Thread by @MartinRafelt

A train of thought about classical coaching, modern coaching and future coaching: Oldschool coaching is mostly individual improvement in specific situations. Which is a logical approach, but it's ineffective because in football there are so many situations with so many options.

Newschool coaching massively decreased this sort of micro-management and focuses on the team-level. You want to control what situations appear and be best prepared to solve these together. Optimally, you'll prepare players individually for these SPECIFIC situations.

So instead of trying to solve many small problems, perhaps randomly chosen, you will solve the biggest problems and systematically choose the most important small ones.

Very intuitive and obvious that this is going to be more effective, especially on the short term.

In practice though, many modern coaches will be stuck with doing this one thing that they do: Put a well-organised hard-working team on the pitch.

Now, if the team IS already well-organised, the way to improve is...classical coaching? Improve everyone individually, step-by-step.

When you've learned that working on team-level is more effective though, you will default into keep doing THAT. You will try to become more detailed, more precise, more elaborate on this level.

From defining the positions to defining the movement to defining the actions etc.

In that moment, you lose one main advantage of what a strategical team-level-approach gives you: There are less things to deal with. You can actually train and prepare the important, relevant things very well. You don't get disturbed by a thousand other things.

All meticulous coaches know one thing: There is not enough time to work on every thing you would like to work on.

(There's so much stuff that can decide games that non-meticulous coaches even just escape into: actual coaching isn't even decisive to begin with.)

That means, it's very important to keep things compact and efficient in coaching. Particularly on team-level where this is well possible.

And then you want to have as much individual coaching (and training) as possible, as efficient as possible.

What I think the best coaches of the future will be like: They're able to transfer the team-level-informations extremely efficiently. A big chunk of ideas should be clear within DAYS.

And while fine-tuning that, they work diligently and efficiently with individual players.

Performance-oriented coaches (which youth coaches should not be) should probably be like: 40% team level and most relevant group tactics, 60% individual focus.

Development-oriented coaches: 10% team level, 90% individual focus with group tactical ideas.

Note: concrete group tactics are a good tool to increase performance. They are not necessarily improving a player though. In development-oriented coaching, the focus should be to find, to SEE group tactical options in the game (rather than a super consistent application of them).

Also note that this does not mean that it's great to give a team very little information. You don't want to decrease the amount of team-level-coaching by LACKING important information, but by transfering the information more quickly and efficiently.

A key thing with all of that is to understand what aspects of the game can be dealt with in a rather simple, explicit, "prescribed" way - the way some coaches would love to handle everything - and which things are naturally so dynamic and unpredictable that you need...

...an approach of flexible player-centric didactic. Many coaches want to "program" their players into doing the right thing, but in many situations, this will be either impossible or ineffective and you will need to trust the player's abilities to solve what's coming onto them.

Coaches, and especially youth coaches, need to figure out how to support players in developing and increasing these abilities as fast as possible. What things to consider, what to look at, how to interpret what you see, which are good options, which ones are bad? + Empowerment.

Conclusion: Coaches need to solve two things.

1. How to design and transfer team-level information as compact and efficient as possible?

2. How to structure individual coaching in a way that it becomes fast and effective instead of just awkwardly fragmented micro-management?

Here's a graphic from our Attacking-Play-seminars which can be very helpful to get an idea what you're actually doing as a coach and how that influences the whole process of the game. (Recordings available: ) spielverlagerung.com/2023/03/15/sv-…