Aspire in the World Fellows Book - 2022

39 38 Second Half Perry Stewart, Head of Academy Performance, Arsenal FC At Arsenal, we are preparing players for future performance. We don’t play competitive league matches until U18. We use competition as an extension of training and developing the players for future performance. When we talk about future performance, we talk about our U21, which is where they will typically go out on loan, or they’ll start stepping into a first team environment, whether it be at Arsenal or somewhere. That’s doesn’t mean the boys throughout the academy do not get exposed to competition. They will go into competitive environments where they’ll do tournaments, they’ll play in Premier League Cups, and we will prepare them to perform well in those. But it’s not an emphasis that we would put great focus on. If we consider it as a continuum, there is very little emphasis on winning at the young underage group. U9 to U11, it’s more about exposing them to those competitive environments, getting to play against better opposition and giving them those development opportunities. Then as we progress through the academy, we use those opportunities of the Premier League Cup and international tournaments to be more prepared to compete. So, there is a sliding continuum within Arsenal and the UK governance perspective on preparing players to compete. So, it’s clearly a long term preparation for the competition. We have to identify the right competitions at the right frequency. If we are competitive or we are looking to prepare players at under 11 to compete and win every week, you run the risk of selecting your strongest 11 and under developing other players. You run the risk of early professionalization or early specialization, which can potentially lead to burnout and increased risk of injury. There are multiple reasons why we do it. There is a wider lens perspective for preparing them to have professional careers as opposed to winning on a weekly basis. Whatever is the sport, performance is all about satisfying stakeholder preferences and objectives. You need to understand what the bigger plan is. Understanding what the objectives are for that athlete, and then putting a development plan in place, but also identifying the important competitions throughout the year and making sure that they are ready to perform within those because there is a lot riding on that. There is a place at the Olympics, there is funding, there are points and qualifications to achieve. If you don’t have a clarity of an objective for a particular athlete or team, then you don’t know how to have a strategy to achieve it. Clarity of the objectives is coming from various people depending on the teams and the individuals you are working with. You have to build relationships, multidirectional relationships at different levels to understand that. And then beyond that, you have to understand what your role is. Your roles and responsibilities are to help, develop and prepare athletes for whatever it is. You need also to put your ego away. Some athletes, I played a bigger part in their preparation and development. Others, I played a minimal part. But it is understanding what roles and responsibilities you possess within that person’s journey. To finalize, the most important thing is clarity on objective, clarity on roles and responsibilities, and clarity on the strategies you are using to achieve both of those things. We also need to create a culture. For that you need to have clear values and then you have to share them with all the staff and ensure an understanding of those values with expected behavior. Then you will create a culture based on people’s behaviors and attitudes. We all come from very diverse backgrounds with our different perspectives. So, having clarity of objectives, roles, responsibilities and understanding the common values, will support you to create a sort of very effective culture. Rick Cost - High Performance Director: US Soccer Everything we are doing is based on a player first approach within the team environment. Which means that for all different age groups there is a similar approach, but with a different objective. The first thing we try to do is find the balance between standardization and not creating robots. What we want is to have that game of soccer in our heart. Next to that, we must have a lot of trust in the clubs because the people who are preparing our players typically are club coaches and the support staff. We try to be as transparent as possible and share everything we have with the hope that as we build this relationship, we will get as much back from the clubs. The second focus is to develop a common approach, that means there is no surprise in the way we handle players. It was super common in the USA to have a physical approach first and then the more cognitive approach. Now we have a sense of periodizing the brain towards the game because our technical plan is a young plan. Our biggest goal is to make soccer preeminent in the USA. We don’t only want to influence the players coming into camp, but also when they’re in their club environment. We shifted from wanting to have every individual player in competition as good as possible, to a long-term approach of how we can make soccer a bigger game. The biggest thing I want to change is get an approach of having one message, one vocabulary. The quality of someone that comes in is to first embrace and understand the environment, because no one individual makes better soccer players. We are just people that can shift things that are good to make it better and make sure that the organization understands where we stand. Everyone can contribute to this common approach. Great ideas can come from first team to youth teams but also it can be the other way around from youth to first team. Looking forward to the World Cup preparation, it is periodizing the physical part towards getting players ready. As the clubs are playing so many games, it’s about recovery methods. In the first couple of games, we won’t be able to get them physically more ready than they already have been with their club. Recovery is one of those things where we put our emphasis on right now and it’s about getting all the pieces of data in and creating a direction where we can have influence. Right now, there is so much data that we don’t even know which could have an influence. We need to move forward using all the pieces of data better to choose those parameters that we have an influence on moving towards the World Cup in 2026. The head coach is the person that makes the decisions. Performance staff, medical staff, analytical staff, we all want to give him a million items. The bigger thing here is trying to give the right information to the coach and make him understand procedures. Make him understand what and when would be the right moment to actually have an influence on players in preparing them better towards competition.