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Hi everyone, my name is Dave Wright and I'm thrilled to welcome you to the first installment of a new feature of Play Developer Project, the PDP monthly wrap. Each month, PDP technical advisor Dan Wright and I will summarize some of the content we published from the past month and give you a sneak peek into some clips and soundbites from our contributors. As always, our fundamental aim is to help coaches create better environments for their players through research-driven content and by tapping into experts from various fields around the world. We hope this summary will help you in your coaching practice.
Dan, thanks for joining me. How are you this week? Really good. Thank you.
Excellent introduction. Very professional. Thank you. Thank you.
Trying to always improve, always learning. So, but last month we published a couple of Masterclass discussions. We published some blogs. We published a Q&A.
A lot of content come out to start 2018. So, we're going to start with the Masterclass discussions. Great stuff. Okay.
So, the first one is with Dan Thomas and Dan is the lead leader of the Play Developer Project Fulham and a former colleague of yours who probably best for you to introduce us for Matt. Yeah, look, a really nice little clip coming up and before we go over to that, you know, first of all, Dan was a fantastic interview, nine years' experience at the club, well connected in the game and with a track record of producing players and really sort of walking a walk in terms of play development, creating a great environment. So, as you'll see shortly, a really good discussion and in this clip, Dan's going to talk us through some of the key points of difference that Fulham offers compared to other perhaps bigger clubs in the area. In terms of the club's play development philosophy, obviously there's been some good success in recent years with a number of players making debuts and going through from the 23 to the first team and so on.
What is it about the club philosophy that in your eyes makes it unique and you're able to elaborate a little bit on how it works? Yeah, I think for me, you have to look at the size of Fulham as a club and the competition that we have. So, obviously, we're based in South London. We don't know the job if we've got Chelsea's training rounds, you know, less than 10 miles away.
You've got, we're competing for players with bigger clubs, the NAS, Tottenham Arsenal. So, I think that forces us to think a little bit differently and to try and do things a little bit differently and the fact that we're quite a small academy in terms of staff, I think that gives us some opportunities to change a bit quicker than maybe bigger clubs and to get to know our players maybe a bit better and share information a bit better and a bit more efficiently because we're quite a small staffing group. You know, the way that each will be pleased on some clubs have got one full time staff per acre or two and that's great. But then I have a question whether, you know, do you share information?
Can you make the changes that maybe you need to as quickly as someone, a club like us who's got less staff? And I think that's one thing. I think continuity of staff has really helped us. We've got people who've been at the club a long time.
So, a few junins have been academy director for seven or eight years. I've been here for nine years, Kevin Betsy was here for a long time. Colin and Monpeon, who I work closely with, being here for seven or eight years after Andrew Watt, you know, pretty much all the guys who who were Steve Widdley, all the guys who pretty much are coaching day to day have been with the club for probably at least five years, almost all of us. So, I think that helps with dealing with parents and understanding players.
So, and a continuity of a program. So, if you put in a programming place, that is changing every year and people are coming in and ripping it up and starting again, I think that's very difficult for players to go through that program. So, I think, you know, it's quite a bit smaller club. The fact we have to think a bit differently.
The fact we have staff who've been with the club a long time. And I think that then that allows us to focus really on the individual players. So, our sort of mission is to be a bit closer and more personal and to work with individual players, whether the under 13 age, win 10 games in a row or lose 10 games in a row or win a national trophy or getting knocked out in the first round. It's not really an issue, you know.
I've never felt under pressure to win a game with football here. It's about okay, what's best for this player? What's best for that player? And because we're in smaller club, we can maybe spend a bit more time thinking about, right, let's move this player up a few, let's move him up two ways.
We'd let's go and send him under 14 year olds to go and train him in the rating. So, we can give that those boys, that individual support, that extra challenge that they might need and we can make those things happen maybe a bit quicker than some bigger clubs with more staff and more layers of decision making. So, I think those are the things that make us maybe a bit different than we can use to our advantage. So, really interesting there from Dan.
What were the key takeaways for you, mate? Yeah, I think it's about working in London where there's so many clubs, so many high quality clubs within quite a small area. And if you have a coach in that area, I think the insight in terms of identifying players and recruiting players and all the sort of the difference you can experience in terms of the multicultural and multinational. And I think you're full of them are obviously doing something slightly different to recruit these players and then to look after them and then finally get them into the first thing that was sort of my sort of main takeaways with that massive pass.
