“What is speed? The sports press often confuses speed with insight. See, if I start running slightly earlier than someone else, I seem faster.”
Memento.
“What is speed? The sports press often confuses speed with insight. See, if I start running slightly earlier than someone else, I seem faster.”
Johan Cruyff
- Why do my eyes hurt?
- You’ve never used them before.
Matrix (1999).
In November 2013, Zlatan Ibrahimovic gave an interview to the French magazine “L’équipe Magazine”. The topic was video games. “After a match, I cannot fall asleep, so I am sometimes playing on my console until 4 or 5 in the morning.” […] “My favourites are strategic and first person shooter games.” There is no doubt, Zlatan loves a good brawl, on and off the pitch. But does the Manchester United striker know that playing video games could help improve his performances[1] on the pitch? Not necessarily…
The gaming scene has evolved since the days of Duke Nukem, Doom, Quake, GoldenEye, Half-Life and Counter Strike. Does that sound familiar? “Football is a game for kids, of visual perception, nothing else,” said former FC Nantes manager Jean-Claude Suaudeau (1981-88, 1991-97). What about video games?
In 2012, the researchers’ team of Daphné Bavelier, professor in cognitive neurosciences at the University of Geneva, stated: “When FPS players are looking for a target, they get less tired than the norm of players and are less distracted by other objects. They react faster and can also focus their attention on another target more quickly.” In that regard, the logical conclusion would be that video games can boost one’s focus and visual acuity. In a FPS game for example, players are asked to look for multiple targets, to memorise the environment in which they are, and to use a real spatial intelligence to dominate their opponents. All the while they are immerged in an unpredictable environment where all senses are on alert. “Repeated exposures of the organism to a given visual environment – a video game for instance – can affect in the long term the cognitive mechanisms that focus specifically on that environment,” Professor Bavelier added. “On the contrary, researchers find that playing action video games affect a whole section of visual attention abilities. The writers of the study compared performances of ‘regular players’ with those of ‘non-players’ when given different tasks. It turns out that playing action games regularly can benefit the visual attention treatment, especially for the flexibility and the efficiency the players use to spread their attention span over time and space.” With the brain at work constantly, every second spent in the heat of the action results in the improvement of one’s ability to make decisions under pressure.
The authors of this research have established that FPS players evaluate better a higher number of objects than non-players – whether it is via peripheral or central vision. They are also able to follow multiple objects at the same time, in time and space, in a clearer manner. According to the same study, “in addition to those effects on spatial and temporal components of the visual attention, the practice of video games seems to improve some characteristics of the spatial working memory.” With virtual reality, possibilities will flourish. For the better, and the worse. What if the future of tactical work and video training was hidden under the use of connected glasses, that the British – or U.S. – army is using, thanks to the “Occulus Rift” and the “Q-Warrior” to train its soldiers to act on the field?
Before he was let go from his managerial position at Manchester United, Louis van Gaal studied the question, aiming to perfect the analysis of the movements of his players. Regardless of his age – 65 years old – the “Iron Tulip” is a man opened to progress because he knows that “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” Since you opened this book, the world has changed again. There is a need to adapt. If you don’t adapt, you will be nothing but Steve Ballmer compared to history.
In 2007, the former CEO of Microsoft said, not without irony, a few days after Steve Jobs released the iPhone: “500 dollars? Fully subsidised with a plan? That is the most expensive phone in the world and it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard.” And then, between bursts of laughter, as a visionary of modern times, he added: “There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”
An emblematic figurehead of the Oakland Athletics, Billy Beane would say that “you should always be where others don’t expect you to be.” When he took over at San Lorenzo, in Argentina, Pablo Guede had a built at the training camp so he could observe better his players’ behaviour and so he could improve the positioning of his team. At Everton, Roberto Martínez used drones[2] to look at his team’s play under different angles. It is a method he brought to the Belgian national team.
Let’s continue our quest in the kingdom of pixels, and be ready to run into Sephiroth who is after Aerith. For us human beings, the central vision cannot be dissociated from the peripheral vision, that gives us information on the environment around us, so that we are ready to turn our head should something enter come in our field of vision. It could be for example, a pedestrian about to cross the road on our right, or a car getting closer on our left. It is that vision that we put aside when we play Grand Theft Auto to enjoy the scenary a little bit more. To summarise, the central vision is about what we are looking at and what we see best while, at the same time, the peripheral vision gives us information on the field of vision we perceive without looking at it. It is due to the eye’s anatomy. Only one point on the retina, called fovea, at the centre of a zone, the macula, can enable a better acuity.
