In Scout7's website journal, we invite both Scout7 staff and influential figures and pioneers within the football industry to comment on wider issues in the game, whether it be evolution in business models, coaching or player recruitment.
All themes within the journal entries can be linked into the proactive use of the modules used within Scout7 technology or support services.
The July Journal is written by Tony Faulkner, the founder of the Provelop organisation, who puts forward his case for professional clubs to consider Player Profiling as part of their existing Academy player recruitment processes.
|
As any coach working in the professional game will tell you, there have been numerous examples going back generations of technically gifted youth players who were initially recruited on the basis of their raw ability.
However, once the coach started working on developing that player within the club environment, they discovered that they appeared to lack the resilience or skill set to overcome new challenges put in front of them every day, which as a result saw them hit a brick wall and fail to make the grade.
|
 |
|
When this situation occurs, you ask yourself the question as a coach why did this player fail to fulfil his promise, when others in the same group, who may not have possessed the same level of raw ability initially, exceed all expectations?
In most cases it will be because that specific player did not hit all the key performance indicators required to succeed, which is why I believe it is so important that a club instigates a development programme for each player, because it will equip them with all the skills necessary for making them a better professional and a better person. These will be life skills across all domains.
The Premier League have statistics on the drop-out numbers from Academies each year and the statistics are frightening - but as I have often stated to people involved in the game, the mind messes up far more performances than the body.
Talent Identification is the precursor to Talent Development, but when we consider how clubs recruit their players at any level, there can be no doubt that for decades there has been too much emphasis put onto a player's physical and technical attributes in the process, mainly because for generations we have based a player's ‘talent' on their ability with the ball.
This is highlighted particularly in the Academy recruitment of players, where it must be remembered that we as a club are recruiting based on an adolescent's potential to learn and develop into a successful adult performer.
Typically, if a player who was previously unknown to a scout performed well in a single game, he would have been considered a good player, but equally if he had had an off day he may have been written off as not being good enough. As a result, the be-all and end-all of the evaluation would have been based purely on performance and totally neglected the player's psycho-behaviours.
|
|
|
This is significant because all research conducted since the early 1990's suggests that performance is actually one of the weakest indicators in establishing a player's personal potential for growth and development - instead these findings actually suggest the key performance indicators for establishing a player's true potential is their psycho-behaviours. In short the key issue is not to identify the best performer in a one-off match in isolation, but rather to identify what factors over time will limit talent development.
|
|
To address this issue, there is a massive opportunity for a club Academy to implement some kind of mechanism within the recruitment process, typically when they invite a player in on trial, whereby they can identify where that prospect is at within their current stage of development, including their psychological development, which enables the club to adopt a more holistic approach so they know where exactly to push the player in his specific development programme if they choose to recruit them.
Of course before they can introduce such an initiative within the club, they need to have an understanding of their own Talent Profile, which is how they define what exactly talent is. Then they need the knowledge, means and methodology to evaluate the player objectively, based on every single aspect of that Talent Profile.
This is where player profiling comes in.
When you profile a player, you are not profiling their personalities, you are profiling psychological traits which are relevant to athlete development. Research is relatively weak on the ground when it comes to an individual's personality, which tends to become fixed around the ages of 7 or 8 according to experts in this area, but it does not suggest that possessing a specific personality is going to harm a person's chances of becoming an athlete.
What the profiling will do however is enable the club to set up a programme which reflects certain aspects of an individual's personality, such as their direction of motivation, which will enable the club to identify methods which the individual is receptive to and helps facilitate learning.
|
|
During the trial, the profiling will sit alongside other assessments based around their technical ability, tactical understanding and physical performance. This will mean that all the players Hard Skills (sporting ability) and Soft Skills (mental skills) which make up the club's Talent Profile are objectively assessed, in order for a player specific development programme to be adopted from the moment they are recruited.
|
 |
|
This will enable the club to work together with the player, from both a performance and psychological perspective, to increase their chances of succeeding as a professional.
In American Sports, the NFL have utilised profiling for a number of years now as part of their recruitment processes for the annual draft. Their profiling has evolved over the number of years, so today's practices may be different from when they started, but it is still being used successfully.
From a business perspective, profiling is seen as a crucial tool within blue chip companies to identify the correct candidates for specific jobs within the organisation, not only in external recruitment, but internally too. They also recognise that profiling is an effective management tool, so that line managers understand the best techniques to get the most out of individual employees within the company. From an Academic perspective, leading experts in the field, including Prof. Carol Dweck and Prof. Len Zaichkowsky have produced groundbreaking research into various aspects of mental skills development, including how attitude relates to both success and failure in every walk of life.
Looking back at player recruitment in football across the decades and moving forward, I think a change towards acknowledging the importance of psychological traits is going to be the next logical evolution in the process.
I say that because thirty years ago, if a player was considered good on the ball, that would have been an overwhelmingly decisive factor in the decision making process, but since the mid-1990's and the emergence of sports science, a greater emphasis is now put on what the player possesses as an athlete. Is he fast? Is he good box-to-box? And so on.
As a result, it would not be unfair to compare today's Premier League players physically with the leading athletes in the NBA or NFL, who are recognised to be some of the fittest and strongest in team sports around the world.
There definitely is a greater curiosity now in the football world when it comes to psychology and there is an interest in aiding development, but a lot of people do not know where or how to start addressing it.
I think one of the reasons for this is because there has been a lot of professional resistance to the subject traditionally - there has definitely been a stigma whereby people have been worried that by acknowledging a need for addressing mental skills they are in-affect acknowledging weakness, and others have considered psychology as simply being a matter of common sense.
In response to the latter I would ask a coach, for example, what methods do they use to get an individual to concentrate on a task, so they went about it properly and gave it their maximum effort? It would be very difficult for them to define. Often we just tell the player to concentrate as if by telling them they will automatically know how to concentrate, but do we know the areas of the brain that aid concentration? Do we know how to ignite these areas of the brain so we are training the player to concentrate? If we don't then are we aiding learning in players? For this reason, psychology is more than just common sense. Psychology is the study of successful people, communication and interaction - it is around us every day and it plays a crucial role in how we go about our lives.
One coach said to me that he was an ‘amateur psychologist' in his job, and I had to make the comment that if he was an amateur coach he would not be in a job at all. As a coach, we may often think that sometimes we have all the answers to the problems we face, but resistance in fully understanding this subject is only going to hinder your chances of helping someone make the grade.
That said, I have definitely seen a change in attitudes during the past five years with regards to the significance of performance psychology and I am convinced more clubs will embrace profiling for recruitment and development, but it won't happen overnight.
It will happen though because as the game has evolved, players and teams are now very close to being at their ultimate peak physically, so there is only room for an extra 1 or 2 % advantage over your rivals in this area.
In contrast, there is so much more that can be done on the mental side, which has potentially huge implications for player performance on the field, and in development off the pitch as an individual.
Tony Faulkner is the Founder of Provelop, an organisation which specialises in developing and administering bespoke profile and training solutions to amateur and professional clubs in the United States and Europe. For further information on Provelop's Profiling for Recruitment programme, please contact Tony via email at tony@provelop.co.uk.
|
|