How about you, mate? Yeah, certainly an absolute melting pot in London and as we both are competitive landscape for coaching and playing and arguably one of the biggest sort of talent hot because of the volume of clubs and players in the area. For me, the key takeaway from that discussion from the clip itself is Dan's sort of emphasis on the individual and having been it full and full enough to understand and have a great deal of respect for the club and the staff working there. There is no doubt that the philosophy and the program there is focused on the individual.
The link that the club goes through to understand the player for coaches to build relationships with players and the quality of staff that have been working there for such a long time and that close knit feel within the club, it's tangible. You walk into the training ground, there's real character at Montzburg Park. So, good insight from Dan as to how they operate and a really good discussion, which I'd recommend to our listeners head over to the website and check out, sign up, join the PDP and get amongst that Masterclass because it's a fantastic conversation with somebody who's a real expert. So, obviously, we're going to move on and we're going to look at the next clip from our January content in the form of a Masterclass discussion with Jonas Blickstead.
Now, Jonas is the lead foundation phase coach over FC Mitchell and Denmark. Now, this is a club known for innovation, known for some unique challenges. Dan, what are your initial thoughts? I guess it's an introduction to this clip.
Yeah, I think this one was interesting from a kind of talent and idea and how they interact with the community. Very different to the scene in the UK. Mitchon seems to be quite isolated in terms of the population and the large cities around it. And then also probably not as much pressure or competition to recruit those players.
So, in the UK, it's quite common to have players in from 678, whereas in this clip, Jonas is going to talk about how they're probably leaving that a little bit later and how that kind of interacts with the culture and the community there. Well, let's get on to FC Mitchell a little bit now in the club's obviously a reputation for innovation and making huge strides in Denmark and course in Europe as well. So, it'd be great to get some insight into the academy. So, can you tell us a little bit about the local football landscape and how the club works with all the surrounding clubs because I understand there's a lot of them?
Yeah, definitely is. It's a big question and big thing to get into for others to give it a go. We are in the middle of nowhere. There's no big city around here.
We have two cities close to here with 10 to 15,000 people but that's it. The rest is just small towns. So, our club, our local clubs, they can be 150 kilometers away, but they still consider us a local club. That is for us the most important thing to be a local club within a big range because we need players from 150 kilometers away to keep our standard at the moment.
To get there, there's been a lot of work. It's taken us many years, even years, where I've not been here to establish a good companionship with all these grow up as a club. It's a matter of not just taking players but giving something back. So, what you know in England as a community work, we've had here in a different way but basically the same target to give something back to the community, in this case back to the clubs.
So, when we get a player, they get attention, they get trainers, they get all sort of stuff that we can give them with our brand. And that comes to the conclusion now that the clubs, when they send a player into us, they feel proud instead of feeling, okay, now comes the big brothers to take the players. That's not the feeling we get and we are every day striving to keep that feeling from the clubs because that's the cornerstone in our cooperation. We have 140 clubs and up to under 15, all of the players comes from these clubs.
When we come to under 15, sometimes under 14, we start to take in players from other clubs of clubs around the country but the local clubs are 140 local clubs. They do the mass of all the players up to under 14. The first tournament team we have is under 13, so under 11 and under 12 and was underneath. They still play in the local club.
We're going to come back to our values as a club but we are a holistic club and in our mind, it's not responsible. We won't be responsible if we took a player and had told him at the 8th of 10 that you have to drive 150 kilometers to train every day. So, we let them train in their own environment and then we make an appointment with the club and with the parents that they can train at the opposite of the team one, two times a week, play games, play tournaments internationally and domestically. That's actually our setup at the under 15 and down.
At the 8th of under 17, actually also under 16 but we don't have under 16 and then it's under 17, two age group combined. They live here. Even though they come from Finland or a local club, they live here together. It's a unit and they stay here until the 8th of under 19 and then it's up to 18 and all the other stuff that comes in from the right so we can control all of that.
But until the 8th of under 19, there are combined group living here at the facility. So, some really interesting insights to what's happening at FC Mitchell and there from Jonas. Dan, what were the key takeaways for you? Yeah, I think the one message I took away was about how the community clubs or the grassroots clubs were really pleased and really proud to hand over their players at that age group.
I think maybe in different environments certainly here in the UK, there is a sort of perception that the professional clubs come into town and they take the best players and the grassroots teams are left with four players and how we're going to run a team and kids travelling those large distances to go and play for the big club. And that came across as something that was completely different there. It was probably a more appropriate age and perhaps when it was a little bit more saying that those players had a chance of playing football rather than Hoover and all the six worlds that could run and kick a ball. What was your sort of takeaway from this one?
