Elite Soccer Coaching Award Syllabus
THE ESCA is a cutting-edge course focused on developing your individual style and potential.
The course is designed to be a highly personal journey, where you will be encouraged to reflect on your context - your club’s vision, the soccer you want to play and the players in your team - refine your coaching approach to best meet your ambition, and create your personal coaching dossier.
ESCA reflects a new age of coaching, one that is less routine and prescriptive and more responsive, holistic and context-relevant.
Component 01 - Playing soccer
Workshop 01
Workshop overview
- Course structure, intentions & journey
- Learner commitments
- Beliefs about learning & soccer
- Playing soccer – scoring goals
Task 1 – Detail how your team (or a team you like) plays soccer
Workshop detail
In introducing the course and its scope, we encourage people to consider some ways to think about what’s important in soccer, on both a global and a local level, and embody it in player development and coaching.
The deeper we understand the players in our care, the more able we are to respond with them in ways that are human, holistic, supportive yet demanding. High challenge requires high support.
We express how all people who commit to the Elite Soccer Coaching Award will develop and progress their thinking and practice through and beyond the course before introducing some broad principles of soccer and exploring the important element of scoring goals.
Workshop 02
Workshop overview
- Review course structure
- Scoring goals & how your team plays
- Playing soccer – start attacks
- Playing soccer – stop attacks
Task 2 – Build your game model
Workshop detail
Through this 2nd workshop, we urge learners to combine what’s important in the ways their team plays football with the flexible & fluid principles of the Elite Soccer Coaching Award. This will enable people to further develop their own game model whilst considering contemporary approaches to stopping & starting attacks. These ideas have been successfully implemented across numerous footballing environments and support coaches to see the game through a dynamic, responsive and player focused lens.
By the completion of this component, learners will have developed and shared ideas on how their team plays & why.
Component 02 - Understanding player development
Workshop 03
Workshop overview
- Review of a game model
- Player development considerations
- Player profiling
Task 3 – Build profiles for three of your players (or three players you like)
Workshop detail
Component 02 of the course, which encapsulates Workshops 03 & 04, places a focus upon the important processes of player development.
We examine three critical factors in player development:
- Talent identification (how we think about player development)
- Player development programmes (the ways we align our support for players across time)
- Player progression (the importance of appropriate opportunity and the value of experiences in enabling players to fulfil aspirations)
Consequently, you will profile players and develop a programme of support that aligns with these critical factors whilst looking at case studies of player journeys.
Workshop 04
Workshop overview
- Review course structure
- Player profile review
- Connecting player profiles to game model
- Individual tactics (Beat opposition & defending)
Task 4 – Combine game model with player profiles
Workshop detail
Through workshop 4 learners will make the important connections between the ways their team plays and the players in their care. This will continue to enable coaches to ensure that playing & player development approaches align rather than the prevailing copy & paste approaches.
Component 03 - Coaching soccer & players
Workshop 05
Workshop overview
- A Curriculum for team & players
- Coaching practice design
Task 5 – Build your curriculum
Workshop detail
Component 3, comprising workshops 5 & 6, is centred on coaching. Our coaching will combine the way we would like our team to play with the deep understanding of our players already explored through the Elite Soccer Coaching Award. Hence, every session and interaction will blend player needs with our game model.
We will help you to achieve this by encouraging a value being placed on a constraints-led approach to coaching and developing both a curriculum and practice sessions that reflect this.
Workshop 06
Workshop overview
- Review course structure
- Practices – start attacks
- Practices – stop attacks
- Practices – score goals
Task 6 - Detail 3 sessions that reflect your curriculum
Workshop detail
The curriculum resource explored through workshop 5, will act as reference points for developing principles of practice design and an aligned library of coaching sessions that ensure we coach, in a connected way, both soccer & player development.
At the completion of this component, learners will be able to make strong connections between their game model, the player development programme and the coaching curriculum.
Component 04 - Connected Coaching
Workshop 07
Workshop overview
- Connect: Game Model – Profiles - Coaching
- Measuring game model
- Measuring player development
Task 7 - Identify what's important to measure
Workshop detail
Component four supports learners to build and develop processes to measure and assess how effectively their coaching is helping the team, club and, most importantly, the players achieve what is important.
We will look at some case studies of how different environments achieve this and support coaches with varying levels of resource to keep a close eye of whether what we are doing is what we said was important.
Workshop 08
Workshop overview
- Review course structure
- Review measuring team & players
- Measuring coaching
- Overview of our journey
- Final dossier submission
Task 8 - Bring together and submit final dossier
Workshop detail
Learners will conclude The Elite Soccer Coaching Award by drawing together all of the experiences and learning from the award into their final coaching dossier. This dossier will be a coherent & connected document supporting coaches to be industry ready or to further heighten your value within the industry.
This will be achieved through the ability to clearly and comprehensively express how your teams play, the ways you support player development, coach &, ultimately, reflect on and enhance your work such that you, uniquely, stand out.
Since 2010 Elite Soccer has given subscribers exclusive insight into the training ground practices of the world’s best coaches. Published in partnership with the League Managers Association we have unparalleled access to the leading lights in the English leagues, as well as a host of international managers.
Elite Soccer exclusively features sessions written by the coaches themselves. There are no observed sessions and no sessions “in the style of”, just first-hand advice delivered direct to you from the coach.
