What Happens in Elite Training?

by Stuart James

In pre-season last year, Nashville’s players were called into a meeting room before each training session. It was their first year in Major League Soccer and Gary Smith and his staff had done their homework. MLS expansion teams were renowned for conceding lots of goals and, in Smith’s words, being “a bit of a pushover”.

Head coach Smith, who played for Wycombe Wanderers in the early 1990s, was determined that his Nashville side would be hard to play against but he had much more than that in mind when the players first showed up for training. The Englishman had a vision of a dynamic team that would be full of energy and capable of pressing and winning the ball back high up the pitch. The blueprint was 4,000 miles away in La Liga.

“For six weeks, we had video every day,” explains Smith, who managed Colorado Rapids to the MLS title in 2010. “We had video of ourselves and we had video of a mirror team, and our mirror team was Atletico Madrid. We utilised Atletico for every single facet of our work. So, initially, building out: what does Atletico look like? What role does each individual play?

“We used Coach Paint (a tool that is similar to the technology that the Sky pundits use to circle and move players) so we could identify individuals, midfield players working as a group, what the back line looks like, so we would have defending as a low block, switching play and breaking lines. We had pressing, creation in the final third… but we had video every day, Coach Paint on Atletico, Coach Paint on us, and as we moved, we compared ourselves and our development with what they did. It was so helpful. The template of our work, the identity of where we were going, was crystal clear.”

Nashville, for the record, got to the playoffs in their debut season, conceding less than a goal per game over the course of the season before losing to eventual champions Columbus Crew in a quarter-final that went to extra time (and was 0-0 after 90 minutes). Inter Miami, another of last season’s expansion teams, got all the headlines for obvious reasons but it was Nashville who stole the show on the pitch.

Showing footage before training also forms part of how Pascal Jansen operates at AZ Alkmaar. The 48-year-old, who was promoted to the role of head coach at the Eredivisie club in December, often brings particular players, or departments of the team, into “the cinema room, so that once we’re training, they can go back to what they’ve seen earlier and imagine what I’m expecting on the pitch”.

Outside, Jansen already has every exercise set up across two pitches. Training will last for between 75 and 90 minutes, and the aim is to switch seamlessly between drills, without moving a single disc. “So that we can all work in a high-pace schedule, from the warm-up session until the end,” says Jansen.

Even at the highest level, coaches believe that it is important for players to know not just what they are going to be doing on the practice pitches but why they are doing it. “I tried before training a lot of the time — 95 per cent — to explain what our work will be and what our target is,” says Slavisa Jokanovic, who has managed in seven different countries, including spells that saw him lead Fulham and Watford to Premier League promotion.

“It’s not working for working, without any target. Sometimes, when we do some kind of drill, it’s not clear what is the reason. ‘Why this passing drill?’ ‘This passing drill is because I need this body shape, this orientation, to control the ball’.”

Chris Davies, who has worked alongside Brendan Rodgers at Swansea, Liverpool, Celtic and now Leicester, nods in agreement. “The why, the purpose, is key in any form of teaching and communicating with footballers,” says Davies, the Leicester assistant manager. “Having clear learning objectives or a reason for doing everything is so important because players will do anything, in my experience, if they know there’s a good reason why.

“So if you want to do an hour of pressing, if you can make the players understand the purpose, then they’ll do it. When the training is unstructured and not relevant, they lose interest because they don’t see how it’s going to help them.”

Speaking to The Athletic on the morning after last week’s 2-0 win over Fulham at Craven Cottage, Davies lists five pillars that are central components to every Leicester training session: organization, enjoyment, learning, competitiveness and conditioning.

The level of organization around training sessions at elite level in professional football is a step change from how the sport operated years ago and driven by a periodization program that takes in the physical data provided by sports scientists and the match schedule. Every session has to be designed with that in mind. It is about achieving peak performance but also about minimizing the risk of injury.

A typical Leicester session plan will be broken down into a specific number of minutes for every drill, includes a graphic showing exactly how each exercise should be set up, as well as a clear outline of the method behind it, the key messages that the coach needs to get across during that practice and “progression” ideas to develop it further.

