Providing solutions or causing more confusion - What do your players think?

The moment arrives where you as a coach or a manager, have to provide some sort of information for your players. This could be during the training week, before the game takes place in the dressing room or at half time. Every team will have these talks (or we can call them meetings), to deliver, discuss and feedback on certain events. The amount (quantity) of information (quality) you provide your players with, will be determined by their age and the competition (non/competitive) you participate in.

At any level of football though, there has to be some sort of coaching that the players must comprehend. When they step on to the pitch, it’s then their moment to attempt to apply what you’ve previously suggested.?

To make this process more digestible to understand, there are 3 tools you could use in order to prepare, analyse and feedback, in order to give more concise information.

Reflecting FOR action - This is before the event and what your hypothesis is. Before the process of downloading information into the players brains starts, you have to consider ‘what’ you want to coach and ‘how’ you will do it. The brain bias, ‘lag effect’ could be extremely useful here, in preparing the amount of information you’re considering.?

Reflecting IN action - This takes place during the event and could be when you’re on the touchline during the game. The stimuli being received by your brain will vary, although there could be some ‘constant’ familiarities that you see. Your team formation could be one, so would something that is a ‘constant’ provoke your brain in the same way then something random?

Reflecting ON action - This takes place after the event and will give you the opportunity to ‘feedback’ and ‘evaluate’ with your players.?

All of the above will take place during a game, albeit it may happen unconsciously and you don’t really ‘realise’. With the 3 reflection processes it’s vital to understand that the emotions you encounter throughout the event, may impact your thinking, thus making deciding even more challenging. What message you deliver and how you do it, could assist the team in taking victory, or hindering this process and suffering a loss.?

Structuring your meetings is important to ensure you get the best out of them and don’t waste any valuable time. Some areas to consider while preparing, could be;

Intentions - Before any meeting, you should have an idea of what the outcomes you wish to achieve are. If these aren’t clear, then you’re simply guiding your players into a random direction with no clear end goal.?Having the outcomes set, will allow you to describe and explain during this process, as well as considering your solutions and method of delivery.

Structure - The structure of information should be planned, with careful considerations given on how much you’ll provide, within a certain situation. If you’re working with under 7 players, this will differ to that of senior players. Why? The attention span of a child and adult is obviously huge and the information (verbal/non-verbal) that you provide, could easily overload that respective player’ brain. The consequence of this, is that the unconscious brain will go to ‘sleep’ and the players are consciously questioning what you’re saying.?When planning what you wish to say, maybe consider how much of this is relevant, needed and how many words you use to get the message across. Keep it simple!

Language - It’s half time and your team is losing 2-0. While some players haven’t performed their individual intentions badly, there are 4 or 5 players that need to perform better football actions, to contribute to the team intentions. How do you address this problem within the group? Do you speak to the team first and look at the communication between players, or do you immediately zoom into the players, that in your ‘eyes’, aren’t performing well? While learning more about what you could do to structure your talks, the language that you use to convey this message (how), is vitally important.?If you use non-contextual language, then you won’t be describing any of the potential problems that may have been identified, which then leads you into further problems.

An example being - If you address the changing room and tell the team that they aren’t sharp enough, then you aren’t describing anything within a football context or even explaining what happened. The consequence now is, you could have 16 players with 16 interpretations of what you actually meant.?

The solution to this is, say what you see and use universal football language. The receiver will then be able to visualise clearly what you’re communicating and get closer to performing your request.?

During those ‘big’ games that are extremely close and the fine margins that come with it, clear information is paramount in assisting with the team and offering solutions. Previously, I’ve discussed in depth about question and answer patterns, as well as team intentions. In these moments what you provide your players with, has to be of high quality and extremely concise. One danger though, is that we talk far too much and overload the players.

Overload - This occurs when there is so much external stimuli, the brain will feel like it can’t cope. What would you do in this situation, if someone spoke at you for 8-9 minutes? Would your attention ‘drift away’ or would you be thinking about the game? Although we wouldn’t want our attention to ‘drift away’, it would be extremely hard to understand and digest all that was said, including the messages in minute 1.

The unconscious stress that comes with playing a competitive sport, is something we would have all experienced. This can ‘control’ how we behave and at times, give negative responses to certain situations. An easier way to remain calm and objective, is to position* yourself as best as possible, in preparation for the task ahead. * (preempting something that may happen).

Since September 2023, I’ve logged the following and while none of these points are ‘groundbreaking’, it has led me into clearer thinking and able to make better decisions.

Having clear team intentions - These are the glasses that you use while viewing the game. Unconscious stress occurs, when you have a certain ‘hypothesis’ in your brain and what you’re seeing, doesn’t align with this. Cue the incoming discomfort.

Offering solutions, instead of highlighting problems - Our brain operates in a way that it will focus more on negative outcomes, opposed to positive. The defence mechanism we have, will try and protect us and keep us in an ‘area’ of comfort. Instead of falling into the trap of highlighting what has just happened, offering clear solutions has been way more beneficial.

Explaining, instead of telling - “You didn’t stop them building from the back” and so on….explaining the consequences of the problem to the team, instead of zooming in on a player immediately, can unconsciously provoke them to recognise their impact within that moment. Without highlighting this incompetence to the team, you could explain what is happening and the players can tell you why (as a consequence of….).?

Using questions at the level of what and not the how - In my previous article, I highlighted the importance of asking questions at the level of what and not the how. Why? If you ask a player how to do something, you may never come to a clear outcome and solution that could benefit the team.

As mentioned above, keeping the information clear, short and concise could give you a better chance of downloading the information into your players brains effectively. This will allow them to digest the information, visualise and then the opportunity to perform what is needed.?

Lastly, we shouldn’t underestimate how much emotions effect performance. Everyone has and will have different emotional responses to situations. This is a type of human behaviour that will be displayed verbally or non-verbally and can’t always be controlled. ?

You may have heard of a comment such as, “in the heat of the moment”, meaning at that given time, things may have got out of control and something happened that wasn’t planned.?Using this comment, doesn’t excuse someone from behaving inappropriately and obviously, all actions will have a consequence. If you weren’t happy with a decision, or a behaviour that your players were displaying, consider the impact it has on your team intentions and if you can help them correct this, so things become more aligned. There is no need to be aggressive when you’re frustrated, as this clearly won’t help anyone or your team.

To summarise, the conversations I’ve had about team talks (meetings) in the past, have all been varied - this is due to subjective application (how) of the objective references (what) someone wishes to achieve. Whatever works for you and your players is obviously fine, but considerations to adapt and evolve should always be reflected on.?

Consider what your (meeting) intentions are and how you’re going to deliver that message. The structure, language and behaviour can have a huge impact on whether this will be (un)successful or not.

Spencer Fearn Bart Caubergh Jack Brazil Harrison Gilkes Alexander Flattum Anshul Kumar Tamta Nico Koch Julius Riemann Alexandru Bourceanu Alex Stylianou Christos (Chris) Themeliotis Darren Murray Benjamin Slator

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