They work in the shadows, away from prying eyes. Are they the invisible army that Premier League clubs join in their quest for glory: the analysts, the statisticians, the scientists and… the surfers? Bobsledders?
– Stream on ESPN+: LaLiga, Bundesliga, MLS, more (US)
Welcome to the world of specialist trainers. These high-performing experts have a unique understanding of their field and tap an iPad before whispering classified information into a manager’s ear. They’re not your traditional football coaches, all swagger, jokes and bold tattoos. They are data nerds and proud of it. They’re the guys you see in the dugout with initials on their club tracksuit that you can’t connect with a name.
Who is that next to Mikel Arteta? That would be Nicolas Jover, the set-piece coach who joined Arsenal from Manchester City in July 2021 and helped them score 16 set-piece goals last season, the third-highest in the league and 10 more than they achieved in 2020. 21. The power has continued this season with Arsenal scoring five from set pieces since September 17, a total bettered only by Tottenham Hotspur (six).
Arteta’s much-improved Gunners are one of several Premier League clubs, including Spurs, Manchester City and Brentford, who have tasked a set-piece manager with improving efficiency in both boxes. These experts once worked in shadowy analysis rooms, out of sight of fans, but detailed post-match breakdowns are bringing their work into the light.
Liverpool have invested in specialist training to keep pace with Pep Guardiola’s winning machine at Man City. In 2018, former bobsledger Thomas Gronnemark was brought in from Brentford to maximize his efficiency; the club went from 18th in service possession under pressure in 2017–18 to 1st in 2018–19, scoring 14 of their 85 goals in their title-winning 2019–20 season from those situations.
– Meet Liverpool’s secret weapon: Thomas Gronnemark
Ahead of the start of that title-winning campaign, Klopp invited fellow German Sebastian Steudtner to Liverpool’s pre-season training camp after watching a documentary about the famous big-wave surfer. Steudtner worked with the players to hold their breath underwater in order to stay focused and calm under pressure. Players were able to fully immerse themselves for 10 to 90 seconds when it arrived. At the end of the session, Mohamed Salah and Dejan Lovren were approaching the four minutes. The team were able to capitalize on the lessons learned from this specialist training during the season as they recorded 14 wins by a one-goal margin, returning to win against Newcastle United, Tottenham and Aston Villa after being back off
The players appreciate it too. Former Arsenal defender Calum Chambers, for example, sought out Jover when he celebrated after he converted a corner with his first touch against Leeds United in last season’s Carabao Cup. In August, Tottenham’s Dejan Kulusevski said his set-piece coach Gianni Vio deserved a pay rise after Harry Kane scored from a corner for the second consecutive game to beat Spurs 1-0 about the Wolves.
The most progressive clubs, however, do not concentrate only on set pieces, but have a number of specialists. The minutiae of pitching, hitting, and neuroscience are being evaluated and reshaped into an accessible curriculum for teams and players to capitalize on for marginal gain.
How Brentford led the way
Most football clubs can’t outspend their rivals and have to look elsewhere to find an advantage that enhances what they already have. See the article : Will the League of Your Own Seasons 2 take place in Prime Video?. In an increasingly unbalanced financial landscape, specialist coaches have allowed clubs to level the playing field, at least in some respects; just look at Brentford.
In 2012 Matthew Benham, a former derivatives manager and lifelong Brentford fan, bought the club and saved them from extinction before helping guide them from League One to the Premier League in nine years
Benham hired high performance consultant Rasmus Ankersen as co-director of football alongside Phil Giles, with StatsBomb co-founder Ted Knutson as head of player analysis. Data-driven recruitment and the use of specialist coaches were two key components of Benham’s strategy for both Brentford and his other club, Denmark’s FC Midtjylland, which he bought in 2014.
Prior to his move to Tottenham, Vio had joined Brentford from AC Milan in the summer of 2015. He was at Brentford with kicking guru Gronnemark and kicking coach Bartek Sylwestrzak. Their job titles drew derision from traditionalists, until their results were undeniable. All three also worked with Midtjylland, who became Danish champions for the first time in 2014-15 and, significantly, 25 of their 65 goals were scored from set pieces thanks to the work of assistant coach Brian Priske.
“We had a lot of success in that first season [at Midtjylland], but looking back, we had all the right players in the building,” Benham told ESPN. “I thought, ‘Oh, this will be easy,’ but we soon realized that it’s not as simple as getting a bunch of specialists together. It took us a few years to get it right.”
After Brentford enjoyed an early surge in the 2015-16 campaign, finishing fourth in the Championship play-off table, they were no longer in the top three again, despite being in the top half for four consecutive seasons . But the impact since their promotion to the Premier League in 2021 has been much more evident, with tactician Bernardo Cueva, who arrived from CD Guadalajara in 2020, curating their playbook. Only Arsenal, Liverpool and Man City, all with their own dead-ball masterminds (Jover, Dr Niklas Hausler and Carlos Vicens respectively) scored more goals in such situations last season. In 2022-23 so far, Brentford have scored four goals from set pieces, the fifth most in the division, two goals behind Tottenham.
