground, they’re ‘in the trenches’, provide unconditional support and they are not just there when they’re winning. This provides a good idea of the landscape and therefore how we can influence it.
• Create a personalised and connected experience: we know the power to individualised approaches, but to elevate this to the next level, how are you connecting this to the experience players or coaches face? Individual relationships are a key component of this (who, self, how, what).
• The FA’s approach to development: the general rule of thumb for the organisation’s development approach is 70:20:10. As people involved in developing talented coaches or players, you’d expect to see our work somewhere in and around the 20 or 10 section. This is why context and experiences outside of this around important to consider.
• If we are only with them for 10-20% of their time, how can you influence and add value for them in that short space of time? You get trust in consistency and competence. How are you adding value to a player or a coach? ‘Bring a gift’ to add value to them.
• Environmental context: spend time getting a better understanding of the context of the team around the individual. An individualised approach is powerful for development, but the external environment for the individual has potential for large influence.

Attendee takeaways:

• Inclusion requires understanding of team values – learning, challenging, contributing.
• Best practice for psychological safety – new people coming in to be clear of expectations and culture, and to talk about intent around psychological safety within the induction.
• The need to formalise your transition process.
• Think about the best way to train or support psychological safety.
• The need to share the four stages of psychological safety and the six descriptions with the team.
• To have the agreed ways of working threaded through a club or organisation strategy.
• Have best practice embedded into everyday work and life.
• Reflecting on effective transitions.
• It is important to understand where failure fits into psychological safety – should we support failure at the top end of elite level performance?
• As a coach or leader, understand your own transition journey to empathise and support the athletes.
• Identifying your team’s roles and responsibilities to help build the six ways to increase psychological safety – use your super strengths well.
• Psychological safety to give awareness to development pathways.
• A way of changing best practice – at national senior team selection meetings, instead of the chair / senior selector listing their team selection and then asking the room to share theirs and justify the differences, build psychological safety in the room by ‘putting it on the table – discuss it’. All of the selection committee put their teams up simultaneously and then open the discussion.

By Edd Vahid

Fifa describe the transition from talented academy player to first team regular as a ‘delicate phase’. The term ‘delicate’ arguably underplays the challenges characterising this period.

Whilst many young players harbour dreams of playing Premier League football, the well-publicised reality is reserved for a minority. Enhancing the existing transition rate remains a priority for most academies and requires a collaborative approach engaging key internal and external stakeholders.

Before exploring existing and future interventions, an awareness of the current landscape is important.  According to the Football Observatory, during the first half of the current season (2021-22) the average age of a Premier League player has been 27.16 years old with only 4.2 per cent of these players younger than 21 years old. Significantly, 59.5 per cent of players currently plying their trade in the Premier League would be considered expatriates (i.e., their origin exists outside of England) who have been secured on lucrative and often long-term contracts (the average stay in a Premier League club is 37 months).

A gross transfer spend of £1.4 billion by Premier League clubs during the two available transfer windows this season, significantly eclipses the €380 million combined outlay by clubs in La Liga (Spain), Serie A (Italy), Bundesliga (Germany) and Ligue 1 (France), and reflects a generally positive trend in expenditure since 2003. These insights arguably highlight a league that present limited opportunities and favour more experienced players. Young players are competing for game time with the finest players in the world. This clearly represents a challenging landscape for young players with Premier League aspirations, and clubs with a desire to facilitate the transition of academy graduates.

The challenges evident on the pitch are often further exacerbated by an incentivised short-term focus and instability that can characterise off-pitch activity. Indeed, in 2021, Statista reviewed the average tenure of Premier League managers in the past ten seasons. According to the report, the average tenure at Southampton Football Club (accurate as of 08.11.21) during this period was 513 days. Our current Manager, Ralph Hasenhüttl, has surpassed more than 1000 days in post and offered a stability that encourages a more future-oriented outlook. Coupled with the financial incentives available when winning games, managers might understandably prioritise short-term results. Arguably, young players may require time before delivering game impactful performances at a Premier League level. Clubs must negotiate this tension, and there is evidence of positive progress in the past decade.

Despite the challenging context, since the inception of the Premier League-led Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP) in 2012 a positive increase in home grown talent is evident. Notably, last season young English players were securing significant game time domestically and in European competition relative to their homegrown counterparts in the big five leagues (i.e., Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, Bundesliga, and Ligue 1). Specifically, English under 23 players ranked second for domestic minutes (behind France) and first in Uefa club competitions. Given the challenges presented, this represents a positive return and evidence of sustained progress.

Whilst clubs must ultimately take responsibility to review their pathway and explore ways to improve the transition rate of young academy players, organisations occupying leadership roles in the wider footballing ecosystem (e.g., leagues and governing bodies) represent important collaborative partners.  For clubs, a clear and agreed vision, the existence of trust and empathy, underpinned by aligned processes responsive to an individual’s needs, appear to represent necessary elements. Firstly, an ownership and board-led long-term vision that acknowledges the club’s youth development aspirations is critical. A clear and agreed vision importantly provides a framework for decision making. If youth development is prioritised, this should have clear implications and evident impact on the decisions related to player transfers, contracts, and general investment.

Creating a viable pathway for talented young players is important. Victor Orta, the Director of Football at Leeds United Football Club, recently highlighted a policy that protects space in the squad for young players. The approach represents a deliberate attempt to create a pathway that facilitates the development of homegrown players. Separately, during a 365-day period commencing in February 2021 our first team played 40 games in the Premier League. These fixtures were fulfilled with the use of 32 players, a figure broadly reflective of the average across the league. Significantly, more than a third (n = 11) of these players would be considered academy graduates; each player accruing varying levels of game time and sustained activity with the first team.