For its 54th issue – published in October 2013 – the French magazine “Vestiaires”, the first of its kind dedicated to football instructors, was focusing on the work Chritophe Lollichon was doing at Chelsea. Alongside an optometrist and French researcher, Michel Guillon, Lollichon tries to improve[3] the peripheral conscience and the assimilating time of the visual information of his goalkeepers thanks to the use of “About a 2-squared-meter board, made of 80 small lights that the goalkeeper will have to turn off by touching them precisely and quickly.” Lev Yachine – Ballon d’Or in 1963 – would be fascinated. “Contrarily to other sports, football vision is complex, because both the central and the peripheral visions are put to use”, says Guillon. Even if there is a part of natural talent, the objective is clear – get ahead of the competition by adding another exercise with goggles “that penalise visually the goalkeeper so he has to look harder.” If it is true that we only see with our heart, an increasingly precise vision is the first step before fighting the terrible Agent Smith in the Matrix.
***
? Do not try and bend the spoon, that's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth...there is no spoon. Then you'll see that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself. ?
A child talking to Neo, The Matrix (1999).
? To compete with my opponents, I have developed other abilities very early like runs or reaction time… Since I cannot compete in terms of power, I have to find other ways. ?
Thomas Müller, The Raumdeuter (? the space interpreter ?)
***
To get into action mode or start a reaction, the human organism uses information gathered by its sensorial receptors that the brain then turns into perceptions. This information intervenes not only in the appreciation of the context, but also in the consciousness of the body itself and the building of the body scheme. Thanks to the memorisation of the brain, this information allows for the knowledge of movements and their modifications, through an ever more precise control. In order to exercise under pressure, a sportsman must learn to respond to pressure almost instinctively and reduce their reaction time. To know how to adapt to the mass of circumstances and avoid being overwhelmed by the turn of events. Hubert Ripoll, psychologist and professor in the school of sports sciences at the University of Aix-Marseille, explains: “Every event in itself leaves, mostly in an unconscious way, a trace in the nervous system, and this trace is ready to be activated, as soon as a similar situation, even remotely, presents itself. Now, these traces not only contain events, but also the responses associated with them, and the combination of an event and a response forms knowledge.
Therefore, if we took some time to respond to an event the first time, we are more likely to give a quicker response the next time it appears.”
However complex it is to follow the evolution of the different cognitive abilities, more and more industries where cognitive processes are overexposed and where a maximal focus is required take interest in new technologies and video games. If we are to believe the conclusions of a study led by the United States’ Department of Defense – in 2010 – soldiers who played video games “are said to possess cognitive abilities that are 10 to 20% superior to those of other soldiers.” Ray Perez, a doctor in cognitive psychology, adds that the preparation to a fight for a soldier is not solely physical anymore, but also psychological. “A gamer is a soldier who doesn’t know he is a soldier,” says Yann Leroux, doctor in psychology and author of the blog “Psy et Geek”. Today, the French, U.S. and British armies train on a simulator called “Virtual Battlespace”, developed from the roots of the tactical shooter “ArmA”. They can set up drills of defence and attack of convoys, exfiltration and V.I.P. protection or any other scenario a soldier could face on the battlefield. An instructor can also create situations in real time and modify them as much as he wants to, while being able to analyse the action under every angle.
However, simulators are not meant to train a person to fight, but only to get soldiers used to navigate in a 3D environment (real or virtual), in order to move as a unit, learn how to memorise the surroundings and spot the exposed areas, to discover the procedure to follow. In other words, they learn to limit the surprise factor, that can be fatal on the battlefield and impossible to eradicate. Using the term “neuron accelerators” in a TV feature dedicated to video games last August, the French information channel “i-Télé” got it right. If used correctly, gaming can be a tool. Some more serious games can help with Alzheimer’s, while a game like “Minecraft” can nurture the curiosity and awakening of a child with an appropriate dosage.
On the 13th of July 2016, the magazine Psychological Science stated that a game like Mario Kart could enhance our driving abilities and our visual precision. Games like Call of Duty, Overwatch or Counter-Strike make you work constantly on your visualisation of a map inside your brain to choose the best route in order to win the game. All of while you are taking into account the ennemy’s rushing, game sounds, your life bar, your abilities, the remaining time, the position of your teammates and their gaming style. It all adds up to form a mass of information to assimilate.