“The Premier League has focused everyone’s minds, because we could get teams off the field into the Championship,” says Benham. “In the Premier League, you don’t have much of the ball.”
The media narrative has painted Brentford as trailblazers, but Benham insists they are “less sexy” and “think outside the box”, with their success down to “efficiency” rather than “innovation” .
Benham is being modest. Advanced clubs outside the Premier League can claim the trendsetter tag, but in England, Brentford led the way. Gronnemark is now at Liverpool; as well as moving to Tottenham this summer, Vio was with Italy when they won Euro 2020; Andreas Georgson (set-piece coach) moved to Arsenal and is now sporting director at Malmö; Jover left Brentford to replace Georgson at Arsenal; Mads Buttergeit (Midtjylland coach) worked with the Denmark national team at Euro 2020 and is now with Germany.
Teaching players how to kick a ball
A detail that few clubs work on is the ball strike. See the article : Everything was in favor of the United States in the President’s Cup. Now, we know what you’re thinking: why would an elite soccer player learn anything about kicking a ball? It’s about the effect you’re trying to make on the ball, whether it’s topspin or knuckleball, or any other variation.
One step forward Sylwestrzak. As well as working with people when it comes to hitting direct free kicks, Sylwestrzak would collaborate with the playmaker coaches at Brentford and Midtjylland. His job was to teach the players to put the ball in a dish for a teammate.
“At first-team level, technical improvement is almost never on the agenda,” Sylwestrzak, who has also worked at Belgian club Gent, told ESPN. “Most people at clubs are thinking about next Saturday and the next three points. All players, even the best in the world, would benefit from spending more time honing football’s most fundamental skills.”
Listening to Sylwestrzak, it’s clear that it’s not so much a job as an obsession that took over his life and manifested itself in a career. Where we see James Ward-Prowse hitting a free-kick into the top corner, Sylwestrzak sees approach angle and rhythm, upper body coordination, right foot placement, foot position, form of swing, ball speed, spin and trajectory – the whole plan broken down into all its elements.
“I’m obsessed with details,” says Polish-born Sylwestrzak, his anglicized Eastern European accent bouncing with energy. “I have now committed 23 years to the ball, to practice, study and, in the last 13 years, train this skill. I had to do all the analysis myself from scratch, identifying all the technical variables and understanding how manipulate them. to achieve the desired effect in terms of the spin and trajectory of the ball.”
Sylwestrzak has had several successful students, both in English football and in other European divisions, although the names of most of his clients are closely guarded information. His website details the impact of his work with some of these players, including Everton’s Neal Maupay, former Premier League stalwart Craig Gardner (Aston Villa, Birmingham, Sunderland), Danish midfielder Bournemouth Emiliano Marcondes and John Swift of West Bromwich Albion, who scores some spectacular goals. free throws
Like a golf coach, Sylwestrzak observes the swing and provides technical feedback. Each strike type can be broken down and then trained.
“Everything I do is designed to achieve the best possible contact with the ball and the desired spin and trajectory,” he explains. “For example, if you want to apply forward spin, the mechanics of the connection determine everything else.
“The position of the foot will determine the approach angle, the position of the right foot will be determined by the shape of the swing, and that will again relate to the coordination of the upper body. Then you have to consider things such as pacing and focus thrust. It’s all tailored to the player.”
Soccer is 10 years behind U.S. sports
Allan Russell worked as England’s attacking coach at the 2018 World Cup, attracting a lot of admiration. The Scot helped England set a tournament record when he scored nine goals from set pieces, including four from corners. See the article : MLB praises CBD sponsorship as an important change for sports leagues. It provides insight into the level of detail involved in creating complex routines.
“There’s a basic strategy and then there’s the detail needed to make it productive,” he says. “When I lived in the United States, I spent a week with the NFL franchise the Oakland Raiders [now the Las Vegas Raiders], so I was able to see how their specialized trainers worked and what results they got from constant repetition.
“I learned a lot about losing your man and creating space in congested areas. It was incredibly helpful.”
Russell believes there is much more to be gleaned from American sports. “We’re 10 years behind the United States,” he says. “But over time, the make-up of the coaching staff at Premier League clubs will start to look more like an NFL franchise, with more specialist coaches working on the details.”
After a spell as assistant manager at Aberdeen, Russell joined manager Dean Smith’s set-up at Championship club Norwich City this summer, the latest stop in a managerial career in which he has honed his skills of scoring from elite attacking units and individual shooters. The former Kilmarnock player has distilled his own process into a curriculum: Superior Striker.
