Hi everyone, this is Dave Wright and welcome to the Play Development Project podcast. I hope you're having a top week working with your players. As always, before we kick off today's discussion, a very quick review of the latest content to come out on Play Development Project.com over the last week or so. Firstly, we published a new Q&A video on the website for coaches seeking advice on how to best organise Match Day.
PDP technical advisor Dan Wright and I discuss a few ideas on how you can create learning objectives on the day, organise your warm-ups and ensure continuity in your coaching approach between training and game day. Secondly, we've just published a brand new masterclass discussion with Danny Barham, head of analysis and data at Birmingham City Football Club Academy. Today we share part of this conversation with Dan Wright and I co-host Danny for a conversation around video analysis, how video analysis can support individual development, some of the principles at Birmingham City apply in this area within the Academy and much more. For the full discussion, head over to Play Development Project.com and check out the masterclass discussion section.
Also, thanks to Danny for his time and we hope you enjoyed today's conversation. As always, look out for more great content on the website next week and a reminder that if you haven't signed up to become a PDP member, we have monthly annual or club membership options available at Play Development Project.com so you can sign up and access all of our top coaching content and the PDP Slack community to discuss ideas with coaches. Finally, if you get a chance, leave us a review and I hope you enjoy today's conversation. My role day today is to look after the strategic planning of the department from ensuring that the processes that we roll out for our own department and the coaching department are underpinned with academic rigor and take a lot of teaching and learning boxes because we are working with a development environment and just a little bit about myself.
I was here as an intern in 2013-14 season. I got very lucky because we stayed up on the last day of the season. I ended up getting a part-time job off the back of it and I'm not sure I would have if we didn't. I got my career to Paul Caddis, believe it or not.
I worked part-time in the analysis department and coached within the academy for two or three years. Then I went full-time with that position as a bit of a dual-walled-between coaching and analysis. In 2017, I worked at Tottenham for a season and then my current role came up here back at Birmingham and I've been doing this for just over just coming up to a season now. I'm really enjoying it.
Sounds like a great journey. What is it about analysis that you think is so valuable for players on that kind of developmental journey? I feel analysis provides a different coaching is the ability to think about performance and development without the emotion that a training session might bring or a game might bring. I think players and coaches, well, main players, but some coaches can be irrational when they're on the training field and so doing analysis-based sessions can provide the same teaching.
Obviously without the ability to practice, which is imperative, however, it allows them to do so without the emotion of the gang and be able to thoroughly think about the learning. I'm going to get into some deeper topics in the discussion. I think one of the things that people might be thinking about if they're watching this or listening to this is they don't maybe have the facilities that professional football clubs have. For coaches that are working in that grassroots environment, what would be your advice to them or how could they use analysis if they're on a very small budget or have limited equipment?
Yes. When I was at Tottenham, I actually did a year of... to keep my arm into the coaching. I did a year as a head coach at a local non-league team back home and we was stricken by budgets there.
Now, again, fortunate enough for me, the owner of the football club was a scapola, so they were able to build a scapola for the film from. I mean, we got a cheap tripod from Amazon Central, they're ready to be cheering at 20 pounds and then you can get a camera that will do a job for probably just under 200 pounds. Now, I understand for a grassroots club, because I did that, it's still big money. However, I feel the learning benefits are there because if you were able to show the most powerful tool, it was the most powerful tool I found in the success of the non-league team that we had, simply because I've been in the academy environment for years and players have sort of accustomed to analysis and maybe taken it for granted to a degree.
However, the players I was wronged out with, it was fresh and it was new and so they really, really bought into it. So, I imagine that if grassroots coaches or clubs were to implement a similar sort of style, just a simple tripod and camera set up and find a way to show performance back suppliers, you can do it by uploading to a private YouTube channel and see that no one else is here for you, but you can just share them in class people. That is really, really powerful and plays you really like to see themselves back. So that would be my advice.
Yeah, it's really interesting, Danny. I think we've spoken previously at PDP on the Power of Self-Reflection. We've got some great content on the website from Sean Douglas who works at Football Federation Australia around the Power of Self-reflection for coaches. Just to dive into their little further, when you were sort of implementing that relatively simple setup at the non-league club, were you just filming practices or were coaches being filmed as well as part of their development?