During competitions, the best athletes are not even aware of the visual markers they use to make the right calls. It could echo the audacity of a young Argentinian genius – who was compared to the Batman by Jorge Sampaoli – when he flicked the football over the head of the goalkeeper, in the round of 16 of the Champions League, against Arsenal in 2011. Only a witness of this act of magic, Manuel Almunia could only act as a dislocated puppet. When Messi thinks, time stops, while Diego Maradona “calculated time” on the pitch, according to César Luis Menotti. Artists play an instruments. The most expert of them conduct an orchestra, with several partitions in mind. Think about it, Dennis Bergkamp had it all figured out – from the first touch with the inside of his left foot to the goal that became legendary. Football is played with the brain before it is played with the legs. “A second-division player has to be accurate at 60%,” claims Jorge Valdano, “a first-division player has to be accurate at 80%, and an international must reach 100%. The technical and mental quickness changes with the level of play. That is what defines football.”
Marcos Llorente explains about his position as a midfielder: “To recover the ball, you need intuition more than you need to know concepts.” The pitbull always trusts its instincts to track down the Fugitive. “The worst thing in that situation,” explains Llorente, “is when you receive the ball, and your opponents come your way from every angle. What we are trying to do, is to turn our head and look before we get the ball, to see what is happening around.”
Regardless of the discipline in which you operate, the quickness of thoughts is always what is going to make you a special player. An alien touched by the divine grace or a IT engineer avoiding bullets. “I'm trying to do some fancy things out there with both hands, making crossover moves and having a certain flair to my game and that's definitely the style Messi has when he is out there in his matches. I love watching him play, I'm a big fan and he's the guy you watch play because you never know what he is going to do at any particular moment,” Curry added. In the heat of the moment, Curry and Messi share the same look, between emptiness and maximal consciousness of events. Time doesn’t have a hold on the greatest geniuses.
In his book, The Inner Game of Tennis, Timothy Gallwey mentions the notion of “conscious attention”, being tactically aware. For a sportsperson, the perfect coordination of movements depends on their ability to be free of any negative thinking that could clash with their analysing process. In other words, thinking should not inhibit and impair intuition. Seeing quickly is anticipating what is going to happen in the next moment. Acting fast is assimilating a large part of data in limited time, unconsciously. Gallwey specifies: “To summarise, playing ‘unconsciously’ doesn’t mean playing without knowing what we are doing. […] The best way to describe an ‘unconscious’ player would maybe be to say his mind is so focused, so attentive that it is calm. It is just one with the body and the unconscious or automatic functions are triggered without any thinking involved. For the focused mind, there is no room to think about how well the body is doing what it is doing, and even less room to find out ‘how’ it all happened. When the player is in this state of concentration, they are fully involved ‘in the game,’ they are one with the racket, the ball, the shot itself, they discover their true abilities.”
Even though there is a part of talent among every individual, it is possible to improve one’s ability to get into their inside game and enhance their process of information treatment thanks to new technologies; In 2015, ViceSports revealed that Hoffenheim’s desire to find solutions to make its players capable of thinking more quickly on the pitch. Cortex wanted to dominate the world, Hoffenheim wants to turn evolution into a revolution. In that regard, the Bundesliga club got in touch with the psychologist of the team, Dr. Jan Mayer, at the club since 2008. Through a game of memorisation and visual attention on a curved screen at 180 degrees, Dr. Mayer workd on the peripheral vision of his players, aiming to improve the precision of the visual field, the quickness of the information processing, and the memory.
According to Thomas Romeas, specialist in cognitive neurosciences, it is possible to obtain “a gain of 15% of improvement on a player’s abilities to make decision on the pitch,” with a 3D training with multi-object tracking on a simple game with memorisation goals. Simple and playful, this method affects fundamental processes of the cerebral treatment, isolates them, like the selective, divided, sustained attention and the processing speed as well as the working memory.
However, Mayer is more cautious and explains that it is still difficult to establish a scientific link between a player’s level on the pitch and the work done in front of the screen. Some European clubs, like Lyon and Manchester United, now use multi-object tracking exercises in their training programmes. Maybe Nike was closed to the truth in the end, with its futuristic advert, The Last Game. Players might have to face an army of clones at some point. Zlatan is already on it.
