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Do we need a performance director?

jts1882

jts1882

Dean Richards
We've all been impressed with the preparation and performance of the GB athletes for the Olympics. Much has been made of the work done by Dave Brailsford with cycling, both the Olympic team and the Sky road team, and Dave Tanner at Rowing. Its all about attention to detail in every possible facet: coaching, technical, medical, physiological, nutrition, training, recovery times, psychological, etc.

Football seems to have fallen behind. Individual aspects have been addressed variously by the French Academy (technical), the Milan lab (medical, etc), and people like Wenger brought the concept of nutrition to British football) etc, and some of this has been copied. Clubs have build more technical training centres, which now offer world class facilities, but there lacks someone directing the whole scheme. There has been more focus on technical development of the youth teams (someone ... unknown? ... posted some great stuff on this for Spurs in a defunct version of this site). However, there is no overall direction. I doubt any football manager would be happy being told that some players need more recovery between matches and training sessions or should be be rested because of an injury. The doctor is more likely to be ordered to inject painkillers.

We have all the talk of Director of Football, Sporting or Technical Directors but these seem more geared to scouting and youth development. They don't seem to integrate the medical, physiological, and psychological aspects. Clearly football has some differences, with a need for sustained conditioning rather than peaking for an event, but this seems a strong reason for a more scientific approach to the players health and fitness.
 
The following article on the preparation of the GB boxing team was the trigger for me starting this thread. The idea that an amateur version of the sport prepared better than the professional version made me think of football.



British boxing on the rise as Olympians Anthony Joshua, Luke Campbell and Nicola Adams have science on their side

When Anthony Joshua embarked on his long, lonely walk to the ring at London’s Excel Centre on Sunday afternoon, he knew nothing had been left to chance in his pursuit of super-heavyweight gold.

By Gareth A Davies, Boxing Correspondent
11:00PM BST 13 Aug 2012

A dedicated nutritionist had planned his every meal, every weight session had been carefully scheduled by a sports scientist.

Even his journey from the dressing room had been planned in advance, to ensure he was not spooked by the raucous atmosphere.

Joshua may have left it late to secure his victory against Roberto Cammarelle, but neither his triumph, nor the two other golds, one silver and one bronze which made up British boxing’s best Olympic medal haul in more than a century, had anything to do with luck.

As British sport attempts to maintain the extraordinary momentum generated by London 2012, boxing could serve as the ideal blueprint.

Team GB’s fighters may have been amateurs in name, but their set-up was, in many ways, more professional than many of their paid peers.

For the last three years, at the English Institute of Sport in Sheffield, 11 sports scientists have been working under performance director Rob McCracken, constructing individually-tailored plans for every fighter under their care.

No detail was considered too minute, with as much emphasis placed on helping fighters make the weight as refining their technique. Mark Ellison, a nutritionist who also works with Manchester United, created a programme to keep a boxer’s weight under control.

“Meals for boxers were specially prepared and delivered to boxers day in, day out,” he said. “It meant they didn’t have to ‘cut weight’ before bouts. There is nothing worse in a long tournament than fighters being weight-drained.

"At the EIS, weight targets are pinned to every door to hammer home the message and, when the boxers entered the Olympic Village, they were accompanied by a team nutritionist.

“There’s no more erection inducing sight than seeing a boxer from another country running in the morning with a sweat suit on, or heading to the sauna to try and cut weight, while our guys are off to have breakfast in the food hall,” McCracken added.

“It can’t but help to boost your confidence.”

Staff have been on call around the clock, helping fighters with every facet of their preparations – Ellison even advised Joshua on which juicer to buy – while Ian Gatt, a strength and conditioning coach, was responsible for maintaining their fitness.

“I made sure that they were icing their hands at the end of every session,” he said.

“Over the last two years we’ve reduced the injuries to their hands by about 15 per cent, and I created a strength and conditioning programme for their wrists, because I found that the strength in their wrists was about 50 per cent less than the general population.

"Hitting all the time creates micro damage and weaknesses through injury. We turned that around with a strength and conditioning programme.”

Catherine Stewart and Rob Gibson created a library of 13,000 clips on every possible opponent at every tournament and two sports psychologists, Peter Lindsay for the men and Chris Marshall with the women, were employed to ensure their fighters were in peak mental condition.