What was the sort of, I guess, the real goal of using that equipment? I'll be honest, first and foremost, it was working within a first-team environment and there was a real big push to get the team promoted and so it was a different mission to what an academy would be. So, yeah, first and foremost, it was to, for the players benefit, however, within the academy environment, we do use coaching analysis to allow reflection to coaches as well, which I've actually really, really powerful. Yeah, certainly, there's no doubt that seeing yourself coach and often hearing what you're saying on the run can be an absolute revelation.
Yeah, what we want to do is dive into a little bit about data and I guess, frame this discussion around the problem with data and the importance, I guess, of context. So, a lot of the messages we've been promoting at PDP in the last and recent months and years has been around performance and narrative seeping down into youth sport. Now, I think we've got to first of all differentiate between academy football and grassroots football. We've also got to look at age-specific contexts along the journey, but I think there's sort of a message we've always tried to promote that football should be fun at all ages and that the performance and narrative going younger and younger can be exceptionally dangerous in terms of trying to test, measure, quantify everything.
So, I really want to get into this discussion between the three of us here. In modern sport, there is somewhat of an obsession around data and the obsession with measuring things. What do you think are some of the biggest issues in the space? In particular, within the academy environment, which is where I'm probably most comfortable talking about, it's, do you start from the position of having an amalgamation of data and then asking questions of the data or is it asking the relevant questions prior and then collecting data in line with what you want to measure.
So, the data we analyze in academy here will be in line with, if it's individual data, is the performance a Birmingham City individual performance and what does that look like from, and that isn't, I always say it's not stick to people with it, it's just asking questions of performance. It's not saying someone's not of a sound that it's more trying to measure development and then if we're in the same way we do in team data analysis, it would be more in line with, is, was that performance a Birmingham City team performance? So, it's effectively a measure of, we say this is our philosophy, are we performing the philosophy and if we are, why and if we're not, why and that's essentially why we use it and I'm really big on that it's not a stick to be in whether it's not, we're not pulling in coaches to the office saying, you know, we haven't met certain thresholds, we're not pulling players or parents and saying, we're not meeting the standard because of this number is below X, it's more of a reflection tool in line with the videos as well because everything's got the contextual and it's only one small part of analyzing the performance, it's not everything, you can't just sort of rely on the data. So, you mentioned there about the context, how do you kind of merge that together so the video is obviously what happened in players and coaches and maybe even parents would look at that but how do you integrate some context into those clips to help the players learn I guess?
Yeah, so I mean, one of the big statistics that we're trying to roll out this season is around our ability to break the last line, now it was all turned out seldom, I think it's used quite a lot in rugby but I haven't seen it, final third entry seems to be the thing that gets used in football but just when I think about final third entries, essentially what you're doing is going pass the plate of grass, it's not, you're not really achieved anything so the real, when we were quantifying final third entries in the academy, we found that we have higher, higher percentage of possession, high amount of final third entries but attempts on goal and goals was low and how we would use how I see we will contextualize video and data together this season would be, so looking at the amount of time we broke the last line and then using the video to see what ways that we did so, so was it an individual dribbling pass at fallback, was it two people combining to getting behind the last line, was it an overlapping run from a fallback to get to point the last line, so there is the number of how many times did you do it and in the video you should contact in, how did you do it and then how would that kind of time to move to individuals, so I'm thinking if you're working maybe with a winger and his target is to break the last line of the dribble and maybe deliver a final ball and have a shot goal, is that how it works my coaching into player individual kind of development angle? It could do, how it looks here would be so weird, we're quite thorough and we follow a, our coaches come up with three objectives to work on over a three week cycle and we work kind of through a syllabus, it's coming away from a syllabus per se and so, so for example, Mike Godz, who you guys know from a previous, they'll be working on breaking the last line, it's one of their team objectives for this cycle and it's just quantifying how well they're doing, what they're saying they're doing with me, so the statistics that we call away, because that's a big part of our philosophy, we're only really measuring the philosophy, we're not, we're not trying to measure anything past that, if that makes sense. Yeah, really interesting, I think just to rewind a step, I mean, obviously you're talking a little bit about the video and also there are other areas that get tested and measured whether it's the form of sports science or otherwise, are you sort of alluding to the fact that there aren't sort of blanket measures and you're very much, are individualizing everything in terms of the players needs, is that something you would definitely promote as a message from the Birmingham City Academy? 