***
? I don’t know where the physical starts and where the psychological ends. To me, football and players make one. ?
José Mourinho
“Every manager knows more or less the same thing about tactics. 4-4-2, 4-3-3, 3-5-2, etc. All that is just music. A manager does not manage football players. They manage men. What matters is the human factor, more than the physical one. You have to wonder who is the new man that shall be born from training.”
Manuel Sergio, professeur de philosophie and founder of the School of human motricity at the University of Lisbon
***
Let’s forget about the world of video games and let’s go back on the green rectangle, real and reassuring, free of a certain Agent Smith who is after control of the Source. Some researches consider that the ability of an individual to learn depends on his emotional state and that, as a result, emotions can favour the process of learning and memorising. That is what happens with Guardiola[4], Mourinho or Jardim, and their concepts of “anthropological planning” and “tactical periodisation” – the presence of a football is near systematic in training, and means more pleasure for players (a positive influence), as opposed to the purely physical work. “My method is global,” says Jardim. “We work on the physical, technical and tactical aspects all at once. I think it is more productive to work on the physical dimension in situations rather than to do it on the side, because players are more willing to run when they are doing something they like, which is playing football. For that to happen, they must touch the ball. The most important part is the intensity and the quality of exercises.”
With the influence of Edgar Morin and his past as a P.E. teacher, Jardim doesn’t believe in “the dissociation of drills”, and thinks that “all factors should be combined in training, in order to be orchestrated and developed together,” since “the pitch is the player’s natural space.” To train the body correctly, the conscience must be trained as well – as the brain and the body are co-dependent and work in synergy. Jardim names his method “ecological methodology[5].” “My method is not a copy of what they – Vítor Frade and Manuel Sergio – claim,” Jardim declared. “I didn’t buy anything from anyone. I took two or three things I liked in each of them. The same applies to José Mourinho. I built my own philosophy. I started at a young age, I tried. What hasn’t changed is my way of thinking. Ecological methodology and work with the ball. To reach the level I have reached today, I have worked for 22 years at this position.” Despite the repetition of games, due to Monaco’s participation in the Champions League, Jardim’s players never more tired than their opponents, on the contrary. After 28 games in all competition – during the 2016-17 season – Monaco scored 76 goals, for a ratio of 2.7 goals per game[6], and showed an impressive serenity given the youth of the group. On the 13th of October of 2014, Jardim explained: “When I signed, the project was a strong one, to win, with players like Falcao or James Rodríguez. Then things took a turn and Vadim Vasilyev – Monaco’s sporting director – specified that things were changing. But I am the manager of Monaco, I support this new project the same way I supported the initial project. My function is to help the club, with youngsters that need to improve faster. But it is not the same. It is hard to use the word ‘betrayal’, because the club’s decisions were not mine. My function is to help, not to question.” In Monaco, players go by, the missus files for divorce and gets a few million euros in the process, but results are constant since Jardim’s arrival. Let’s take his precepts to the southeast of the Pacific Ocean. On your left, you can see the Stewart Island, and the Chatham Islands, birthplaces of the Maori culture.
The functioning of the brain cannot be dissociated from the functioning of the body in human beings, since emotions are directly involved in decision making, as Antonio Damasio puts it in Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (1995).
This book, which is among the most important scientific literature of the 20th century, is the absolute reference for José Mourinho. The theory of somatic markers, developed by Damasio, reveals how complementary emotions and cognitive functions are, on the basis of the thesis that the reasoning system evolved, “because it is an extension of the automatic emotional system, with emotion playing various roles in the reasoning process.” It came out as a revolution because, since Descartes, reason and emotion were not working together, but in opposition. To simplify, it is not always necessary to wait until you are at peace to make a decision, as it was supposedly the case before, as emotions can help the reasoning process without disturbing it. “It is what make the beauty of emotions throughout evolution – they give people the possibility to act with intelligence without thinking intelligently. […] In other words, emotions play a role in intuition, a quick cognitive process thanks to which we can draw a conclusion, oblivious of all the logical steps that led to it.”