“It’s a very dense session with no waiting around,” explains Davies. “Excluding the warm-up, we will have between three to six sections within the session, and these can vary in content, from technical work, possession, tactical work, small-sided games and full-pitch games.”

The squad numbers of the players taking part are listed on the same session plan, teams are organized in advance for any small-sided games (some managers like to put certain players together to develop partnerships) and a coach allocated to take each drill.

“I like to have different coaches deliver different sections of the session — not just one voice for 90 minutes,” explains Davies. “Some people would disagree with that but for me, if you have the choice… for example, at Leicester, we’ve got Brendan, myself, Kolo Toure, Adam Sadler, and also the goalkeepers with Mike Stowell. It might be (former Arsenal and Manchester City centre-back) Kolo will work on the defensive side, Adam Sadler will take a possession game. I might do some tactical work and then we will finish with a game at the end, which is maybe managed by the manager. I think that is more stimulating for the players and also, we have our different strengths.”

Thomas Tuchel used the term “guided discovery” last week in relation to his coaching style at new employers Chelsea. The German was referring to an approach that encourages players to come up with their own answers and solutions rather than giving instructions that have to be followed. The latter is more commonly known as a “command” style and is no longer so prevalent in the game. That shift is not just because football has changed; players have changed too in terms of their personalities.

As a result, coaches need to think more about how they come across during a session. Davies talks about using a mixture of authority and empathy while coaching.

“Your role is one of a critical friend,” he says. “So you’re always striving for that balance. If you haven’t got authority, it’s a disaster. Because they don’t respect you. Any group of players at any level will sense that, and you’ll just lose organization and quality in the work, but if you’ve got too much authority and dominance, and there’s no empathy and feel for the players, then, of course, you’re not tapping into all the subtleties of human beings and footballers, and all the real key things you need.

“Enthusiasm is a big one, especially in a professional environment where you train every day. There’s fatigue, there’s disappointment, there’s a lot of emotions at this level with big pressure on the players. To be enthusiastic, I think, takes players back to why they play football and the coaches that they first had. I think that’s so important. Having a dour, miserable coach… you might as well not even be there.”

Smith faces some unique challenges in Nashville compared to his experiences in England, where he had a brief stint in charge of Stevenage in 2012 and 2013. The heat and humidity in Tennessee at certain times of the year mean that they need to be finished by mid-morning. Then, there is all the recovery time that is required because of the amount of traveling in MLS as teams criss-cross the US and Canada. On top of that, he has a squad — or a roster, as he describes it — that could include up to 25 outfield players because Nashville don’t have a reserve team.

Training numbers are far more important than some people might imagine; it is not just a case of trying to make a session work with however many players are available on the day. Pep Guardiola, for example, regularly calls up youngsters from Manchester City’s under-18 and under-23 squads to join in with the first team because he needs a certain number of bodies to do tactical and positional work. The same has happened at Chelsea under a succession of managers in the past, even if that sometimes means players taking part in other exercises on the side of the pitch — head tennis, for example — until they are required.

Leicester’s Davies says one of the biggest challenges comes following a match day, when the starting XI are taking part in a low-key recovery session, leaving a small group of first-team players who need more substantial work.

“If you’ve got just five players, then you’re very limited in what you can do, so what we do is link closely with the academy,” he explains.

“It’s a fantastic opportunity for them to get exposure to train and obviously allows us to have our training numbers. One testament to that would be Luke Thomas because he came to train with us during lockdown and it was only through these sessions, not games, that Brendan and myself began to really see his qualities. And then we started to sense that the players could see his qualities too, and everybody knew this was a top talent.

“From that, he makes his debut for the first team against Sheffield United (in July) after just training with us for six months. So the normal theory would be, we’ll watch an under-23 game, we’ll pick out the best players, but look at Luke Thomas — this wasn’t through under-23 football. This was through training time, and training time where we could test and challenge him. He grew in confidence and he got his opportunity, so that can be the pathway.”

“If I close my eyes, I have an image of how my team should be performing on the pitch when we have possession, in transition, and when we don’t have possession,” AZ Alkmaar’s Jansen says.

Jansen is talking about his philosophy or, to borrow another term that some of his fellow coaches use, the “game model”. He mentions courage, hunger and discipline, and his desire to have three or four players with “adventurous minds” to take the game to Alkmaar’s opponents. “What I’m looking for in team behavior is domination — we want to dominate games,” says Jansen.

