Fellows Book Online Version 2020

46 Francisco Tavares (Sporting CP) opened the discussion by picking up the key messages of Ceb’s talk. The first one was that “you should treat losing as you treat winning.” The other one was related to creating a safe environment for the players to realize their potential, whether being an underdog or favorite. Aris Tsoulakis (Aspire Academy) found Ceb’s view on ‘defending the title’ interesting. “We forget that a lot of times that even as a defending champion you need to compete again to win the title when you enter the competition” said Aris. “How you approach this situation can have big impact on performance,” he added, bringing up an example of Denmark winning the Euro 1992 as underdogs having no pressure and expectations on them. James O’Brien (Red Bull Salzburg) was asking, how we can apply this in our own work, using sports medicine and player rehabilitation as an example. “How do we consider winning? Is it only the match performance of the team or can it be understood more broadly covering training and other aspects of football?” he asked. Reilly O’Meagher (New Zealand National Team) took the same angle saying that, what may be considered as failure from team performance perspective, can still be a success for individual player, if he/she was able to realize his personal objectives. Fabio Francioni (QFA) added on that improving performance of an individual player should also contribute to make the team stronger. Fabio drew attention to another interesting pick from Ceb’s talk, as he mentioned that “one of the team players didn’t want to warm up for the game, as he felt it wouldn’t be helpful for his performance.” Francisco said that there should be individualization in the warm-up but different from eSports, in football we need to do the warm-up to prepare the body for training or game demands. He also felt it is important to get the players engaged by getting their input for designing the warm-up. Aris asked, “to what extent the players should have the freedom to do their preferred warm-up?.” For summarizing the topics discussed, Francisco picked up the main points. It’s important to clarify, what is considered as success or win. “Winning does not mean that we did good job” he concluded. We need to look at success at different levels within a team environment. James added that he finds it important to have a structured reflection process in place to make sure that we cover all the aspects, whether related to team or individual objectives. It was also important to keep consistency in the practices and processes rather than doing any drastic changes without properly analyzing what is working and what is not. In general, eSports is still quite unfamiliar to most of us and it was challenging to find association with football. Some of the clubs do have eSports in their programs but it seems there is very little integration with other sports, as mentioned by Alberto Franceschi (Juventus) in their club as well. Maxime Coulerot (Paris Saint-Germain F.C.) said that he was previously working in Monaco with their eSports team in order to support them with load management and recovery area, as the players are training a lot (up to 50-60 hours a week) and also in tournaments they need to play lot of games in a short time. Sebastien Debs Workshop 4