This is how with Mourinho, for each exercise, players work simultaneously on their focus, their creativity, their technique, their speed, their sprint, their strength, their intuition and their collective and individual intelligence. This method – “tactical periodisation” – was created by Vítor Frade, former professor at the University of Porto and former head of the FC Porto academy, and consists of an approach to a context similar to that of a match with maximal intensity. The goal is to develop certitudes among the player so he can apprehend any given situation after going through them in training. “It has to be said that intensity is linked with our psychological attention, our focus,” says Alain Casanova, “and therefore a notion of tactical intensity comes up, and can come and go from one session to another. Our approach wants to emulate the highest tactical and athletic intensity in every new training session in an environment as close to a real match as possible.” As a result, training sessions are never longer than the duration of a game and serve the same purpose – develop the physical condition with tactics, technique, and the mental aspect all at ones thanks to high-intensity drills, always with the ball (“95%” of the time for Jardim, “80 to 85%” for Emery). Drills are always evolving and match the game principles defined at the start of the season by the manager[7].
Expert in ‘Mournihology’, Thibaud Leplat states: “When Van Gaal repeats the same drills of memorisation, Mourinho’s method takes focus into account as well as the physical side.” In life, you must alternate between pleasures: “During three years and a half, four years, training sessions were different every time,” says Didier Drogba. “It was a pleasure to go train in the morning. Every day you would learn something new.” All along the week, oppositions – 5v5, 4v4 or 5v3, 6v3 – are set up on different spaces in order to vary the intensity, and require a full focus. Training is a laboratory where Mourinho rules out chance. Every drill aims to make game plans systematic. Maniche, former FC Porto player, develops: “He wanted us to press very high on the pitch. He wanted the team to react quickly when the opponent lost the ball. […] This pressure had to be put as a team, not only by one or two players. He wanted to prepare us for every game during the whole week and he worked towards that objective. If he knew that one of the two opposing centre-backs had trouble controlling the ball, he would tell us to press his teammate, so the weaker of the two would have to run with it.” In football, luck only goes on the side of the team that prepared best. Costinha continues: “He wanted to give us detailed information, at the beginning of the week, on the team we were about to face. And more specifically on the player that would be in each of our areas. ‘What does this player look like? Does he get booked a lot? How does he time his runs?’ It was new for many of us defenders, but it was very useful and it enabled us to be prepared for every match.”
A specialist of volleys in impossible angles, Marco van Basten points out, “People underestimate football, they think it is simple. But no, it is a complex sport. You must possess a good technique and, in the same time, you need to analyse the position of your opponent and that of your teammates. Looking at the ball, controlling it and moving it forward. All of while the opponent tries to dispossess you. The higher the level, the smaller the gaps, as well as action and reaction time. At the highest level, like in the Champions League, you see the smallest gaps possible. You need to be very astute to understand how to use those available gaps. And in that situation, you need players that are as talented as intelligent. […] The occupying zone was wider by 20 metres 20 years ago. Today, you are going to find 18 players – 8 from your team and 10 opponents – sitting in a tiny space on each side of the centre circle. The time you have to find the right solution is very short. Football looks more and more like handball.”
Zdeněk Zeman, a disciple of a spectacular attacking football, explained that he got inspiration from ice hockey to work on how his teams would occupy space. No matter the shape of the ball[8]. “We are always looking to learn from the best”, says Eddie Jones, head coach of the English national rugby team, and who called for Guardiola’s advice before the 2015 World Cup. “Rugby and football are very similar, in that you have to constantly move the ball in the (unoccupied) space”, he continues. “Guardiola’s teams have developed the most fantastic passing game we will ever see. Principles are the same (as in rugby). The best football teams can vary their use of space and their formation so that they can use the available space the best way possible. Learning from those teams is a great opportunity for us. The main thing we have learned this year was to be more ‘flexible’ tactically. We have to react to the situations we encounter on the pitch and make adjustments in the way we play. In football, this approach is called ‘tactical periodisation’, method thanks to which all those lessons are passed on during a game’s preparation, with the goal of being tactically up to the task.” Ready to answer any problem during game day.
Christophe Haag, researcher in social psychology at EM Lyon, argues: “There is no absolute intuition. But studies tend to agree on the fact that in a critical situation, decision making based on intuitions is more reliable than a rational, analytic decision making.” […] “Intuition uses two engines. The first one, related to expertise, starts when we get in a situation we know very well, that we encountered a hundred times. When expertise is at a loss, and we get in a new situation, the second engine related to memory (more often emotional) starts. It looks into our personal memories’ catalogue, searching for a ‘proxi’ event, which would be similar enough to the situation we are experiencing. In case of an emergency, decision makers make intuitive decisions based on their expertise, on their past emotional experiences or on immediate emotions when they face an unknown situation.” There lies the interest of putting “tactical periodisation” in practice – or any method that puts the ball at the centre stage – during training, since it will enable the players to get references on the pitch, and to assimilate different scenarios a team could face.