Yeah, I think exactly the idea around age groups, you mentioned that they're sort of looking at how they can be different there and what the players needs are as opposed to the competitive landscape that perhaps we referred to in London earlier. The fact that Jonas is the head of the foundation phase and that his age group starts at 13 is quite different to what the scene may look like in the UK where that role may be 9s to 12s. So, the debate around how soon players should be coming into formal environments is interesting and I think whether this is a Scandinavian approach because I know things like this are happening in Sweden, particularly at AOK and I'm sure in other clubs. Clearly, Mitchell and the trying to give players mixed experience, they're putting value on the, I guess, the social and the lack of pressure perhaps in less formal environments or academy environments and they're giving players more time to go out and explore through play before coming into a more formal environment.
So, I recommend the discussion, a really good chat with another good youth developer and somebody that's doing something interesting over there in Denmark. So, we'll throw down to the next piece of content and one of the sort of new features again that we've been working on at PDP is our monthly member's webinar. So, for anybody who is a member of the website, each month we're going to be putting a webinar on around the topic which is heavily based around questions we receive from our community and questions we receive live at the event. This month in January, our second member's webinar went out and we talked about the fundamentals of session design and Dan, you put a lot of work into this presentation so can you give us some insight as to what the key messages were and I guess the clip that we're about to see.
Yeah, so basically we wanted to try and talk about how you could rethink training and rethink practice. So, we talked a lot about representative learning design. So, we're trying to make practice and choosing the nights and Thursday nights and when you're with your players trying to make those sessions look a little bit more like the game, hopefully to build skills that can be transferred from practice into matches. So, we talked a lot about the constraint, that approach, we talked about the practice spectrum and a really good sort of 60 minutes there where some of it was the framework that we put together in terms of the presentation but also asking those live questions so it was really good to get questions from the members and so we were sort of flippin' between the two which was a new skill for us as well isn't it Dave?
Absolutely and we'll throw it out to the clip. You'll hear the three of us chatting through some key ingredients that need to be considered before you actually get on the grass. And obviously now we're sort of talking about the practice and the session itself. So, obviously the first question around is football being played.
I mean that's pretty key in terms of realism and relevance. I think the main thing is there to look at what moment in the game you're looking to isolate or potentially expose within a game situation. So, whether it's a smaller session, maybe a 4v2 and a correct sort of geographical area of the pitch is it real? Is it relevant to the players and their positions or their targets?
So, what they're working on? And, Dan, any additional thoughts around realism and relevance and importance of the practice design? I think Jimmy is actually about representative design which is kind of where we're going with the practical ideas in a minute but it's about what the players practicing, is it going to transfer to the game? So, it's not maybe just improving performance through a drill through repetition about an isolated practice.
It's about the pressure from the opposition and the time and the distance is being realistic so that the things I'm practicing on a Tuesday and Thursday night will help me make better informed decisions on a game day and doesn't transfer. Going into constraining to a 4v2, I know you've quoted being Bartlett here who both of you and I've worked with extensively and obviously we've interviewed him on the website and a fantastic discussion and I recommend everybody's in their own watches if they haven't already. Constraining to a 4v2, constraints is a word in the last two or three years, it really comes in the 4v2 particularly on social media. It's become a lot more prevalent.
The understanding is better. Can you just talk us through this quite a little bit? Yes, so this links in more to practice design. So, what we're trying to do is we're going to constrain the practice or manipulate the practice to point the learners towards certain information within the practice.
So, that might be, if I do a practice with us four goals and we're encouraging you to switch a play, the goals will direct the learner to take the ball from one side to the other to make them understand that that is going to give them a solution to the football problem. So, tying back to the slide we had before, football is about solving problems as an individual and solving them as a team and then we're just going to take part to the football problems away so that their learners can really focus on the bits that they need. That's my understanding of constraining to a 4th, I think Jim could probably add a bit more meat to the bone there. Yeah, definitely going, Jim.
Yeah, I think just building on what you mentioned there, Dan, I think the, again, if we look at what performance is, then it's about coordinating all of the constraints. So, those being the constraints of the player like in terms of their physical characteristics and the environment they're in, like, which is like a physical environment and then the task, which is obviously the big part, that's the coaches part in terms of what is the task. And then, as we talked about before, the wider environment, so social expectations around what's going on, like, and that feeds into big pictures, like understanding the formal life and the player style that emerges from all of that. But I think what the quote really gets at is that constraints are used to afford movement opportunities.
