The hidden art of strategic performance planning for major tournaments : World Cup 2018

Watching a major tournament as a fan for the first time since 2013 has made me realise just how much of a bubble I used to exist in when working for the England football team. The alchemy of creating opinion and “insight” from the scraps of information the media procure - the mention of a team video, the picture of the new recovery toy - is frankly staggering! On the inside, it's very different. We have all the information, all the detail and a clear understanding of why we are doing what we are doing. So what really happens behind the scenes in planning for a major competition like the Euros or the World Cup in 2018?

My role at the FA gave me responsibility for creating and delivering the strategies and plans to create success for England senior teams at World Cup’s and Euros. My career before then had given me some fantastic opportunities to learn and develop some proven ways of working. With Clive Woodward’s England team, I oversaw a lot of the work to plan our training camps and Test match weeks with a superb group of coaches and staff. During my work with Team GB for the London 2012 Olympic Games, I was fortunate to work alongside colleagues from Deloitte who helped me appreciate the power of programme management principles (if sympathetically applied) and how they could be used in sport. At tech incubator Blenheim Chalcot, I learnt how to be more agile with planning as well as the importance of recognising when to pivot to a new direction when the evidence supported it. These experiences gave me the confidence in a comprehensive set of principles and methods I could rely on as I joined the FA. 

World Cup 2014 : Schedules not strategies or plans.

When I began at the FA in February 2014, I was fortunate to get involved relatively quickly with Roy Hodgson’s team who were building up for the World Cup in Brazil. Any change I was able to make was pretty limited as a result of starting so close to the tournament, but the opportunity to observe what was in place and to experience a football World Cup was invaluable. What did I find? There was a team of highly committed and knowledgeable people working incredibly hard to deliver, but compared to my experiences in rugby and Olympic sport, there was a glaring lack of a common understanding about what mattered, a clear unifying purpose or strategies to align all of the effort into a purposeful and efficient plan. Things seemed to change all the time, ideas came in at the last minute, causing knock-on chaos. Communication and commercial teams felt excluded and often faced difficult conversations with sponsors as a result of not delivering because the schedule had changed. It felt stressful for those involved and in my view didn’t give the team the best chance of succeeding.

In the period between late 2014 and 2016, I made some initial progress on the planning for performance agenda, most successfully with Mark Sampson and the England Women’s senior team ahead of the World Cup in Canada. However, the majority of my time and energy was consumed with a large-scale restructure of the England team department. 

In the background, however, I’d consolidated my thinking into a series of frameworks and toolkits I felt could work when the opportunity presented itself with the England Men’s senior team, and this in turn would provide the impetus for cascading the approach to all England teams.

Time for Change : September 2016

The good relationship I’d developed with Gareth Southgate since I started at the FA meant that I transitioned quickly into a role with the senior team when he took over in September 2016. He was familiar with some of the methods I’d used and he also recognised that my 

strengths in strategy and planning complemented his strengths in other areas. This was clearly the opportunity to get the senior team back on track for the objective of winning in 2022 and for me to convert all of my previous experience into supporting that goal.

Whilst the autumn games in 2016 gave the opportunity for me to lead the planning of the International camps in more detail than ever before, Gareth’s confirmation as permanent manager in November created the real opportunity to do things properly, and to build a future strategy for the senior team, something we badly needed.

Building a Winning Strategy

Before planning starts, it's useful to know what you are planning for! At that point, the England team had no clear purpose, vision, targets or principles to work with. I had a clear idea about how we could build the programme for change and Gareth and Dan Ashworth gave me their full support when I pitched it to them.

From January to March 2017 I designed and led a series of workshops with a core group of staff including Gareth with others such as Rhys Long, Head of Analysis, Bryce Cavanagh, Head of Physical Performance, and the leads for culture, medical and team operations.

The goal was to create a first version of a strategy and plan for the England senior team, which we could present to the players at the first International camp in March. It was apparent from our experiences in the autumn that the players (never mind the staff!) hadn't really processed the Euro 2016 defeats and would benefit from the confidence that a clear sense of direction could give them. 