A good strategist will always look to minimise the surprise factor and to develop his players’ intelligence – in this situation, we might consider “spatial intelligence” is called upon to give the body “corporal intelligence”, as Howard Gardner labelled it.
Grant Fox, winner of the original rugby World Cup in 1987, works nowadays as an assistant coach for the All Blacks. The 54-year-old, former fly-half, who considers that rugby has turned into “a chess game” with countless parameters to bear in mind, specifies: “We spend a lot of time imagining situations, creating worst-case scenarios so that our players can understand what options they have in hand. From there, they are forced to think about what they have to do. First of all, during video, then during training drills. We work just as much on the physical, the technical and the tactical sides, but mental preparation has taken a greater dimension because it is at the heart of the decision making. We often hear players talk about key moments in a game. Choosing the right option under pressure is the one variable that decides who wins and who loses. Sometimes we fail, it is human. Other times, the opponent frustrates you. But deciding is something you learn, and you prepare.”
In April 2016, Dan Carter, who took part in 4 Rugby World Cup (2003, 2007, 2011, 2015), explained: “Instinct is the most important and also the most difficult to cultivate. Sometimes I hear something, a call from one of my teammates or one from an opponent, but my eyes tell me something else, so I follow my intuition.” What were Schopenhauer’s words? Intuition is a sign of genius. “Things are moving so fast on a pitch that I don’t even know what I am going to do in the next few seconds! Of course, reflecting on the game is important in rugby – understanding offences, defences, imagining new ways of breaking lines. But once you’re in the game, you need to get free of those thoughts, this reasoning, and get into the action on instincts only. When you are confident, when you trust your teammates, you go even further. Whenever I was doubting after injuries, I would not dare to trust my instincts anymore. I was overthinking it. Even though when you do something wrong with 100% commitment, you can turn it into something positive, some incredible play no one would have thought of.” Plus, nobody has to know…
In addition to his role as a teacher, Mourinho makes his players responsible in training to make them think all the time. The Portuguese coach calls this learning phase “the guided discovery”. “To do this task correctly, players have to have their own opinions. I often stop the training session for a moment and ask players what they felt at specific moments. For example, if they tell me they felt like the right-back was too far from the centre-back, okay, let’s put them closer together and let’s see what happens. We try two, three times in a row and then I ask them again what they think of it so we can reach a conclusion.” Mourinho constantly stimulates his players’ creativity and curiosity. Therefore, the memorising phase becomes the fruit of a collective reflexion, made of daily exchanges. “He has managed to teach me things I thought I already knew”, summarises Dejan Stankovic. He knows how to tackle individual problems and give advice. He is demanding, he is hard. He requires a lot, but he also knows how to give you time when you need to express yourself. He pushes you to pay more attention and focus more.”
Genius is doing things without thinking them. For managers, it is about using their players’ memory while making them work on their own. Hubert Ripoll develops: “Human memory, and more specifically sportsmen’s memory, is substantially automatic, which makes it close to the memory of the most powerful computers. It is necessary because the relevance of actions depends on how rich the memory is and, what is essential in sports, how quickly they are executed.” […] “Once the player becomes an expert, his decision making will be quicker, for one because he will be comfortable with the formation, and because all responses, ready to use, will be easily activated.”
This is why rondos – which consists of a short passing game in a limited circular space – are great exercises to work on ball movement while improving vision, communication, marking, helping the ball holder and solidarity – positioning and movement in-between lines. It is a mix between pleasure and intensity to which some playfulness must be added to cover tracks and require the whole group’s reflection. “We would put 2 players in the centre and 6 around,” remembers Jean-Claude Suaudeau, “which brought us to 4 colours and limitations: red bibs could not play with yellow bibs, who have to play one-touch football with blue bibs, who are free. And white bibs are in the centre. That forces you to think quickly, let me tell you. Some of them had the ball in their face...real gymnastics. The instructor had to be everywhere! In addition to the players with the ball, he had to focus on the ones in the centre to see attitudes we expected in matches: one who guides and the other who comes out. That was when we would make good habits sink in. Being always on the move, even in tiny spaces, enables players to react more quickly and to be where others don’t expect them. When you are static, reaction time when you receive the ball is higher. The best examples are boxers. If they don’t move constantly on the ring, they are dead. Mohammed Ali was incredible in that regard. In our club – at Nantes – even rondos were dynamic. A pure show! Exhausting at times, because doing it for two minutes is alright, but for 20 to 25 minutes with bibs, limitations and everything, is a different story.” It is a perpetual challenge of reflection, or the action of the automaton showing off its skills. In the real world.