Without that vision or plan — a way of playing that is written down and not just stored in the mind of a coach — training becomes generic and meaningless; a possession exercise for a team that doesn’t seek to dominate the ball, some standard crossing and shooting to fill the time. It is training for the sake of training.

“The problem for some coaches — without being too critical — is that they don’t know what their game idea is, they don’t have a game model, so they can’t train for anything,” Davies adds. “They’re just training for random football, which is fine. Sometimes it’s the most enjoyable thing just to have five-a-side all afternoon but they don’t really know exactly what it is they want from the game, from the team.”

Davies starts screen-sharing during our Zoom call and opens up a document titled “Leicester City’s training database”.

It is a remarkable library of session plans, covering just about every topic imaginable, from one-v-one duels through to compact zonal defending, and at a level of detail and depth that is hard to take in at first.

“This is something where Brendan began the process and I’ve created a session database that is our very own,” says Davies. “The way in which we want the team to play is clear and every single exercise here is relevant, deliberate and linked to the game model we have.”

Pressing, possession and penetration — “the three Ps”, as Davies puts it — drive Leicester’s approach to training.

“Our first idea is to press high in a defensive phase, so defending is always more important than attacking, despite what people say,” Davies explains. “We would always say, ‘Defensive base and then attack from there’. The first idea in defense is to be aggressive, to press. Of course, you have to be adaptable and there is space within the game model for that, but the idea is to press high. Now, that can be worked on in groups of three in little pressing exercises or in a group of 22 on a full pitch.”

Pressing is an interesting subject to explore further with Davies, both in terms of how Leicester coach their players to recover the ball — Rodgers told Jamie Vardy soon after taking over that he wanted him to chase down opponents in central rather than wide areas to ensure he was in a better position to capitalise once possession was turned over — and also how they deal with teams that seek to stop them from playing out from the back.

A couple of years ago, Arsenal pressed high on a Leicester goal kick, so high that Kasper Schmeichel drilled a low, long pass over the top of their defence and Vardy scampered clear to score. That passage of play doesn’t happen by accident.

“Kasper’s got all the lines of pass,” Davies says, when reminded of that goal. “We’ll always see it as, ‘This is an opportunity to start an attack in the best possible way’, so if they’re locked on man-for-man, then this isn’t about us saying, ‘We need to play through’. Of course, the space has changed.

“We always see it as when you’re the protagonist on the pitch, the pitch is too big for the opponent. The effective playing area, if their defensive line is high, is short but of course, there’s space to play into in behind. When the opposition have the ball in their build-up play, the pitch is too big for 10 players, so we have to be very, very clear on what we’re trying to do.

“And if we’re not clear, then we’re going to get exposed. Either they’re going to eliminate us and play in behind, or we’re going to be spread out and they’re going to play through us, or we’re going to have to come back (retreat), and then they’re going to have control. So we train these types of things, and we could even do that in a four-v-four scenario in a little possession (exercise).”

To illustrate his point, Davies pulls up a graphic of a four-v-four game in a tight area and shows what happens when a player starts to press and is unaware of the position of his team-mates. “We might stop (the session) and say, ‘Hey, remember, this (the deepest opponent) could be the goalkeeper, now you (the most advanced attacking player) have gone up to press but you (his team-mate) haven’t followed — you’re back there and now they’re playing through you’.

“In this moment, what we’re saying to you (the most advanced player) is, ‘Look around, no one (any another team-mate) is coming. Come back. Wait. Our first idea is to press high but in this moment, it wasn’t the right thing to do’. This kind of learning is really important because then they start to understand that everything needs to be for a purpose and synchronized. And even little things like that might help a striker to learn something.

“Against Fulham (last week), maybe our striker looks around, he thinks we’re not ready to press, he doesn’t chase, he comes back, and we block the space. These are just examples of how you can link what you’re doing in the game all the way back to the training exercises, and make sure that they’re based around a certain way of playing.”

The need to coach with absolute clarity and structure when a team is without the ball is a common theme among top coaches.

