Assessing fitness and performance in Football

[Guest guest]

I wanted to pick up on two issues that have arisen on this discussion which

currently exists

in the group.

Firstly, the issue of including a ball in fitness training for footballers. In

my experience

current approaches separate the work of the fitness coach (as it would be known

in the UK)

with the technical coach responsible for improving individual and team skill

levels. In my

opinion the drills and tests which deal with changing the physiology of the

player

(especially at elite level) must have face validity for the player, but DO NOT

NECESSARILY

need to contain a ball. Remember for most players their contact with the ball is

limited to

around 1 minute out of 90, yet they can cover in the region of 10km per game.

The relevance and use

of the ball in the fitness training process becomes more important in the latter

stages of the

training program when exposing the player to skilled performance under fatigue

becomes

more relevant and indeed essential.

Secondly, the use of film to evaluate the game. Video footage of the game has

been used for some

time as a method of performance evaluation; however I find it is still very

vulnerable to the

biases of those watching. In my opinion, the use of Notational Analysis in

football, pioneered

(I think) by Reilly at Liverpool University has the capacity to provide much

more objective

data on performance for both the individual and the team. Perhaps our American

cousins are

not aware of how little statistical evaluation of performance has been used

football in the UK

and could help here. It is changing, predominantly driven by the television

companies, however

player performance evaluation has been a process driven almost entirely by the

subjective

opinion of the team coach(es).

Football in the UK has been notorious for resistance in the area of fitness and,

even today, many

teams are still highly skeptical about whether they even need a fitness

specialist. Often the team

coach thinks they can do it and even when they recognise the role of a

specialist, they often

interfere. If team performances aren't good, the fitness person is one of the

first to see the door.

As for the use of targeted weight training......well, forgive me if I stop

there.

Stebbing

London UK