Blueprint for Football Digest [Issue 19]

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How They Do It: The Feyenoord Academy
Just a few years ago, Feyenoord were on the brink of bankruptcy and suffering heavy losses at the hands of their fiercest rivals.  This has changed and whilst they are not yet challenging for the title they are back among Holland's elite.

This has been achieved thanks to a youth system that has been constantly producing bright young talent.  This is down to a change in how the system works and this article, which was originally published on The Football Pink, explain how they have achieved their success.

Using Game-Calls to Develop Game-Understanding & Skill
In the world of football coaching there is a lot of attention on the drills and techniques used by different coaches, which is great, yet very little attention is given to what probably is the key factor for anyone who wants to put across any message: the way that it is delivered.

Gerard Jones isn’t like that.  Indeed, he is a coach who places a lot of words on the words that are used when delivering a session and in this piece starts to explain how one can ensure that the message does indeed get across.

How Habits Shape Football (And Why They Matter To You)
Watching Bayern Munich take on Porto last week was fascinating not least for the way in which they pressed so high up the pitch, ensuring that they won the ball in dangerous areas.  It was this particular aspect of their tactic that allow them to overturn a somewhat significant deficit with apparent ease.

That they did so using such a system shouldn’t come as a surprise given that Pep Guardiola had already mastered the use of pressing teams high up the pitch with Barcelona.  Indeed, the organised – almost mechanical – way in which they execute this pressing and the knowledge that players have of what to do in each instance reminded me of an article that I had written on habit forming and which, essentially, argued that players looked for particular cues in their opposition before deciding what they were going to do.

It was a theory based off Charles Duhigg’s excellent book the Power of Habit and one that I strongly feel every coach should be looking into.