“If we don’t have possession, it’s not a democracy, it’s like communism — we tell you what to do,” says Jansen. “Once we have possession, that’s when we have certain patterns that we train but we also count on your creativity.”

An expression that Jansen uses more than once when talking about Alkmaar’s training sessions is “putting players in situations where they have chaos”. It is something that he likes to do at the start of the week, he says, to “challenge the players” and place them in scenarios “where they feel uncomfortable”.

Asked to explain exactly what that looks like on the training pitch, Jansen replies, “What you have to think about is exercises where maybe two to three, sometimes four, situations, appear. You start off where there is a three-v-two situation and they have a plus-one situation in offense and a minus-one in defense, and that goes on for maybe 15 to 20 seconds. And hen the next situation starts immediately, where the two defenders get either a plus-one and they play three-v-three, or maybe even four-v-three.

“One ball goes out and then you have to scan on the pitch to see where the second or the third or the fourth ball will start; so, creating chaos from different angles, different starting situations. Is the focus on defense? Is the focus on offense? Is the focus on transition? All those aspects will come, so they have to switch in their mind all the time and adjust themselves to being comfortable in a certain situation.”

Smith’s own belief is that the “biggest strides and developments in the team” come from 11-v-11 work on a full-size playing area because the “pitch is clearer”. That is not to say, though, that he is wedded to that type of work. In fact, he starts every session at Nashville by dividing his squad into team departments — defenders, midfielders and forwards — and three different coaches work for half an hour with each section. It is an approach that Leeds United’s Marcelo Bielsa has favored at times and allows Smith and his staff to focus on individual, as well as unit, work in a particular area on the pitch.

“For me and the defenders, it will be footwork, individual defending, relationship defending. It can even be back-four work, defending crosses, clearances — anything that relates to a defender’s job. And likewise, the midfield players and forwards will be doing exactly the same,” Smith explains.

“So, element one (of training) is more individual. Element two is more tactical, and then we’ll go into the third element of the training session, which is more general, more competitive, and maybe bring out the topic that we’ve worked on (during the tactical session) but in a more free-flowing style. It could be a continuation of an 11-v-11 that’s not stopped or it could be an eight-v-eight that’s conditioned to bring out those very same benefits for the group.”

Jokanovic agrees that you “must be working like you want to play the game”, but insists that it is not as straightforward as having a playing philosophy that you take with you to each club and then coach each group of players in. He talks about circumstances and makes the point that when he took over at Fulham, in December 2015, they were 18th in the Championship and just three points off the bottom three. Playing with pragmatism, rather than panache, was the priority at the time and, naturally, that impacted on the type of training sessions he put on.

The characteristics of players, Jokanovic says, is something else that a coach needs to take into consideration. “In the (Carlo) Ancelotti time and (Jose) Mourinho too, I was watching Real Madrid training and I remember in some drills, the ball is coming to Zinedine Zidane and he’s sending a perfect pass 45 meters. This is not useful for us.

“It depends on the situation, it depends on the players, it depends on what is your target. It is not a question about having some book of training sessions and you repeat it. If some of the top elite coaches send me (sessions) and (you think that) within one week my team will (be able to) play like they play, that’s outside of the normal.”

As someone who had a distinguished playing career himself, 64-cap Yugoslavia midfielder Jokanovic brings a slightly different perspective to this subject. For instance, he is well-qualified to talk about how training methods have changed over the years — or not, as the case may be.

“Principally, it’s similar. A pianist, when he starts to prepare himself, probably starts with, ‘Do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si, do’. You can use drills from small kids to (Sergio) Aguero — the highest level,” says Jokanovic, now managing Al-Gharafa in Qatar.

“You need some kind of repetition and this is easy. OK, it’s so easy, but you must be focused and concentrate on your work. You cannot forget anything because a lot of the time, you’re talking about repeating things. Dominating the ball is simple passes, simple control. It’s completely useful for some warm-up, for example.

“In professional football exist players who have huge problems with the control of the ball or with simple passes, or with body shape. You need to observe and add it to this simple exercise. You must start with the basic things.

“A lot of the times, a big mistake of the ex-player is that they ignore something by thinking, ‘Ah, they know this, this is so simple’ but if you ignore these things, you can discover they don’t know. In some cases, some people who didn’t have this football past can have some advantage that they start from zero.