Crucially, that included preparing them for their march to ringside, when boxers can feel most psychologically threatened.

“Threat trumps everything – it can kick in and it’s a conscious thing,” Lindsay explained. “If you recognise it early, you can control it, and know that your heart rate going up is not you unravelling. Once you know that, it is quite empowering.

“We didn’t want anyone all the time thinking through being on the podium with a medal around their necks. We talk more about focusing on their strengths, sticking to their methods and turning the noise from the crowd down because it’s a carnival.”

With that kind of backing, it is no wonder fighters such as Joshua – and, indeed, his fellow gold medallists bantamweight Luke Campbell and women’s flyweight Nicola Adams – are cool on the idea of turning professional in the wake of their Olympic success.

Joshua is adamant it will take much more than money to tempt him to leave the amateur ranks.

“If fame comes I’m going to be OK with it, but I don’t want to be hyped up and made out to be something I’m not,” he said, perhaps mindful of the fate that befell Audley Harrison after he won Olympic gold in 2000.

“I look at great amateur champions like Vasyl Lomachenko [of Ukraine, the double Olympic champion] and how he just goes out there and gets the job done every time. That’s the kind of attitude I want to have.

“The way the amateur sport is going, with the World Series of Boxing and the new amateur professional boxing model, a way of staying in the Olympics but being paid to box within the set-up, it’s very interesting.

"It could be the kind of thing that stops boxers automatically turning professional.

“You look at the Cubans, the Ukrainians and the Chinese and all their double Olympic champions and imagine how great that would be. If Great Britain can keep this team together, we would be incredibly strong in Rio in four years’ time.

"We are in a position where we could dominate amateur boxing over the next four years.”

With such a backroom staff in place, there is every reason to suspect they will.
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I think the idea with the new training complex is to start adressing some of these things. Sherwood getting some of the administrative responsibility, but we'll probably get some people in.
 
i wonder if a performance director would recognise our need for a striker
 
Those are just job titles, not job description. They essentially deal with developing the technical skills and fitness of the players. They won't be dealing with medical, physiological and psychological aspects. In these other sports the Performance Director is responsible for coordinating everything.

I'm not criticising what they are doing. From what I have read on McDermott he has an excellent plan, but its limited in scope compared to the team GB cycling, rowing and boxing programmes. Its nothing close to being the same thing.
 
I saw an interview with Brailsford on BBC and he came across as very astute. Talked about making small gains in lots of areas and when asked if the strategy could transfer to football he said 'why not'. It seems a more business like approach and examines areas for competitive advantage. I think it could transfer to football, especially as the Team GB success would help players to have more faith in the methods but it would probably take a while to bed in and might require a big attitude shift in some players.

Although I feel most players and fans like to see a track record of success within the game, there is room for an objective view especially in the current age where the playing field for player recruitment is so uneven. Not sure someone like Brailsford or indeeed anyone is going to come up with a new tactic or formation but technical and physical and maybe even pyschological could be made with a performance director. It does seem AVB is representative of this type of strategy, given he has never played the game and appears to focus on performance data and analysis. Again the risk seems to be will he get enough time to implement his ideas.
 
Yes, it was the small gains in lots of areas. I think he said something about lots of 1% advantages adding up. I'm not sure if apocryphal, but Chris Boardman was quoted as saying the paint on a cycle weighs 60g and that red paint is slightly heavier than other colours.

One thing that interests me is recovery times. When we look back to the 60s, 70s and 80s, teams often only used a squad of around 16 players and it was common for players to play more than 60 games. Playing twice a week was not a problem. Now, it seems players can't play two games a week sustainably. I think this is because of the greater running and especially the greater amount of intensity sprinting (which has doubled in the last decade), which means a player can no longer recover in three days. The late season struggles of many teams support this.

One of the coaches from either cycling or rowing explained how they put the athletes through rigorous workout routines and then monitor their recovery, how the cardiovascular system and lactic acid levels recover in the hours after the training, and then how the physical output (e.g. muscle strength) recovers over a few days. Then they try and tailor the training regime for each athlete so they don't do heavy routines until recovered. Apparently some can put in heavy workouts every two days while others have to do it every three or four. Inbetween they can schedule more technical skills training.