100% because the law in the short of it is in the same way that a coach has to have a grip on development from where is each player in the group that I'm working with in their development path, we have to, we have to understand that as analysts as well, so everything has to be contextual, not only to their age but to their physical development where they are in on the spectrum of their peak high velocity and all these things are considered, what their academic performance is like, we're not, we roll out something at the start of the season called the Mortal Disciplinary Player Report, which we try to get a holistic overview of the player's performance and their engagement with the academy and their statistics are from all manner of things, so even as things from the operation department with how far away does the boy live away from the training ground because if a coach doesn't know how far away from the training ground the boy lives and the boy's coming in, he's traveling in 45 minutes to an hour every day to come into training and he's not performing great, that could be a variable as to why, so it's, in development there's a big emphasis on looking at reasons behind the number and so we try to give as much information holistically as we can but at the same time it's not given as much information for the sake of giving as much information all the data points are pertinent to what we feel are important to play development.
Yeah, very interesting and just to sort of go one question further with that on the individual theme I guess, I mean I can recall having a fairly robust conversation at a club around retaining release with a certain player that was let's say under achieving in terms of passes in the final third which is obviously a heavily congested part of the part of the pitch, a difficult place to connect the dots when it comes to passes versus the Cinevac building play for example, in terms of individual objectives if you've got players working on say taking risks in the final third is that taken into account with providing some context? 100% so on this multidisciplinary play report we actually have the the learning objectives that the boy is working on so for example why we use that for a coach is reflected forward big if we're saying that a boy has got taken risks in the top third of the pitch as he is learning objective and then we break down the positions that he's played in and he's played at center back and left back and he's not really in the forward opportunity to achieve his objective. Oh you're rolling out the right the right program for that boy so it's a it's more reflective talk for the coaches however it would work the same with understanding from a player's perspective like you say if a boy's got that particular learning objective we can't hold him accountable for something they're actually asking him to do. There was a big push when I first come in from some coaches to try and get me because I come in a new role head of academy and others and data not people wanted me to quantify training performance and I think that's really dangerous literally say is academy but the training ground is somewhere where they need to express themselves they need to try and get not try to get things wrong but a sense to do things right but can get things wrong to improve performance so if we're holding them accountable to numbers on the training field it's a contradiction in terms of all hypocrites as developers if we do that.
Yeah so some really good insight and advice there around how important the context is in terms of what we're looking at on the given day because there's so many variables and individual objectives might be one of them. You've touched a little bit on the differences you know and bit an age appropriate ideas a couple of times there but if we talk about the key ingredients of successful analysis what's some of the difference between that first team or performance context versus an academy and development environment. So if we're looking at it from a data perspective that the anecdote I like to give is so Vincent company spent a lot of time injured but he was a bit of honey pointing that he was such a good player so whenever he was out of the team you'd see on Sky Sports News they would provide the win ratio of him in the team versus the win ratio of him out the team. Now we do quantify that on our report but the reason we quantify it in a first team environment they will quantify it for the team is more successful with this player and the team so there's a push to get that person in the team we would take the same statistics how we would interpret it would be with this boys got high win percentage ratio then it probably suggests that he's games programs too easy for him and that we'd probably need to look to play him in a high-rate group if possible or get more difficult opposition so again that feedback loop is we would be that into the operational department they may be able to get more default opposition for this particular age group because their games program seems to be too easy for them at the moment so it's the same number but different context.