“I have one example. In one game, it’s the last minute. We are winning 2-1, we have a corner and one of the guys is going forward to try to score a goal. They catch us on the counter-attack and score. How is that possible to do this? It’s possible because I didn’t tell them clearly, and so they don’t know.

“So it can be the mistake of the players but it can be my mistake too, for ignoring something basic.”

Asked whether that is where the 11-v-11 work that he spoke about earlier comes in, Smith replies, “Absolutely — but the other thing is, if I do 11-v-11 all the time… I’ve heard stories, as many others have, that Roy Hodgson at Liverpool and Rafa Benitez worked tirelessly at 11-v-11s, and one or two players got completely pissed off with continually doing it. Well, 11-v-11s will give you the best possible structure and appreciation for what you’re going to see on a match day but does it keep the players stimulated? Probably not, because when I’m working with those players up top, the centre-halves are like, ‘That’s got fuck all to do with me’ and they switch off a bit.”

Interestingly, Bobby Zamora told The Athletic last year that Hodgson’s training sessions at Fulham were “quite boring” and repetitive. “We’d do the same practice every single day,” striker Zamora said. “One day he would just talk to the defenders and the other day, he would just talk to the forwards. Pattern of play.”

Yet what seemed banal and tedious to Zamora and others at the time, would be viewed in a totally different light in years to come. “It’s only now that we look back as a team and go, ‘Bloody hell, Roy, you didn’t half do a good job in terms of drilling us’,” Zamora said.

Smith smiles as he thinks about trying to get the “balance” — a word he uses a lot in relation to training — just right.

“Ray Harford was my first manager at Fulham,” he adds. “And Ray always said, ‘One for the players, one for the coach’, and it basically meant, ‘I’m going to give the players something that they enjoy but can stimulate them in an environment that I can also get something out of, and one for the coach’. The one for the coach was, ‘This is tactical. This might be a little bit boring’. I was 16, 17 at the time and that always stuck with me.”

Davies makes an interesting observation when it comes to tactical work more generally and the mindset of the modern player. He explains that Rodgers oversees the tactical side in the days leading up to a match and how “you’re constantly analyzing where the team’s at, the opposition, and the game that’s just coming. And the emphasis is always on, of course, the next game.

“But because of the Premier League, you’re so aware of how the teams play. All the games are on telly, you watch them all. We’re playing Wolves next. We already know all about Wolves without having to go into too much detail. I think that has changed and even the players, to be honest with you; the top players consume so much media and so much football. They’ve got such a great understanding as opposed to 10 years ago in the Championship (when the pair were together at Swansea). There would be some players who I spoke to on a Monday and they wouldn’t even know who we were playing on the Saturday, and they were due to start!

“Someone like Youri Tielemans, who’s got huge football intelligence — he’ll have a really clear understanding because of the way he thinks about football and how he understands the game. Of course, we will build upon that as a coaching staff and the manager will define how he wants us to play, and what Youri really needs to know, but he’ll have a clear understanding of how all the teams in the Premier League play and there will be many players like that, that we have.”

“I mix new technology with smell,” Jokanovic says. “I don’t believe in the past that my coaches had clear information in which moment I was tired but today, it is possible. People bring you some information and know if a player is in a dangerous situation, and you must adapt the work for him for a few days. I completely agree it is necessary and it’s a fantastic tool for all the coaches, but we are not robots. My eyes and my head are the principal tool.”

Technology has made a huge change to elite training. The granular data gathered by sports-science teams informs how coaches work on a day-to-day basis, especially as the numbers are monitored live from the side of the training pitch. “I know in some places, the fitness coach might control it (the length of the training session): ‘OK, we’ve done enough. We’ve got to stop’. That isn’t the case here,” Nashville’s Smith says.

“I work very closely with the fitness coach, who was with me in Denver (at Colorado Rapids). We have a good relationship. He will come up and have a whisper that one or two players are going into the red zone. Sometimes I’ll say, ‘OK, fine. That will do us’. Other times, I’ll say, ‘OK, we need to push on, there’s more work to be done’, and that will obviously be related to either the stage of the week or what I feel is a necessity for the group to be successful.”

