Aspire in the World Fellows Book - 2022

35 34 Round Table Topic 2 Preparing players and team for the competition First Half Nicolas Mayer: Head of Performance - Paris Saint-Germain FC In eight years, I workedwith five different technical staff fromdifferent nationalities and backgrounds. It means when I think about planning, I can only think about various adaptation to various philosophies. Within the technical staff, I saw different approaches from the fitness coaches. Secondly, the context is important. In my context, 80% to 90% of players are internationals. It means 64 to 69 games per year. Additionally, in our squad, we have 11 different nationalities. It means different culture and different habits. Thinking into planning and preparing players for the competition, we have the necessity to take into account the uniqueness of each player and the few moments available for the coach to work on group component. It means when we have time to work with complete squad, the most important is to focus on football perspective. Thirdly, because we are playing twice a week most of the time, we need to think about the strategy to compensate players who are not playing a lot. We need to define different strategies for pre or post training session, post-game session and day off accordingly to the game exposure of each single player. In PSG, Medical and Performance are part of the same department. When a new coaching staff is coming, our main goal, is to make it win time, first by providing as much precise information as possible about all players. And then, the idea is to meet with the new staff to understand their methodology, and to define accordingly a common approach and strategy until the last game of the first phase of the season. It means strategy more in terms of planning and organization. For instance, to define a common strategy regarding the work after the competition game at home or away taking into consideration time and equipment context, this needs a different approach with the ones playing a lot and the ones playing less. Taking into consideration not only the physical status but also the emotional, mental, and psychological perspective of the players. It’s very important to invest a lot of energy to align all staff who are working in Edgar Cardoso: Academy Technical Director - FC Shakhtar Donetsk I want to introduce our way of work in two different moments: preseason and in season. At Shakhtar, we have a style and philosophy that is decided from the top by the president. This style is very offensive and attacking orientated. In the academy, we need to follow this idea and this style of play. Regardless of who is the coach of the first team, the style never changes. Every time Shakhtar is changing the first team coach, the new one is hired with the intention to keep playing with the same ideas. My priority in preseason is to dedicate time in how we want to play, in our style and in our ideas. Of course, the physical development is very important. So, we like to start the season with two big blocks. The first 10 days are dedicated to big or medium spaces drills. We want to avoid injury and support the players to improve their fitness together with their teammates but the most important thing for them is to listen and to understand the way we want to play. We prioritize exercises with superiority, not a big superiority to force the defenders to run a lot and to press a lot. Usually, we have a game on the last day of this block, then we rest for two days, and we go for a second block of 10 days. Here we go from big spaces to small spaces, going to change of directions, accelerations and step by step to reach maximum speed. At the end of this second block, we also finish with a game. From this point, we start our usual weekly cycle with a game at the end. Football and way of playing is a priority but at the same time, we use the football exercises to develop physical capacities. The situation now is very different due to the war in Ukraine, In the current situation, it’s much more difficult to follow any plan. When the war started at the end of February, our first priority was to protect our players to be in safe places. With the high management of the club, we decided to move abroad players under 17 years old because 18 to 60 years old men cannot leave Ukraine due to the martial law. As our sport director is Croatian, we could find a good place to stay in this country. We are now in Split since mid-March, but during these months everything was very unpredictable. I’m responsible for seven teams from U12 to U19 and two months ago, the Ukrainian president decided that first teams and U19would start the championship in Ukraine. So, the idea was clear for U19 (train and compete in Ukraine), but completely unpredictable for the other generations. With the U19, we started working abroad. First in the Netherlands. We understood immediately that from the 26 players that we called for this first training camp; half of the players were not comfortable to go back to Ukraine. So, we tried to delay as much as possible our way back to Ukraine. We managed to move from the our department (physio, fitness coach, nutritionists) into this approach to ensure we all have a common communication with players. One of the most important things is to put our ego away and to understand that we are here to support the Head Coach. For that, we need to understand the coaching methodology as fast as possible and to find the organization that fits his methodology the most accordingly with the full staff. Understanding the vision of the head coach and fitness coach and how they plan helps me to set up whatever they need based on our context. Above all we need to build trust because, in the end, it’s all about trusting each other. Netherlands to Slovenia and then to Western Ukraine as it could be safer. I will explain the process to compete in Champions League and European Youth League. We started playing in Kiev. Kiev is 800 kilometers from the border with Poland. Some roads are destroyed, and we need to play Champions League abroad or in Poland for our home games. Our opponents are Red Bull Leipzig, Celtic Glasgow and Real Madrid. We need to travel by bus from Kiev to Poland. It takes maybe 12 hours (including many hours to cross the border), then to go again by bus to the closest airport and finally to travel by airplane to the place where we are going to play. Four days before this we had a home domestic league game, you can imagine how it is for the players, how we need to manage training, preparation, recovery, and game. We arrived at the idea that we decided to not travel with a full squad. We are thinking about the next opponent. Sometimes we made the choice to travel with 16 players and leave the remaining number of players in Ukraine to keep some players fresh for the upcoming game because it’s impossible with such a heavy trip. For our teams in Croatia, since mid-March, we didn’t stop training. We didn’t have a break. We didn’t have preseason. We are just training, training, training. Thanks to Hadjuk Split that allows us to use their training pitches 3 hours daily, our 4 teams can train on a daily basis. As we weren’t allowed to take part in the Croatian youth league, we are playing friendly games versus regional clubs competing against their older age group. We are able to have our normal cycle of five days of training following by a game day and a day off, and we restart again. Even with a lack of supporting staff (as they are older than 18 years old), with very few people we are able to manage our 85 players. I am taking the role of technical director, coach, nutritionist, psychologist and also a role of father. Finally, despite everything and thanks to the support of Croatian Football, we are able to find a way to have a process.