Our workshops varied in their areas of focus, and in the initial stages, I felt it was important to create a clear understanding of where we were starting from. This involved an evaluation of our competitors; their unique strengths and advantages, their mindset as well as any areas of weakness. I also wanted to make the concept of competition more personal. You can see on the walls in the picture above, photographs of staff from other teams - managers, coaches, analysts etc. When it came down to it, we were competing as much with these individuals in our roles, as we were with the intangible concept of another nation’s team. 

In other sessions I asked us to focus on where we thought the game might be going in 2, 4, 8 years time and what trends we might see that we needed to take account of and be ahead of. As an example, it was already clear set-plays were an important area, and only likely to become more so. 

A crucial aspect of strategy in sport, often overlooked, is the importance of making clear decisions about what matters most. Marginal gains are all very fine, but unless you have the discipline and humility to address opportunities or deficiencies in the fundamentals which truly drive performance, focusing on 1%ers can cause a team to miss big opportunities, or devote too much resource to activities which add little value.

One of my go-to activities in strategy sessions uses a limited physical resource - poker chips! - to create a visual indication of the group's view of our priorities. The exercise of having to commit your limited number of chips to activities brings prioritisation to life, but even more powerful are the discussions and negotiations it provokes. In my experience, if the environment created is supportive, this is where the true advantage of a diverse, multi-disciplinary team comes into its own. When there is a genuine openness to listen to and properly consider different ideas and perspectives, a team can genuinely translate thought into new and bigger opportunities. 

Throughout this work, I continued to bring discussions back to the elements we could control, and where, through creative thinking and planning, we could make a transformational difference to the performance gap which existed. 

My role was to encourage openness and creativity, to challenge crooked thinking, to input my own multi-sport experience, and drive the process forwards. Over the years I’ve developed my confidence and skills in leading multi-disciplinary groups and it’s certainly helpful to be able to draw upon some knowledge of every function, from coaching to culture, in order to support and challenge appropriately. Sport brings together a varied mix of people, personalities and experiences. Coaching can often be characterised as a creative art, whereas analytics is the opposite. The job of melding these and the myriad of other sometimes opposing views of the world into a coherent, synergistic whole can be tricky. There were times where arguments needed to be had and heard in order to find a better solution. Sometimes I was a peacemaker, other-times a fire-starter but I believed strongly that a healthy and respectful level of conflict would ensure much better outputs.

Player and staff engagement

With a couple of weeks to spare, we’d created a good first version of our strategy - a clear future vision for the team, initial milestone tournament targets over 8 years, (including Euro 2020), and a very high level plan. The next important step was to engage the wider group of staff supporting the team - I felt it was crucial that they had an opportunity to contribute to what we’d started. Taking a day out of everyone’s diary to do this sort of work can feel like a difficult equation to balance at times but the benefits of wider feedback to refine our approach and the feeling of ownership it gave them was worth every second.

At the March camp in 2017, we launched the strategy to the players under the banner of “Time for Change”. There was an obvious change in Gareth taking over the manager role permanently, and we also wanted to convey clearly that we wanted the future to look different for the England team. Gareth and I worked closely to create the narrative for the camp, which included a short film I’d written the script for to emotionalise some key messages. That the past need not define us, that there were reasons and a reality to where we were (ranked 13th), and that we could choose to make the future our own if we were prepared to think and work differently. This context provided the platform to walk players through the strategy, and to start to build their confidence that this time, it would be different. 

Projects to deliver strategy

More than 12 months out from the 2018 World Cup, there was a huge amount of work to cover. In between leading the planning for our June camp, including delivering an iconic event with the Royal Marines, I needed to keep up the momentum on the next stages of the World Cup plan. A strategy is nothing if it isn't delivered, and although we had the concepts outlined, we needed to get into some more formal project work.

Whilst working for Team GB in delivering the London 2012 Olympic Games, I had been introduced to the principles of programme management as a result of some excellent support from Deloitte. On the face of it, programme management and elite sport are difficult bedfellows. With the requisite level of understanding of the people and context, it can be a powerful way to keep delivery focused and on track. I’d introduced programme management as part of the bigger change programme at the FA in 2015, and as a result we had some tools and people in place to help.

For the senior team plan for Russia 2018 , I decided to use a “light” version of project management which was appropriate to the needs of the group and the skills and preferences of those involved. We ended up defining almost 40 unique projects for the team covering everything from penalty shootouts, set plays and an opposition analysis hub to player gifts supporting our identity and the transformation of the base camp hotel. For each project, there was a clear definition of what would be delivered, a timescale, budget, an owner, and importantly, details of the team who would deliver it.