Given the relatively short tenure of a head coach or manager, it is vital that clubs employ guardians of their philosophy. Radically Traditional studied organisations who have enjoyed sustained success.  These ‘centennial’ organisations, as they termed them, were characterised by two distinct headline features, namely a stable core and a disruptive edge. A new manager arguably provides the disruptive edge that is necessary to evolve. This might involve changes to a playing style or training methodology. Complemented by a stability that safeguards an organisation’s identity, this represents a formidable partnership for progression. An instable core where purpose and identity are frequently negotiated ultimately creates confusion and inhibits continuity.

Deploying strategies that help support the development of trust between an academy and first team is vital. In his 2006 book Speed of Trust: the one thing that changes everything, Stephen R Covey considered trust a function of character and competence. In a transitional space this has implications for both staff and players. Senior academy staff and first team personnel must develop relationships embodying trust. An absence of trust will be debilitating and potentially impact the opportunities presented to young players. Whilst character arguably exists on an individual level, competence can emerge from a shared understanding of player development and potential. A shared understanding is often the product of a regular dialogue, which effectively serves to calibrate people’s views of individual players. This might involve discussing match performances and sharing training observations. Importantly, frequent feedback amongst staff operating in the transitional phase (i.e., academy and first team) should help enhance a player’s experience by clearly identifying agreed areas for development.

Empathy is closely intertwined with trust. It is important that both parties (i.e., academy and first team) appreciate and seek to understand their respective challenges. It is also important to acknowledge the inevitable tensions that exist. For example, an academy affords a time and space that is rarely available to a first team, which is under constant scrutiny from media and fans. Results in a first team setting represent the essential currency and this can conflict with the developmental needs of transitioning players. Arsène Wenger described management as ‘living on a volcano’, presumably in acknowledgement of the intensity and uncertainty inherent in the profession. Michael Calvin later adopted this phrase as the title for his 2015 book Living on the volcano: the secrets of surviving as a football manager, which provides an insight into the challenges experienced by managers. The competing tensions further emphasise the necessity for a vision that transcends a pathway and the importance of a clearly defined and stable club purpose.

The partnership between academy and first team staff is helpfully supported by aligned processes. This might include similar playing styles and approaches to set plays, which are designed to minimise turbulence during this critical transition. Indeed, our B team model at Southampton was introduced under this premise. The B team are philosophically aligned with the first team, operating a playbook that encourages a consistency in approaches to training and games. Ideally, individual development plans for the highest potential players are co-created amongst selected first team and academy staff. This should ensure a common language is deployed and a shared understanding of the demands and expectations evolves. Additionally, a schedule that permits regular opportunities for academy players (and staff) to observe and participate in first team training provides an important benchmark for performance. In recent seasons this has more formally involved a season-long sabbatical for selected members of the senior academy coaching team. Importantly, these interventions should help determine the training and competition needs of each individual player.

Facilitating a successful transition from senior academy player to first team player is difficult. However, this difficulty can be mitigated if an ownership-led and collectively agreed vision promoting young players is supported with an infrastructure characterised by the interdependent features of trust and empathy. As previously mentioned, each club is ultimately responsible for supporting the development of their players and creating conditions that enhance an individual’s progress. However, clubs operate within a broader ecosystem, and it is important to acknowledge the important role of leagues and associations. For example, the Premier League and Football League have effectively collaborated to provide young players an opportunity to feature in competitive fixtures against senior teams. The initiative, introduced during the 2016-17 season, invites senior academy teams to participate in the Football League Trophy. This opportunity complements the under-23 fixture programme and adds to the breadth of experiences that are necessary to prepare young players for the challenges evident in the senior game. Whilst it has not been universally accepted, the intent is clear and should be recognised.

The Premier League have previously reported the valuable role that a loan experience can have in a young player’s development. Specifically, there is evidence to indicate that a loan (or multiple loans) can provide a helpful platform preceding future Premier League appearance milestones. Whilst causality could be speculated and is likely to be individually determined, it is important that a loan system permits an appropriate degree of flexibility. A scenario where a young player has restricted playing opportunities and is locked into a loan experience for several months is counterproductive for all parties.

It will also be interesting to observe how the re-introduction of a rule permitting clubs to make five substitutions during Premier League fixtures will impact young player’s next season. Clubs will continue to be able to name a total of nine substitutes in their match day Premier League squad. Whilst intuitively this appears to present more opportunities, clubs must be mindful of an unintended consequence that could see young players deprived of meaningful game time and restricted to the role of an observer. This further emphasises the importance of detailed individual development plans with clubs ensuring their highest potential players are exposed to the appropriate training and match stimulus during a critical stage of their development.

Gareth Southgate recently called up 26 players to the England international squad in preparation for fixtures against Switzerland and Ivory Coast. The initial squad comprised players from 15 different teams, with individual development histories reflecting the diversity in transitioning experiences. A minority of the group have enjoyed Premier League opportunities as a teenager with their parent club, transitioning seamlessly following their academy experience. Several have negotiated the lower leagues (as both permanent and loan players) with carefully crafted and deliberately implemented development plans. Others have enjoyed less refined journeys that have seen them respond to setbacks during the infancy of their career. Each player has a unique story, which further emphasises the importance of a footballing ecosystem that is agile, responsive, and capable of facilitating multiple pathways to a first team transition. This outlook is broadly consistent with the conclusion Fifa reached following their extensive research into the transition of talent.

Edd is one of six Leaders Performance Advisors, a group of leading performance thinkers providing more subject expertise to our member-only content and learning resources. To find out more about all our Performance Advisors, click here.