Delighted to have another of my PhD papers published: ‘A preliminary multi-club project: Understanding player technical outcomes in European football academies training sessions’.

For full access to the paper, see the link below:

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

A breakdown below👇🏻
1/5

Huge benefits have been found in playing 3v3 games

This links to a lot of how teams have been training in the top European Academies, as highlighted in my PhD work

PhDone.

Yesterday I passed my viva for my Professional Doctorate (PhD) with the University of Birmingham!

The past 4 1/2 years have been a real learning curve for not only creating research in the most successful European football academies, but also my professional skills to take into my job.

SSGs; these are split into 2 categories

- 1v1, 2v2, 3v3 (and variations of e.g. 3v2)

- 4v4+

Here is a great SSG I’ve picked up along the way which is now used in Germany as part of their new SSG curriculum👇🏻

There’s many ways to deliver this. The idea is that (for example) strikers can practice shooting in the same varied way that they do in a game situation, it will never be the same twice but the practice is in the adaption with a high number of repetitions which can’t be achieved by just playing SSGs

Fabian Otte has done some fantastic research in this area around the idea of ‘Repetition without repetition’. Honestly, take a look, it’s brilliant and uses context to create the situation again and again but without the stationary ball and queues of players. 👇🏻

One question from outside of football academies is ‘what do the sessions look like?’, well these interviews had same great insights, and one of them was exactly that. On the left is the usual session structure, on the right are the extras that happen not in a team setting.

So I interviewed coaches that have worked with some of the best players in the world (while they were young academy players) what the sessions looked like, small sided games? Isolated practice? Both? None? And here’s the results 👇🏻

I started my PhD because the football world use isolated practice in different forms and scenarios at different ages, but the academic world was telling me this was ludicrous. Firstly to get an idea about the general view of isolated in football was and why coaches/players believe it’s important 👇🏻

Firstly, I’m about to tell you something controversial that if you are a twitter academic, it may shock you. Ecological dynamics says isolated practice is good to use!! Yep, you read that correctly, the message has been adapted/misinterpreted over time, but here is it 👇🏻