In June 2012, while playing for Orange County SC in the USL Championship in the United States, Russell founded his attack-specific training program that uses data and analytics to improve performance. When his playing career ended in 2014, he returned to England and focused on his new venture. Soon, he would have the likes of Aleksandar Mitrovic joining him for sessions dissecting the art of scoring goals like never before. The Serbian striker has since scored 103 goals in 186 games for Fulham and nine in seven Premier League appearances this season, breaking multiple goalscoring records along the way.
Gareth Southgate saw an opportunity to integrate Russell’s specialist approach into his England set-up and signed him in 2017. The focus on open-play finishing routines and ball games gave his it paid off when England reached the semi-finals of the World Cup a year later.
“We’re all top players but he’s always coaching us on things that give us an edge,” England captain Harry Kane said.
This advantage is given by a unique understanding of the smallest details. “When I was playing, I wasn’t trained enough in the intricacies that make the difference,” says Russell, formerly of Forest Green Rovers. “It’s a game of small margins. You can throw a lot of irrelevant statistics at the players, but if you can give them clarity, you’ll get their buy-in, for example by telling them to change the angle of their first touch inside the box will improve your scoring chances.
“If their first touch is forward, there’s an 80% chance a defender will hit their shot on goal. If it’s sideways or backwards, that drops to 60% and they have a better chance of getting their shot off. These details make the difference.”
It worked for Conor Washington and Andre Gray in the 2015-16 EFL season. Both forwards reached their highest single-season totals that year while in the Superior Striker program. Gray helped fire Burnley to the Premier League with 23 goals, while Washington scored 15 for League One side Peterborough United, which led to Championship club Queens Park Rangers signing him in January 2016.
If specialist coaches work for forwards, then could they work for, say, a full-back?
“I don’t think so,” says Russell. “Attacking players have a different mentality – there’s an element of narcissism and selfishness that you don’t get with other players, who tend to be more humble. Attackers want to star, so you need a specialist coach who can manage them.”
How specialists can get inside a player’s head
There is a specialist coach who guides all aspects of the offensive game, but football is as much psychological as it is physical and technical.
Coach players all you want, but in-game intelligence is also vital, with the body’s control center, the brain, holding the key to decisive execution. That’s where neuro11 comes in with “neuroscientific data-driven training for elite athletes.”
“It’s about getting specific players before a set piece into the right mindset, doing the things you do on the pitch,” Liverpool boss Jurgen Klopp said at the end of last season. “Everything is measured, they are neuroscientists. It is a very interesting and important new chapter for us.”
Liverpool had beaten Chelsea on penalties to win the FA Cup and Carabao Cup, with Klopp praising the “incredible impact” the neuro11 can have.
You may have seen Liverpool’s Trent Alexander-Arnold wearing hats that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Doc Brown’s lab in ‘Back to the Future’. This equipment measures the electrical activity of your brain when taking free kicks, corners and penalties.
“We record brain activity to give us objective feedback,” explains neuro11 co-founder Hausler. “Then we talk to the player to understand their mental and emotional state during moments of high pressure and stress. We want players to be free of distractions and negative thoughts, so that their decision-making is faster and more accurate.”
In psychological terms, when a player faces a stressful situation such as a penalty, there is a reaction in the amygdala – the part of the brain that detects threats and triggers an appropriate response from the body. neuro11 wants to help players optimize their fear response, using both psychology, the study of behavior, and neuroscience, the biological and chemical processes of the brain and nervous system.
When probed for future possibilities, Hausler remains tight-lipped, but admits, “This is just the beginning. Neuroscience is a gold mine.”
Just the beginning for specialist coaches
The discovery of gold usually brings with it an influx of miners looking for their fortune. Just look at the number of clubs using set-piece managers since Brentford started the trend in England: Arsenal, Manchester City, Manchester United, Liverpool, Norwich and Tottenham, yes, but other clubs such as Leeds United, West Ham and Chelsea have assigned responsibility to members of their coaching staff.
Football, a world notoriously insular and governed by traditions, opens its borders. However, he remains suspicious of outsiders.
Sylwestrzak offers an opinion endorsed by other specialists: “There is still insufficient technical instruction for different aspects of the game. Compared to other sports, football is far behind. In the sphere of the ball, the margins are not small; there are major technical deficiencies at the highest level of the game.”
When a CEO sees deficiencies in the operation of his business, he looks for solutions. That’s what Benham did at Brentford. He accepted that he was not an expert in all aspects of performance and hired the relevant specialists: coaches obsessed with their craft and indifferent to the established practices of football. But as Benham explained, recruitment is only one part of a cohesive strategy.
Whether you’re the underdog looking for an edge or the heavyweight fighting for titles, a specialist’s insight is crucial. “It can be the difference between winning and losing,” says Hausler. “Simple as that.”