P.R
[1] Scientists do not all agree on the impact video games can have – For Thomas Romeas, an impact can be noted if the player spends at least 40 hours a week on video games.
[2] About the use of drones in training, Martínez explains: “It really is efficient. We can set it up and choose an angle. It is really easy to work on tactics with that. It is the first time we are using it. During training, a very professional team handles it. The only problem is that we are dependent on the weather. I had been told that it would be a problem in Belgium, but we’ve been lucky until now. It is a great tool to work on tactics.”
[3] In Dortmund, Thomas Tuchel can let his players benefit from the use of the “Footbonaut”, a machine developed by Christian Güttler. Positioned in the centre of a small room, the player receives a ball he has to control and then send back as quickly as possible in a box that is indicated by a light. All of this is meant to make players work on their reaction time, their visual accuracy and movement precision, their peripheral vision and their execution speed. At Atlético Madrid, an exercise without a ball enables to work directly on the reflexes of Diego Simeone’s players as well as on their explosive strength. They need to go to another zone of the field as soon as they hear the whistle – change their pace, accelerate or slow down – in order to improve this notion of “conscious attention”.
[4] Guardiola studied training methodology next to Paco Seiru-lo, former fitness coach at Johan Cruyff and Louis van Gaal’s Barcelona, today a member of the catalan club’s department of methodology. For Seiru-lo – who was influenced by Edgar Morin – “football fitness does not exist. What does exist is the interdependence between factors that condition the performance. Jardim would add that he did not want to see his players “optimise their physical abilities by doing specific exercises indoors, for example” because “they put their body through something that doesn’t match the repetition of what is required of them in game. Shots, direction changes, steps. All of this you cannot work on as efficiently off the pitch as on it. It is the same for communication: when the ball is there, it is a completely different story.”
[5] Jardim still: “The pitch being the natural habitat of the footballer, the ball has to remain at the core of his activity for him to flourish. If you tell a player to go run 8 kilometres, he is going to find it tedious. But you can get 10 kilometres out of him if you put in some playing, tactical combinations, shooting drills, crossing. You will be working on decision making as well as the physical condition. In France, the culture is more analytical. Managers separate the physical, technical and tactical aspects. Like in Italy.” Or in Bielsa’s method. Ricardo Lunari, former Newell’s Old Boys midfielder for a season (1991-92), recalls: “During training, he would always focus on intensity. To do the impossible, we would work up to 5 hours a day. We could repeat the same drill 10 days in a row with the same intensity.” The Argentine makes his players do the same drill over and over so it becomes second nature, a reflex. On the other hand, for Christian Gourcuff, former iconic manager of FC Lorient during 25 years, “when you are too rigorous, you lose creativity.”
[6] See Les chiffres complètement fous de l’attaque de Monaco for a more thorough study (https://www.chroniquestactiques.fr) by Florent Toniutti. A work that will make you fall in love with maths.
[7] Lucien Favre feels the same way, agreeing about adding an “athletic” dimension à la fran?aise during pre-season, “a proof of his open-mindedness” as Frédéric Giorra, former assistant coach under Clause Puel, and still at OGC Nice, explains it: “However, since we started the league, we do everything with the ball. He gives us the material of the day and we choose the drills. His sessions can last two hours and a half – thirty minutes of technique, thirty minutes of possession, thirty minutes of tactics, games, matches.”
[8] As any good explorer, Cruyff was interested in field hockey to improve the way his teams would play. Horst Wein, a former ice hockey coach, silver medal at the 1980 Moscow Olympics with Spain, and passed away on the 14th of February 2016, told the Wall Street Journal: “He was not there just to have fun. He assimilated everything he saw and would apply it to his teams.”