As an example, the penalty shoot-out project was largely driven by Rhys Long as Head of Analysis and Insight, even though Gareth was ultimately responsible. Rhys’ team did all the hard yards on the background analysis of rules, successful tactics, techniques, roles of staff and a myriad of other areas which ultimately created a plan for coaching and delivery. Like all projects, the owner reported back on progress every 2 weeks which allowed us to make sure we were on track to deliver, after all, the World Cup wouldn't move!

Performance Planning - “Make every day a masterpiece”

The final piece of the jigsaw was to create the detailed tournament plan to enable all of the previous work to come together when it mattered. I see planning as a competitive advantage. It is an opportunity to make the best use of your available resources in pursuit of your goal, and perhaps even more importantly, it helps you to deliver under pressure.

Whether in a club environment, or in the latter stages of a World Cup, there are an avalanche of decisions to make and a mass of conflicting demands.

Sponsor commitments, press conferences, school visits compete for space with training, recovery, nutrition, personal development, culture, sleep and down time. Each of those areas has its own complex requirements depending upon the stage of the season, the week, and the stage of the tournament. How will the players be feeling at this stage? Do we need a change of scene, a change of food set up? How tired will the analysts be after a late kick off? What might we lose if we delayed the debrief planning until the following day? You can of course make these decisions in the moment, and planning certainly doesn't remove all the real-time decisions - but it does make them easier. The more investment you make upfront, in calmly and unemotionally talking about and planning for those demands in advance, the better your decisions are under pressure. It’s not about blindly sticking to the plan regardless, but it is about having real detail to fall back on when you might start to doubt.

This is where a plan differs from a schedule. A schedule has things on it - generally, the times of training, meals, travel etc. A plan has things in it - the rationale, the details of how, the content of the session and why, it creates understanding.

I had created a planning toolkit - a process and electronic means of creating content - the previous year and had started to roll it out across key teams. It brought together elements of different approaches I had developed for England Rugby, The British & Irish Lions and Team GB. The toolkit covered the entire period from the very first preparation camp on the 20th May through to landing back in England on, we hoped, the 15th July. It covered all possible scenarios of finishing first, second or third in our group and the permutations after that. The toolkit visualised each week on a page with every session, event, time off, travel etc shown, and then linked to a daily view which provided more detail. Deeper still, each of the events or sessions had a document linked to it enabling us to see what was being delivered and why.

Performance planning can be a brutal and exhausting process, especially at international level where you are planning so far ahead. Every 3-4 weeks throughout the period from April 2017 to May 2018 I ran planning sessions to develop the detail. 

I had now brought in the commercial, media and digital teams to the process ; our communications plan was a core element of the performance strategy. The sessions could be long and tedious at times but little by little, the plan came together, the details got clearer, the decisions became fewer. 

The goal was to create something we could truly trust when it mattered, that we could rely on and not second guess. Even by the end it wasn't perfect - plans normally never are - but it was much better than we’d ever had before and from my perspective, I felt we were really well prepared. Part of a message in a pre-tournament card from Gareth read :

“Well, here we go! I hated your planning documents, now I can’t live without them!”

We used and referred to the plan every day of the tournament - in daily management meetings reviewing the day gone and looking to the days ahead. In over 67 days of activity, we changed only 1 session. Most of the projects delivered spectacularly - the obvious ones like penalty shoot-outs gaining the headlines, but less public one’s like the huge effort on opposition analysis and the private gift to commemorate players legacy numbers as well. 

After the World Cup, our strategy and plan gave us an excellent basis for a thorough debrief before starting the next phase of strategic planning. In late 2018, after the autumn series of games, I started the process again from a new level of understanding. This time the focus was on Euro 2020 and the World Cup in Qatar. The strategy evolved and we started the process of planning in detail for the Euros with greater confidence. When I left the FA in December 2019 I handed over strategic planning to others to continue. The planning toolkit was a core part of the England DNA, endorsed by its successful use at World Cup 2018, and evolved through its use by more England teams. I can’t say whether the process has progressed or regressed since I left, but I know it was a key part of our over-achievement in 2018.