So, I think when we're looking at designing sessions using constraints, the first point is to figure out what are the movement opportunities that we want the session to afford our players. So, if we want the switch of play, if that's what we have in the back of our mind, that players, we want them to have the opportunity to do that, then we need to design a session that has wide spaces that are available to the players to utilize. So, those wide spaces become the affordance. And then, recognizing that affordance is moving a lot of the time away from the ball into that wide space with the body shape, where they're able to receive the ball and see forward and play forward or receive the ball with their back foot as an example.
Well, look, I know you've written an excellent couple of blogs on this, particularly the Yannick, the Lassie blog, creativity from Playground to Premier League, and of course, the one-around skill and affordances, which site skiing and surfing and those kind of areas, do you want to just take us through a little bit as to why we've touched on perception and action coupling? And I know you've done some work with another contributor being Galloway on this a lot, and he's really working hard on his research on this. Do you want to take us through this one, Jim? Yeah, I think the recognition in football and in probably a lot of invasion games is that a lot of skill is really about perception action.
And Dan and I were actually chatting about this earlier on today, and the difference or the different ends of the spectrum, that decision-making sit on and perception action sit on if you like, with different ways of understanding them. But skill being that in the moment, like perception action, it's something that we perceive and we act without necessarily thinking. So that can be like, recognising that the fender is slightly off-balanced after you've you fainted and seen the opportunity to dribble past them. It might be the opportunity to see a first-time passer it might be, coming up with something that a creative movement, faking a passer one way.
And as you're in that moment, passing the ball, you realise that the fender is starting to step across. So you just fake the passer and you play another way. These are moments of skill whereby there's not enough time to think through what you're doing to happen in a split second. So I think that's becoming more and more of a recognition in sports like football.
And we need to provide environments that also give the opportunity for moments like that, as well as moments for Q&A, which would be more about a decision-making at a higher level around, like maybe game intelligence, recognising that they're playing with a back three or they move back four and what that might mean for your team in attacking moments. So I suppose there's a spectrum but more and more with grassroots coaches, with young ages, targeted and perception action is really where skill development lies. So Dan, obviously you can see we've sort of covered three interesting points there before we were heading towards, I guess, in practical examples. And for those who couldn't make or attend or haven't seen the webinar, what we actually led to there was some practical plans.
So each of us put a session together and we looked at what the coaching spectrum or coaching continuum would look like based on the topic. So going from unopposed through to a game based scenario and just demonstrating why each idea from unopposed through to game based has its place and how you can manipulate the task. So why did we go into detail from your perspective on those three key components before actually getting to the practicals? I think it was two main reasons in my head.
The first one was if we're going to try and build this skill set or put guys in the context of football, rather than the examples we use, sort of unopposed drills or unopposed practices and then putting them in a more contextual environment, how that's going to help them see more opportunities for action or affordances, as Jimmy would say. And then the second thing I think that you touched on really well was how you were designing sessions for individuals. So there were team based sessions in the sense that there was a set amid, there was why players never forwards. But you had shown like which boys would play and which players and perhaps some conditions around those players and perhaps you could run two practices at the same time to give those individuals more of what they needed rather than sort of a one size fits all solution.
I think you've done a good job of making sure that there was two sort of crossing a finishing or two sort of finishing exercises at the same time. What are the considerations for you mate? Well look, I think going through the idea of realism and relevance and just touching on constraints is important. And the idea of perception, action coupling is a difficult one at times for coaches.
It's a new concept. It can sound like scientific or technical language. I know for myself it's something I've learned a lot about in the last few years through PDP. So I think the Laneette Foundation was key but on the practical side, yeah, it was great to sort of put some plans here and say look, there is a spectrum and every sort of component of that spectrum from unopposed to fully game based and fully post has its place.
But how can you manipulate the practice to deliver something for the individuals involved? So it's just about painting those pictures really looking at how you can change tasks to wind up and down that spectrum for individual player needs. So really enjoyed the discussion. I know we've got another big one coming up in February for another member's webinar which will be out soon.
So we'll look forward to promoting that and getting a few people on the call. The next bit of content that we produced was one of our Q&As. Now you and Jimmy got together and had a really interesting discussion on what is the value of the whole part whole methodology. So have a look at that now.
Yeah, I think it also worth talking about briefly. There's no sort of silver bullet here. It's not saying that whole part whole is the best thing and that's all we should be doing. We've discussed before about session planning and I think you've got to have some flexibility in that and it's around what you planned and what turns up in front of you.
You've planned the session for 12 kids and early 9 turn up. You shouldn't just run the session plan down there. That's what you scribble down. And I think that's kind of maybe where coach education has got a challenge because you have that skill as a coach of planning a certain theme or principle and then what emerges in front of you is completely different.