The use of video is also invaluable around training. As well as enabling players to visualise what the coach wants from a particular training session before it starts, there is the opportunity to review and reflect afterwards. That goes for the coach’s performance too, says Davies, not just the players’. “Was your coaching position right? Were your points correct? Is there anything you’ve missed?”

Smith’s assistant, Steve Guppy, who was a team-mate at Wycombe, has been using video to statistically analyze the significance of scanning — players “checking their shoulder” to know where an opponent is before receiving the ball. A clip was posted on social media a couple of months ago showing Phil Foden of Manchester City scanning eight times in as many seconds before receiving a pass against Arsenal.

“How many times do you scan in a game? How many times do you do it in training? The more that Steve and the group have looked into it, it is absolutely vital to moments in a game,” Smith says. “Did you take advantage of a creative moment because you were aware of a situation and you scanned well enough? Did we lose possession in a particular area because an individual didn’t scan enough?”

The skill of a coach is to not just identify an area that can be improved but to come up with a practice that can put that right. Alternatively, a coach may have watched something that worked really well in a game — a particular movement pattern that wasn’t necessarily coached beforehand — and come up with a practice that replicates it in training.

“We don’t just say, ‘Right, we’ve got these sessions and that’s it’,” explains Davies. “On Friday, I might come up with a completely brand new game which is related to penetration. We didn’t feel like we ran in behind enough against Fulham, for example, so I’ve got a little game that I just created, and Brendan’s great like that, ‘Let’s try that. This is a really good idea’.”

“And then when we execute that, we watch the video back and we go, ‘Do you know what?, that worked really well’ or, ‘I might change that’. Now we’ve got a brand new session for our database. So be creative, don’t stand still, keep thinking about how you can improve to increase the variety.”

Some will have more left-field solutions than others. Tuchel, who once made his players train while holding tennis balls to get them out of the habit of pulling shirts when defending set pieces, springs to mind. A few years ago, I pointed out to him during a long conversation about coaching in Germany that a lot of managers would deal with that situation by simply blowing their whistle on the training ground and telling their players to stop doing it.

Tuchel explained that he had little time for that sort of coaching because he believes it makes players think they are doing something purely for the manager. He likes exercises, rather than his instructions, to change habits, which is why he once set up a pitch with diagonal touchlines to encourage a different type of pass.

Coaches are treading a fine line when it comes to doing something totally out of the ordinary with players on the training pitch, though, because it can easily leave them open to ridicule.

That said, Tuchel’s use of size-one footballs in training at Chelsea in his first week was not as unusual as some people might imagine. Jokanovic has done the same in the past — “It’s good for technique, for concentration; you must be focused on all the details,” he explains — and Smith says Guppy regularly works with tennis balls with their Nashville players:

“Steve actually uses them for his finishing and some of the technical work. For many years, he’s said that it enhances players and sharpens up technique in front of goal. Whereas with a normal-size ball, you can sometimes get a little bit more flippant with the way that you’re finishing.

“Personally, I’ve not done anything too outlandish. With young players, I’ve worked on techniques and movements with an imaginary ball on the floor, just to sharpen up their balance and their appreciation of changing direction. But with senior players, not too much to that degree.”

Smith pauses for a moment as a story comes to mind.

“I was at an A-license refresher in Wales and, of all people, Thierry Henry was taking a session. The warm-up was something he said he did at (French football’s national training headquarters) Clairefontaine. There were 400 people in the little stand and you could have heard a pin drop. Everyone was like, ‘It’s Thierry!’

“He had eight or 10 players a-side inside the penalty box and he played imaginary handball, like passing the ball. And it was… bizarre, I’ve got to tell you. I mean, I’ve never seen anything quite like it because no one really knew where the ball was.

“He had this microphone on and he was trying to say to them, ‘When you play the ball there, make a movement there’, which made a little bit of sense but in the end, I think the players forgot what team was on the ball, or the imaginary ball. There were a lot of ‘Action Man eyes’ looking at the person next to you in the stand and if it hadn’t have been Thierry, I think there would have been a bit of chuckling.”

Smith shakes his head and smiles.

“I can tell you now, I’d have never got away with it. People would have got up and walked out!”