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Young players with potential: Developing the elite
With a combined 24 years spent with the English FA, alongside decades of experience in professional academies, Ben Bartlett and John Allpress are no strangers to developing and nurturing players that go on to compete at the highest level of the game. On a recent Elite Soccer webinar, Fundamentals of elite player development, they shared their thoughts on the role of the coach in developing the elite
Elite: what does it mean in a soccer context?
Ben Bartlett: Elite is a word that’s often banded around too readily and attributed to an environment: ‘this is an elite club’, or a human being: ‘this is an elite person’.
The majority of people that work in coaching work with young players, players that haven’t necessarily achieved professional contracts yet, and often the assumption is that being elite is about being professional.
What I’ve tended to try to do across a range of different jobs is to try to consider elite behaviours. That’s to say behaviours that will contribute towards you having a greater likelihood of being successful in whatever domain.
From a footballing perspective, there are some general behaviours that are going to give you the greatest likelihood of being successful. Just turning up and working hard is sometimes understated, as is the idea of being consistent. It isn’t an easy thing to be consistent every single day.
As the industry changes and grows, it’s becoming more important to be exciting and to be able to connect to lots of different people such that you can be socially accepted to be valued in the environment.
Then there are elite behaviours defined within any specific environment. For example, the elite behaviours at Arsenal might be different from the elite behaviours required at West Ham, because the specifics in any given environment might need to be different to support people to succeed.
John Allpress: An elite environment is one that understands elite players and their needs and then leads accordingly. To say young players are elite is a stretch, but coaches can look for the traits and behaviours that elite players have, then promote them in their environments.
Elite players want to win, they have a drive to win, but they also crave mastery. They want to practise, they want to learn, they want to go home better players. It’s up to us as their coaches to promote that.
It’s also up to us to develop them as people off the pitch as well as on it. They’ve got to be good people. If you reduce it to just two words, it’s humility and confidence. I think a potentially elite player is humble, knowing that they’re not there yet, but they also have confidence enough in themselves to take on all the challenges they need to take on if they’re going to give themselves a fighting chance of getting a job.
Ultimately it comes down to the culture that clubs have and whether promote elite traits and behaviours.
CURRICULUM and learning objectives
BB: Ideally a curriculum should be held together by big picture beliefs, for example: ‘we intend to dominate possession and try to win the ball back quickly’, whilst also responding to the needs of individual players.
What we do in any given period or on any given week needs to be a considered, balanced response to how the team and players are getting on, which requires a sound process of reflection.
JA: Every player should have a curriculum in their own right. These sit within a very dynamic, flexible and adaptable program. Because that’s what kids are: they adapt and they change regularly. Try to instil the skill of reviewing their own performance in the players so they can ask questions about what went well and what needs to change.
Early specialisation: consistent positions and shapes, or varied experiences?
BB: It probably depends on what’s important at your club. Many of the top players now can be considered as ‘hybrids’; less definable by a ‘position’ or a number on a shirt, more by skills and qualities. Think Bellingham, Foden, Saka, Musiala.
This is perhaps more likely to be evident if we, within reason, provide a varied set of experiences in terms of positions, systems of plays and tactics. Further, often young players find opportunity in a senior setting if they are adaptable (can come on as a sub in a range of positions and be able to do a range of different things) as managers may see them as more flexible.
JA: Ask yourself the following three questions: Who are the players? What do they need? How can we help? For some players, sticking to their position and unit is useful. Other players may need to change positions depending on their needs. If you’ve got full-backs or centre-backs that need to quicken up their feet or need to become technically more proficient, for example, then they might spend some time in midfield.
It shouldn’t be a case of ‘we stick to this rigidly’, because that doesn’t work for some of the players. Playing in one position might work for some while playing in a variety of positions might work for others.
In terms of shape, that should depend on the players you’ve got in the group, rather than committing to a system. If you’ve got two really good forwards who need time on the pitch, for example, you might have to change your way of playing a little bit in order to accommodate them.
Alignment from the academy to the first team
BB: In my experiences in academies, we had big picture principles; not specific systems of players or player profiles.
This meant that our coaching approach was a response to each individual player and the team they played in, rather than a top-down process led by a first team manager. The closer the player got to the first team, the closer our coaching approach came to what the player needed to get in, and then stay in, the team.
This approach supported players to learn a variety of skills that would have value to whoever was manager and enabled players to have significant transfer value to other clubs.
JA: The amount of time a manager spends in most football clubs is around about 22 months. So build a footballer in an academy, don’t try to think of how the first team play. Develop players technically, tactically, physically and socially, in the spirit of the game, to help them become selectable for any manager.
If a manager comes in and says: ‘can you do this for me?’ the player needs to be able to say ‘yes’. Build footballers, not teams.
With every new manager a different game model may come. But if you’re a footballer and you’re good technically and physically and you can make good decisions, then you’ve got a fighting chance, no matter what system the manager plays.
Related Files
Communicating with players
BB: Connection is important. The more we come to understand the nature of the players in our group and respect their differences (from us and from others), the more likely it is that they will feel as if we care and are able to support them.