I think something we've spoken about before was an idea that Liverpool spoke about one of the conferences I went to where they had a traffic light system for players so individuals were having like a red challenge game an amber game that they might win they might lose and a green game that they expect them to be very comfortable to take a lot of risks and so I think all you're doing there is maybe explaining what that looks like for an individual so rather than saying the under 15 to 175 percent of their games and it's that good or bad we're saying Dave's one 80 percent of his games and Danny's one 20 percent which one needs more challenge and that might link into personality it might link into their growth and maturation it might link into their position so then you're kind of tailoring that games program and maybe even the training programs to get that kind of stretch and challenge for every individual is that kind of how you're seeing that. Exactly that and it's so important it has to be individualized I mean piece of these reports together it would be easier to firstly enlist our Iron Maiden because I have to understand the dynamic of boys have mixed games programs they could be playing there could be a 15 playing down into the 14 because he's physically under maturated it could be an under 12 that's playing up to age root and I have to account for that in all areas of the reporting because it's so so very you can't everyone's program has to be different and if we're going to quantify things I need to be able to consider that and make sure that my methods are reflective of that. I think that's a fascinating story like something we could probably go really deep into and ties a lot into the PDP message kind of going along a similar theme how can coaches use analysis or how can analysis of support a coach with a similar kind of story that's the one you just told. My understanding of how I think coaches should best serve and analysts should best serve coaches is I think I've got a big bug there that I think I feel that a lot of analysts in the country and we're trying to get away from it are just trying to accommodate so they have to work really closely with the coach and in a lot of environments coaches seen as King and so we have to be able to challenge not just accommodate what the coaches is saying so we can't just come up with analysis that fits the narrative that the coaches trying to push at that time we have to actually challenge thought as well I think the biggest thing the biggest skill for the modern day analysts I believe is having the strength of character and the belief in what they do to be able to actually go and challenge coaches thinking as well as just accommodate coaches thinking it's really really difficult in terms of where analysis is as a discipline so if you look at sport scientists I don't know 10, 15, 20 years ago if a team lost a game and the coach was feeling emotional about the game there we go right everyone's in tomorrow we're doing that for the picture we're running I now sport science and discipline has got enough academic rigor and enough challenging ability to be able to coach and none of that's not best practice we're not doing that however I still see an analysis team loses on a Saturday Monday morning everyone's in watching about the four 90 minutes and that is the equivalent of doing that's around the picture and analysis perspective I believe so again my challenge is to challenge my staff and I don't want to challenge the discipline of analysis broadly to be able to how do we find experts in our field and back ourselves to be able to challenge coaches thinking around their practices and ask the question are we doing this for you or are we doing it for the players that's that's what I want to do so I think that story that watching 90 minutes a game is similar to laps it is really powerful because you're definitely going to turn people off with analysis they're not you they're going to associate video is when they made mistakes and then we get to sit there and watch them again and then the coach might embarrass us in front of our mates so then even now as it says do you want to do a little individual clip to do you want to go through 15 minutes they're going to say no thanks because you know that's a lot of negative memories I suppose the next obvious question is how could you use analysis to help individuals then and how does that what is the role of an analysis analysis to work with those individuals I'm really fortunate in my role that I get to strategically plan to the department I don't actually work with a team weeks a week so like I said I'm able to make sure that our process is full of some real academic rigor and my my girlfriend's a teacher so we talk about teaching learning theory which is very boring we do but so I make sure that a lot of our processes are underpinned by academic underpinning now our individual process how it works is our cycles work on nine weeks and our players have individual learning objectives for one nine weeks cycle so we we the coach and the player will agree on a priority objective for them so rather than four objectives that they have what is the most pertinent one to you to improve on and what we say is for that nine week block from an individual perspective that the player will just focus on that one individual objective and that allows them to really narrow their focus and that's not the two reasons because if you narrow the focus of learning it is it becomes more pertinent to you and you're able to focus more and and and go into more depth into it and hopefully you actually get some results out of it um the flip side of that is I also I've got a big understanding around you know the sports owners are asking the players to fill in our pings and the education department want them to bring home works today we're leaving sessions so if we're asking too much of the players then again it becomes too much so we want to make sure that we're able to maximize learning but also we're not demanding too much for them thanks for joining us on the play development project podcast you can follow us on twitter and instagram at player.db or find us on facebook don't forget to head over to playa.com where you can sign up to our progressive coaching community and gain access to our wide variety of resources to help you with your coaching