Founder of TOVO Institute, Todd Beane examines how young players soccer brains process and filter information via ‘RAS’. Are you focused on the right stuff? Believe me I know very little about the brain so if you have a P.H.D. in brainy stuff just humor me. Apparently, we all have a RAS (Reticular Activating System), which is a part of the brain that filters information collected from our senses. Actually most data to which we are exposed does not make it through this filter, which is…
player development
PDP Contributor, TEDx Speaker & Founder of Raising Excellence, Reed Maltbie delivers 10 practical steps on coach communication in the age of millennials who have grown up on social media. “One could change the world with 140 Characters”. February 8th, 2007 at approximately 6:57PM PST, Jack Dorsey “tweeted” this now famous line. At the time, Twitter was still in its nascent stages as a company. These words changed Twitter forever. Even in 2007 they wielded a powerful effect on the company and its small group of rabid…
Player Development Project Assistant Editor, Jon Hoggard asks when is creativity deemed disrespectful? Do coaches have double standards or show bias depending on who is brave enough to take the risks that lead to some of the great moments in football. Twitter went mad. Opinions flew all over social media. Newspaper columns were written, some praising, some condemning. Readers commented back and forth, for and against. What caused the furore? Barcelona scored a penalty in a run-of-the-mill 6–1 win against Celta Vigo. It was the…
PDP Technical Advisor, Dan Wright provides an in depth analysis of how Leicester City have managed to defy the statistics and implement a ruthlessly efficient counter attacking game plan which sees them sitting on top of the Premier League table heading into Spring, 2016. Leicester City have shown during the 2015/16 season there is more than one way to win a football match. Throughout the top European leagues the teams with superior possession dominate the standings, all except the Premier League. In fact, Leicester are ranked poorly…
Player Development Project Magazine Editor, Dave Wright was fortunate enough go behind the scenes at Liverpool FC Academy with U21 Manager Mick Beale. Following on from our 2015 interview, Dave gets Mick’s views on developing better people and watches the U21’s train prior to their match against Middlesborough. On a gloomy day in the North West, I arrive at the Liverpool Academy with fellow coach and friend, Dan Wright to meet with U21 Manager, Mick Beale – a man who was featured in Issue 7…
Todd Beane has been a contributor to The Player Development Project since our inception. A Co-Founder of Cruyff Football and the Cruyff Institute, Todd has a passion for positive player development. We caught up with him to ask about his latest venture, TOVO International and what his philosophy involves. Todd, you’ve got an obvious passion for player development. What has inspired you to create the TOVO training program? My ambition reaches far beyond the development of talented athletes. I want to nurture capable leaders who…
Pressure. What is it and where does it come from? Former professional golfer and President of New Edge Performance, John Haime examines this challenging concept, investigating how you can harness the power of pressure and turn it into a positive. Does pressure in soccer really exist? Well, according to some researchers and experts, it really doesn’t. It’s all dreamed up by you to make it difficult for you to perform when it counts. According to a noted study (Beilock 2010) people create pressure for…
The sporting dilemma. Nick Levett, Talent Identification Manager at The FA, discusses the moral questions that sport can throw up. Whether it’s within or outside of the rules of the code, when does winning become the focus and should it be at all costs? The Moral Mankad Maze… It was one of those things that occurs occasionally in the world of sport that I love observing from a variety of different perspectives. The way people share their views from polarised positions, taking into account a whole host…
Zlatan Ibrahimovich is one of the great characters and creative players of modern football. PDP Lead Researcher, James Vaughan examines some of the reasons why. Watch this… Zlatan is the best example of affordances in action. Ibrahimovic sees and plays passes that very few players can because he sees the opportunity to move in ways that most people can’t. This allows Zlatan to make passes and score goals that no one else can. He is one of the most unpredictable, innovative and therefore creative players of…
Emerson Hyndman currently plays for Championship club Fulham FC. Having come through their academy to feature regularly in the first team, as well as representing his native USA at the FIFA U20 World Cup in New Zealand, the Player Development Project were keen to understand more about the development of a player described by his club as ‘a chief midfield orchestrator’. The name Hyndman is one that attracts a fair bit of attention in US Soccer. Schellas Hyndman coached FC Dallas for 5 years…
Steve Lawrence is a consultant to Cruyff Football and Ajax in the Netherlands. With a Masters in International Sports Management, Steve founded the Football Analytics Lab and is at the forefront of research into the topic of Relative Age Effects. In this article, Steve explains how the Relative Age Effect works and discusses the impact of this phenomenon. Relative Age Effects have become a well known, if slightly puzzling, phenomenon in youth football where players with birthdates at the beginning of the season have a huge…
Talent: a dangerous word for players and a highly infectious idea for coaches. This article by PDP Lead Researcher, James Vaughan explores the possibility that talent is a ‘meme’. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term meme to explain an infectious idea that spreads from person to person: the cultural equivalent of a gene. Incorporating theories from motor learning and psychology, this article discusses talent as a meme and highlights its potential influence as a socio-cultural constraint – inhibiting the development of skill and creativity….
Founder of TOVO Institute & regular Player Development Project Contributor, Todd Beane discusses whether the Coerver Coaching model is in fact flawed. In this challenging post, Todd questions the value of skill acquisition in isolation versus the benefits of game-based learning in the dynamic environment of football by asking ‘did Wiel Coerver get it right?’ This blog may upset a lot of people in soccer. Having said that, this article may also resonate with some of you soccer coaches out there that somewhere deep in…
With the help of Pro Soccer Development, Dave Wright examines whether Jamie Vardy is a football anomaly or personification of a problem in elite player development. Unless you’ve been living in total football isolation, away from the world of social media and headline news, it’s fair to say that by now, we know that Jamie Vardy has experienced a meteoric rise over the last eight years. This has culminated in seeing him go from striker for the Stocksbridge Park Steels (in the eighth tier of English Football) to the…
PDP Editor Dave Wright provides his report from the 2015 Norwegian Coaching Convention in Oslo. Known as the Cupfinalseminaret, this is one of the largest gathering of coaches in Europe and an event PDP highly recommends. After a day of presentations from the likes of Bob Bradley, Flemming Berg & Chris Sulley, a night of conversation around all things football and player development continued in the bar of the Ullevaal Stadium in Oslo on Thursday. The one thing that was common in all of the…
Dan Senda is an example of someone who has always worked exceptionally hard for everything he has achieved. Desire and determination are traits that you easily identify in the man when you spend time with him. He hasn’t played in a World Cup, and he hasn’t played in the Champions League, but he personifies classic British hard-graft. What Dan Senda has done in his time in football is persist, and with that he’s managed to achieve what few do – sustain a long career as…
The road to success in football is not always straightforward. Now regarded a Premier League stalwart, West Bromwich Albion were a club once derided as the ‘Boing Boing Baggies’ for their succession of relegations and promotions in the early 2000s. Now a stable club under the guidance of Tony Pulis, the club’s academy are producing some exciting young footballers. PDP Editor, Dave Wright spoke to Jimmy Shan, the Under-21 coach at The Hawthorns, about his career and got an insider’s look at the WBA Academy….
A recent study showed that more than one third of athletes were expatriates in 20141, with almost half of all active professional footballers having experienced international migration during their football career. But mentioning cultural intelligence and professional football players in the same sentence often raises eyebrows or question marks. Why should football players have to worry about working across different cultures? If we take a closer look at the industry, it becomes clear that players are finding themselves in multicultural teams, surrounded by diverse staff,…