But that's the number of players whether it's the space available, whether it's the players can't do the activity or if you're working on a topic and the kids can't defend then it's times you have to talk about defending. You have to have them understand the realism of dribbling or passing through spaces if the defending's horrific then you need to do that. Do you want to give us some insight to your planning procedure? And as I mentioned before but it might be something I think I've evolved over the coaching experience of how I use the plan and kind of how I plan now and how more comfortable I've got with the kind of the chaos and what's going to happen on Tuesday night rather than I'm going to think say everything that's going to happen Tuesday night.
Well it's very difficult not to ram the session down the players throat when it's taking you three hours to do a session plan. So that would that would that would that would surprise my experience as a younger coach anyway. I found there was a lot of emphasis on planning in like the early coach education I did and then I would spend time planning a session and then I get to the pitch and ultimately one thing would lead to another and you couldn't do the exact thing that you had in front of and I found that extremely frustrating and almost you'd stress around the whole session just trying to like try to like yeah like throw pro. Yeah, commit anxious.
We've got to get to part two. Why don't you then part one? Exactly you crowbar the players into the session even though it's not appropriate at all. So I think if whole part hole is a recognition of that as well I think it's brilliant.
So now my planning process is much more around a moment in the game that I'd like to see or an opportunity or an affordance I'd like to I'd like to see a merge within the session. So having a space for example make a pocket for players to receive on back foot or be in a situation whereby they can play and they can be facing like they can be facing forward and learn to play and receiving away they're facing forward. I know I need to have kind of two lines if you like and I know that in a four before when they play this generally a pocket space in the middle and I know that I can kind of like replicate that if I have jokers at either end in a 3d3 in the middle and I can talk about you know one player pressuring in one area and others having to hold off another so I know that I can amp up how quickly that time in space and that pocket changes for players and I can kind of dial it down using pulling people around and manipulating the session. So I think then that makes the before planning like quite short and simpler and around concepts and then the observation at the start really really crucial and for example with whole part whole when you are doing the whole bit you're looking to see if like what the challenge is so what are they doing well what might they need to work on and you've probably got an idea in the back of your mind about what the part bit might look like but if in the whole that is different then ideally to be player centered in what you're doing then the part that you then do could be completely different.
Some really good explanations by both of you guys there Dan I mean obviously a really interesting conversation and a different way of working what for you are the key points that should be I guess reiterated or some of your reasons for joining the whole part whole methodology. Yeah I think Jimmy touched on how the whole part whole gives you chance to see what the kids need a bit so if you're putting them into something that's game based to start whether that is 2d2 3d3 or the game format that they've been used to over 77 or 11d 11 that might give you opportunity to have some flexibility in your plan so Jimmy talked about you know how he used to spend three hours planning his session and then he would try and sort of squeeze the kids into the session plan and make it work and perhaps you know that isn't the individual approach or the tailored approach that we would want to see and so by going into something game based first you know that gives you opportunity to say you know these boys don't need switching play these boys need playing through the central areas of the pitch and you know once you become probably more comfortable with having that flexibility in your plan that gives you a chance to adapt on the run a little bit change the session and deliver something kids need. Also that was interesting how we talked about those different types of whole I think perhaps when I started out I thought that whole but the whole was had to look the same and that whole was the whole game so it was like I said that that macro said be said or 11d 11 but you could be skillful in how you sort of move up and down that spectrum again of what the boys need and again you know how much realism and repetition and relevance they're going to get through those different types of games so yeah really really good chat with that one and it's always a skill to stop Jimmy talking so I'll be able to keep that one down to 25 minutes in terms of other content what's been on the website this month mate. Look we've heard some fantastic blogs from some of our regular contributors so the first article of the year was from Reed Mulbee over there at Changing the Game Project in the USA and Reed shared an article around that's not how I learned and some of the challenges around learning and tailoring your approach to the individual and what they need to do at the time highly recommend that one.
John O'Sullivan founder of Changing the Game Project shared his article around how performance is a behavior not an outcome and really trying to understand that performance has really a set of values that are constantly reiterated within the environment another fantastic Reed and then we had a nice article as our final blog in January from Todd Bean over there in Barcelona founder of Tovow Academy just on the benefits of rest recovery and sleep for young players it's included advice for parents and coaches three good reads and we've got plenty more coming up in February some great articles and other members webinar and plenty more video content than any final thoughts from you on the rap this month. I don't think so I mean sleep is a challenge for you and I at the moment is with without time difference so it's a nine of fucking the one for me and bedtime for you. Fantastic well thanks so much for your time again today mate and we look forward to another PDP rap next month. Thanks for joining us on the Play