Applying it to football you could determine which players can play and train hard regularly without a gradual decline over the season and which need longer recovery periods. Knowing the physiological characteristics of a player better, could be the basis of scientific rotation. The background people determine how much a player can play at maximum fitness and then the coach/manager can adjust his teams accordingly. If a star player's tests are beginning to show reduced performance, he can be rested before important games. In effect this is a more scientific version of what we did with Ledley, using physiological tests rather than a player's pain and knee swelling like a balloon as the criteria.
 
This is the job at the FA that Trevor Brooking has been failing at for years, Gareth Southgate is now doing something similiar.
 
jts1882 said:
Those are just job titles, not job description. They essentially deal with developing the technical skills and fitness of the players. They won't be dealing with medical, physiological and psychological aspects. In these other sports the Performance Director is responsible for coordinating everything.

I'm not criticising what they are doing. From what I have read on McDermott he has an excellent plan, but its limited in scope compared to the team GB cycling, rowing and boxing programmes. Its nothing close to being the same thing.
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Performance Director is just a job title, too. Without any description either way you can't say what they do and don't do. On the face of things it may just be another level of manager. Who does McDermott report to, for example? it isn't clear.

It's pretty clear that an Education/Welfare guy or Integration guy doesn't deal with technical skill and fitness. More likely is dealing with psychological or personal problems.

My point was that Spurs DO have a structure for the young players - it's not clear for the first team as it's not listed. The directors in cycling were appointed to drag the sport forward, football clubs are guarded about their backroom staff and the services offered by the club.
 
Danners9 said:
Performance Director is just a job title, too. Without any description either way you can't say what they do and don't do.
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That's why I gave the examples of Brailsford and Tanner, who have brought overall performance of their athletes to the top by attention to detail in all aspects, not just a few. The article I posted on the boxing is another example.

We have people dealing with some aspects, especially for skills development in young players, but no obvious structure in the scientific side. If you look at our history there are obvious problems. Late season slumps as players no longer perform at peak levels (see my post above on recovery), the prevarication about injuries and operations (e.g Huddlestone and Parker's recent operations), the outrage when Ramos removed chocolate muffins from the buffet table, etc.

The new training facility is promising. It has more medical facilities and could have the necessary physiological testing. But you need people who can run these departments and a structure where they are listened to. Its no good monitoring the players if the advice with long-term sustained performance in mind is ignored and a pain killing injection to get a player read to play is the short-term requirement.
 
Suddenly theres a flashy job title and calls for us to have one. Without doubt we have a performance director in some guise at the club, albeit under a different job title.

Also lets remember, Olympic athletes spend years training towards their individual events in build up to the Olympics, they aren't competing at the top level up to 3 times a week like football. The preparation for the athletes couldn't be more different
 
An interesting step from City:


Emirates Marketing Project to open the archive on player data and statistics


The champions plan to make available the data on every player in every team from every game in the league last season

It was once a tiny room on the first floor of Emirates Marketing Project's Carrington training complex, not much bigger than a broom cupboard, where successive managers from Kevin Keegan to Stuart Pearce and Sven-Goran Eriksson would field questions at close range from the press. Today, partition walls have been removed to house a team of full-time analysts who study every touch, turn and sprint made from the Premier League champions down to the club's Under-9s. The world of data analysis has developed rapidly within football in recent years but not, City believe, beyond the guarded confines of its clubs. That is about to change.

On Friday, City will make available through its website the data on every player in every team from every game in the Premier League last season. That may not enrapture the supporter fixated on Robin van Persie's next career move but to the growing number of researchers, sports scientists and bloggers seeking new ways to measure performance and value a player, it is potentially ground-breaking.

Until now, data that costs all Premier League clubs a small fortune each season has not been widely available or at least widely accessible to the public. Baseball may have been revolutionised by Bill James's sabermetric findings from the late 1970s onwards, leading to Michael Lewis's book Moneyball and now a film starring Brad Pitt, basketball coaches make tactical decisions based on live data during a game, but developments in football have largely remained in-house.

As Gavin Fleig, the head of performance analysis at City, explains: "Bill James kick-started the analytics revolution in baseball. That made a real difference and has become integrated in that sport. Somewhere in the world there is football's Bill James, who has all the skills and wants to use them but hasn't got the data. We want to help find that Bill James, not necessarily for Emirates Marketing Project but for the benefit of analytics in football. I don't want to be at another analytics conference in five years' time talking to people who would love to analyse the data but cannot develop their own concepts because all the data is not publicly available."

