Thread by @IJaSport

Is the way we think about football and the methods we train football fundamentally wrong?

Neuroscience suggests so.

It starts with debunking the belief that we are in control of all of our decisions, once we accept this we can approach football differently 🧵👇

We go about our daily lives under the impression that we are completely aware of all our actions and decisions.

We are evolved rational creatures who make conscious decisions about how to best live our lives.

Naturally, we take this idea to football.

Players are capable of consciously making decisions to achieve the best outcomes.

Boom! Let's develop good decision-makers.

✅ Scan the environment
✅ Decide on the best course of action
✅ Execute like a champ
✅ Goals galore

Complete Footballer.

This is simple enough.

Give them an environment where they have to THINK. Thinking seems to be key. If our players are better thinkers, they'll probably make better decisions and I've done my job.

At the end of the day, they're in control of every decision...

Right?

Wrong.

Let's look at research conducted on baseball hitters.

It takes the ball 400 milliseconds to get to the batter. After all is said and done, a batter has 150 milliseconds to 'decide' how to hit the ball.

It's impossible to have a conscious thought and execute in that time.

This means 'thinking' is too slow for sports.

Sports with space/time principles, including football, players have milliseconds to react to stimuli and therefore to be successful cannot 'think'.

If players don't 'think', how do they know what to do?

The answer is prediction.

Neuroscience tells us that the brain is a prediction machine.

From the moment we are born, we attempt to predict what's going to happen next based on stimuli we gather from our environment.

And all of this happens without ever being aware of it.

This is why we are able to finish each other's ...

or why we can pick up on cues about how someone is feeling within seconds of walking into a room

or why we release saliva at the thought of food

Sometimes our predictions are right.

And sometimes our predictions get really, really good at predicting certain things, like in the case of baseball hitters.

This is exactly what happens in football.

Players get really good at predicting how to act in game situations.

A great example of this is Cristiano Ronaldo finishing crosses in the dark.

Watch this but think about Cristiano's brain being a prediction machine 👇

Let's recap 😮‍💨

Football requires actions that don't leave any time for thinking and conscious decision-making, so we need 'hack' the predictive power of our brains.

❌ Instead of Stimuli ➡️ Thinking ➡️ Response

✅ We use Stimuli ➡️ Response ➡️ Understanding

Examples 👇

We need to provide game situations with as many variables that the match provides (within the constraints of training session) that they can get really good at predicting how to act.

Rondos and positional games are good but...

but they limited in this sense. A lesser known part of Barça's methodology are Preferential Simulation Situations, recreation of moments of the game.

Simply put, this is recreating moments of the game to allow players to experience the exact thing they might see in a match.

Next, Players DO the thing.

This means players don't need to be able to tell everything that you know as a coach, they just need to be able to do it.

Consider this quote by @CoachBentley ⬇️

"Players do as much as possible, understand as much as necessary"

What Chris is saying is if a player plays really well, they don't need to be able to tell exactly how they do what they do, what they are thinking, what they are looking at, etc.

“The best decisions aren’t made with your mind, but with your instinct.”- Leo Messi

Lastly, you must trigger understanding, not thinking.

What this means when you interact with a player, your interactions must evoke reflection in the player about something they just experience to better help them understand what just happened.

Triggering this reflection process is different than triggering unnecessary thinking. Players don't necessarily need to know what you know as a coach.

Ask yourself this: Is what I'm about to tell them necessary for them PLAY better?

One last thing.

Football is an action sport that is hindered by conscious thinking, thus makes it very different than traditional education (eg. classroom environment).

For this reason, be wary of methodologies or approaches which originate from classroom environments.

To summarize in order to 'hack' the predictive power of the brain we can do three things.

• Provide game situations with as many variables as the match
• Realize they are players, not coaches. They PLAY.
• Trigger understanding, not thinking

This approach has been transformational for me as a coach.

I now craft training sessions to condition player's actions through their predictive powers to better perform in the game.

By triggering their understanding of what they are doing well, I empower them to self-regulate.

Viewing football through this lens has many implications. I have discussed some of those implications in this thread but that's just the beginning.

There are many more I will discuss in the future but I am happy to answer any questions in the meantime.

If you feel your network would benefit from the ideas in this thread, share it 👇

https://mobile.twitter.com/IJaSport/status/1484518663247958018