If we can underpin that with sound knowledge of the game, the more likely we are to retain their trust, respect and confidence.
JA: Communication style is affected by the choices we have learned to make by watching other people, by trial and error, by success and failure, by parental and social experiences, and a variety of life experiences.
You’ve got to use all of that and look at the individual and personal needs of the player you’re dealing with.
Managing entitlement in players with potential
BB: In some cases, players have or are perceived to have a sense of entitlement because they believe that they have greater value to the environment than the environment does to them. As difficult as it may be, there are times when you embrace their entitlement because you know that their value to the club is greater than your need to want to try and change their entitlement.
There are a couple of caveats to that. There are times when someone’s entitlement or someone’s behaviour can significantly negatively impact upon the environment. Collectively, we’ve got to understand whether or not our culture is, broadly speaking, strong enough to manage that entitlement – whether there are enough people, staff or players, that can pull that person more towards the group – or whether or not we continue to enable them to exist as an outlier, knowing that the group is strong enough such that it can manage having a player or a person of that nature without it too negatively impacting upon the environment.
All of those things are going to depend upon the environment. If you’ve got five players that are actively entitled and they’re the worst of the five, you might be able to make some decisions about not including that person in the environment anymore.
The other bit that I try to focus my attention on is the fact that I try not to give up on anybody. I try to be open-minded enough to recognise that just because someone’s exhibiting behaviours today that we might not like or might not actually even be helping the environment, it’s not necessarily who they are.
Consistent support in terms of behaviour within a professional football environment can, over time, enable people to feel so inherently valued by either the environment or a specific coach that maybe some of that exposes the fact the entitled behaviour is actually not really who they are. It’s just how they’re acting out because of the way that they feel at any moment in time.
JA: Young players, especially adolescents, are a work in progress. They’re at different stages of development in lots of areas. Even if they’re playing in the first team, they’re still young people.
As long as they’re not toxic to the group, or the group can’t handle them, it’s important to allow them to develop as much as you can. As a coach you’re constantly surprised by people who are now having really good careers and constantly surprised by people that have disappeared that you thought had the potential to be really good players.
Futureproofing young players
BB: To support players to be able to continue to exist in the game as it continues to evolve, we need greater flexibility in teams, with and without the ball. This likely requires a wide set of skills and experiences.
We must place less focus on ‘a right way’ to play or to support development, rather focusing more on ways that align with particular environments.
We should also look to have younger teams and squads in the professional game.
JA: We need to understand the greater physical demands of the top leagues. The game is quicker than it’s ever been – both technically and physically. The ways that teams attack, technical elements and traditional positions continue to change and evolve. It’s all about quicker decisions and moving the ball faster.
Elite coaches: how to learn and develop outside of formal education
JA: Find out how people learn, find out how kids learn, and then go into the importance of practice. That for me is the most important thing to look at: the importance of deliberate, focused practice. Then try to work out how you’re going to weave that into your work.
BB: There’s no richer learning environment than the environment in which you coach. The more we can get a strong connection between coach’s development and the development of players, the more likely it is that the resources that a coach draws on, falls upon or becomes interested in are a direct response to the human beings that are in their care at a moment in time.
One of the things that I’ve tried to do and continue to try to do, and certainly encourage coaches to do, is to, in the broadest sense, profile the people in their care. I don’t mean profile in terms of ‘this person’s an eight, this person’s a six’, but generally come to understand them as a human being.
The more that you try to come to understand each of your players, the more likely you are to recognise that there will be general shortages in your knowledge about certain things, or there are specific things that you know, if you pursue that piece of information, it will help you to help a certain player. If you pursue a certain intervention or interaction with someone, it will help you to support them. Then, as a consequence, the more broadly you can develop your skill in response to people, the more likely you are to be able to genuinely have the opportunity to practise that information.
The risk is you can read something, learn something or think something’s important, but if you don’t genuinely get the opportunity to practise working at it, there’s a decent chance you’re not going to add it to or develop it within your coaching armoury.
So, broadly speaking, profile your people and then find means of generating information that’s going to support you to respond with and help those individual players. And know that some of those skills become broad, which means when the age group changes, when the group of players changes, when the club changes, you should still fall on this broad but also deep personal resource that helps you to deal with any situation as it arises.
about
Ben Bartlett
Ben Bartlett is a UEFA Pro Licence coach currently leading the delivery of the Pro License with US Soccer.
He spent 12 years in coach development with the English FA and was head of women’s football at Chelsea, head of coaching at Fulham and director of methodology at Houston Dynamo.
He is the author of two coaching books: Constraining Football and Connected Coaching.
Ben serves as the technical director of the Elite Soccer Coaching Award.
John Allpress
John Allpress is a UEFA A Licence coach who spent 12 years at the FA where he was national young player development coach.
He was part of a team of three that designed the FA Youth Award and the FA Youth Coaches course.
He served as assistant head of academy player and coach development at Tottenham Hotspur and spent time at Charlton and Fulham.
He authored The Long Audition: How to become a professional footballer, a guide for players looking to make a career in the game.
John is player and coach developer for the Elite Soccer Coaching Award.
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