Fleig's full-time department alone consists of four analysts attached to City's first team and six analysts working at every level of the club from Under-21 to Under-9 level. As he conducts a tour of the office, one analyst is dissecting an Under-18s game against Chelsea. Ensuring the next generation is following the football strategy of the first team is paramount, although the data is not simply to educate young players on the way up. Far from it.

Two years ago Vincent Kompany instigated a weekly review of City's defensive performances with the analysis team. Every defender in Roberto Mancini's match-day squad now spends 15 minutes before a game assessing the unit's previous display, on topics such as transitions in play when City have lost the ball, their relationship with the midfield, defending crosses and recovering back into shape. "I would argue that having the best defensive record over the past two years is partly down to the reflection process the defenders have on a weekly basis win, lose or draw," says Fleig. "They have a constant guide as to how they are doing."

Work stations at Carrington allow every player to analyse a breakdown of their performance 24 hours after a game. Each has a specific development area to study too, if they wish. Gareth Barry, for example, can see how he protected his back four, his goal attempts and movement to receive the ball. A full-back such as Micah Richards can review one-on-one tussles, pass selection, positioning, recovery runs, supporting attacks, stopping crosses and running with the ball. There is also a personal highlights package they can play in the gym, a good way to boost confidence on the way back from injury.

Friday's data launch is for a global community, however. Fleig has worked closely with Opta, one of the first sports data organisations to embrace analytics in football and which has given City permission to make the database available, in an attempt to support the analytical community.

He explains: "The responsibility for developing analytics has always tended to fall on the clubs and that hasn't really changed, even as the community of statisticians, bloggers and students who are focusing on performances and analytics has grown dramatically. Bill James didn't work for a club. He was a statistician with a normal job outside of the sport but he was able to get hold of the data because it was made publicly available by the broadcasters and the league itself. There is a data culture in America. There isn't a data culture in the UK, although we are getting there.

"The whole reason for putting this data out there is to open the doors. The data has value, previously it has been kept in-house and behind guarded doors, but there is a recognition now that clubs need to help this space develop. There are a lot of people out there blogging and doing their own research and they can do a lot more with this data. I hope it will have a big impact on those who want to do research. It might just be the armchair enthusiast. If the worst it does is show a few people that there are different ways of looking at a player's performance, then great. If it helps universities and gets the blogging world talking and coming up with fantastic ways of modelling performance, that is what we want. We want to engage with them."

The data will be available from Friday by logging in to mcfc.co.uk/mcfcanalytics.
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Richie said:
Suddenly theres a flashy job title and calls for us to have one. Without doubt we have a performance director in some guise at the club, albeit under a different job title.

Also lets remember, Olympic athletes spend years training towards their individual events in build up to the Olympics, they aren't competing at the top level up to 3 times a week like football. The preparation for the athletes couldn't be more different
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Its not about job titles, its about what people actually do. The performance directors in cycling, rowing and boxing are responsible for making sure that every possible performance gain is achieved. It's about the attention to detail in myriad aspect, gaining an extra 1% in many places, that gives the overall advantage.

Of course, football is different. Clearly the advantages of footballers using a psychologist when running out of the tunnel are negligible, while in boxing the walk to the ring can give a significant psychological edge. A scientific approach would be geared specifically to the sport.

Your point about football being different in requiring top level performance up to three times a week instead of every four years is valid. I addressed that specifically in the post about recovery times. I don't think anyone can argue that we didn't run out of steam last season and that more rotation and resting of players would have helped at the end of the season. I'd prefer a better system that the play the first team until they drop, then stick someone else in, approach. It should be possible to monitor the players fitness (cardiovascular, muscle power, etc) and see when they need a rest. Not only would you have fitter players, but many injuries could be avoided as they often occur when a player is tired.

The article on the City analysts above gives a hint as to how a scientific approach can help individual players prepare and play better.
 
Note the City players only spend up to 15 minutes reviewing how they played!

I think that shows the lack of dedication compared to Olympians

Spurs players are more keen to go shopping and play X-Box

I am all for it but the laddish British culture is hard to break through, imagine David Bentley doing all this in a focused, mature way like the cyclists Hoy, Kenny etc
 
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