Aspire in the World Fellows Book - 2022

41 40 Tony Strudwick - Head of Performance: Football Association of Wales When you are Head of Performance of a National Federation, it’s about managing relationships and key stakeholders around the clubs. Essentially, we loan the players to the clubs and we have to create the best environment for when the players come back to us. Ultimately, the most important thing is ensuring that players want to come. We must have a structured approach to decision making and really focus on the environment and when we do make decisions on our training template and our planning process, we need to ensure that it’s sharp and informed. The Wales FA is a really unique organization. Culturally, most of the group of players have been together for 10-15 years. They are a very tight group with strong relationships, and we have a strong continuity of staff. We need to ensure that we have the right medical processes in place, and we also need to ensure that there is a common language between players, coaches, and support staff. When we look at success factors and what is high performance, everybody would give you the same answer, but the Wales journey has been long term. The idea is to build a common story, to have a common objective altogether and to feel the belonging between players and staff. We want players coming into a camp with rhythm. The planning beforehand must be extensive, but we can’t always control when the players are coming. We have Champions League, League One and Championship players. We have a real diverse group, and we have to build an agile plan. Essentially, we have to use all the information to guide the coaching process. The difference between managing a National Team and a club team is essentially time. You have to maximize learning opportunities and contact time with the players. After travel arrangements and planning and getting the group together, we have only got six training sessions between now and our first game of the FIFA World Cup. We haven’t got much time. The planning and preparation have to be really deliberate. This next World Cup is unique. Usually, players arrive very exhausted to a World Cup competition after having played 50-60 games during the season. This time, having the competition in the middle of the season, it will be different. I hope it will establish that it is actually a good time of the year to have a major championship. Our number one priority is to liaise and collaborate with the clubs, but this is beyond our control as the players belong to the club. The other priority that we can control is that we have to make sure that we have a world class environment when we arrive in Qatar. We want the players to have a wonderful environment and enjoy the World Cup experience. We have not been there for nearly 60 years, so this is some level of achievement and it’s all about connecting the group with the Welsh people. I understand what it means to these players that have been together for so long. So irrespective of the physical component, actually having a cause and a purpose that this group comes together and ensuring that they have a wonderful World Cup experience is going to be the priority.