Due
to the length of the speech, at least in blog terms, I have broken it into two
parts. I have some comments about the speech but I will put them in a third
post because the other two are long enough already. The speech begins:
30 years since stopping play. I’ve probably done every job there exists in
professional football and probably in grassroots football as well. It’s amazing that I learn new things every day. There are new experiences. The game changes so rapidly that you never
know it all. You’ve never seen it, done
it. There is always something that is
going to surprise you around the corner and I’ve had a few of those in the last
couple weeks.
The important thing for me is having done a number of
different roles in professional football clubs, also with the national
federation, and also overseas national federations. There can’t be many countries I haven’t
worked in at some point either coaching or advising or consulting. All of that matrix of people who work in the
game, the different roles in the game, it all comes down to communication at
the end. Good communication means all
those parts of the whole work well together. You will have a good organization
and you’ll achieve success. But without good
communication then you always going to have difficulties and things will be
slow. I am going to talk through how
that relates to how we organize the club and how we operate the club and how it
links into the theme of this conference.
We have a fantastic reputation for our youth policy, our
academy, and our ability to develop players.
The interesting thing about that is it’s a legacy. It’s something that everybody who works at
Southampton now has inherited from Southampton history. People always talk about Garreth Bale and
forget Matt Le Tissier, but it goes back to that time when Southampton were
developing stars from a long time ago.
The recent history has multiplied the number of players that come
through the system and also go right through to the top level. Obviously, the biggest exemplar of that at
the moment would be Luke Shaw moving to Manchester United. A boy
who made his debut at 16, who many people thought would be a future star, but
nobody really thought that having got in the first team, he would stay there,
see off two other senior left backs on that journey and become the number one
premiere league left back at 17 years of age and get a massive number of
appearances and perform against big, big clubs.
But Luke is only the latest one off the conveyer belt to
move on. There are bigger numbers now in
the academy—a lot of players coming through.
I always used to say way back in the day that there used to be kind of a
number and rule that an academy was successful if it brought one player through
to the first team. The academy managers
or centers of excellence directors at the time used to hang their hat on
that. I always used to say that’s a
waste of money. We have over 300 kids in
the academy. To think that out of a
moving pool of 300 you might get one every now and again is not efficient. I always felt that you should be looking to
be developing five or six players that get through to your first team and we
seem to have been quite successful at that and I think it’s because of the way
we operate.
There is no secret, but what I would say is there is a
philosophy which under pins the ability to develop young players in numbers. That
philosophy is based on making sure that you absolutely optimize all of your
resources. I find it quite interesting
when cubs struggle, clubs get relegated, can’t pay the wages of their first
team, and they have no choice but to turn to the kids. How many of those kids actually step up to
the mark and come through? A simple
example of that would be Coventry. When
they lost its stadium; they were almost broke; they couldn’t buy players; they
had an embargo; and they had no choice but to turn to the kids and had a
fantastic season. Would they have put
those young players in had they had money to spend? I don’t know the answer to that, but
generally I would say, in my experience, when there is money to spend, you
spend it and you ignore what is right in front of your nose. So part of our philosophy is to make sure we
never lose sight of the fact that we have very, very good players already in
the building. If we give the right
pathway and develop them properly, they’ve got a chance to blossom and come
through.
To create that pathway and to get them through you have to
be very, very well structured, very well organized, and you have to make sure
that your philosophy is adhered to and communicated so everybody knows what it’s
about. It’s not a surprise, it’s
expected. Then everybody works in the
organization in whatever way they work, they work efficiently. And again that comes down to an integrated
structure and good communication. There
is not a secret, but there is a philosophy which underpins what we do. What we then do is very simple. This is just an example of one of our coaches
who is now our under 18 coach.
VIDEO PLAYED BUT NOT TRANSCRIBED.
That’s just an example of a typical academy session. Those boys at the time I think were under 15s. One of the boys I’ve noticed there who sat on
the floor scratching his neck with his bob cut will probably make his debut at
some point during this season as a current under 18 player.
Thanks to Terry and Chris when we started the new academy—which
I will come back to in a minute—five years ago, Chris and I met in a hotel in
London with an idea of having a visual aid that was very simple easy to follow
but was high quality and Chris and Terry developed the coaching manual which
you would have heard of I hope. What
used to happen with us is I’d get 300 emails, letters, telephone calls from one
source or another every month saying “can we come and watch the academy? Can we see how the academy train? Can we come to a training session?” If we were to allow it, then all of our
academy sessions would have 300 people stood around the outside. To develop players is the big priority, not
to demonstrate what we do. The coaching
manual fulfilled a need which was we take our academy out so people can see
what we do. Our sessions are simple—very,
very high quality production. That was what
is called a “nugget” which just a quick look at a particular coaching session
in the organization and a visual on it.
The byproduct of that is every player in our academy from 8
years of age to the first team is issued with an Ipad. They have access to that resource all the
time so they can prepare before they come to a training session. They can revise what they have done by
looking it up afterwards. The parents can
see what is going on, what they are doing, what the messages are, and they can
help to reinforce that at home. So it has
given us a fantastic coaching resource as well as being able to demonstrate to
the wider world we do what we do. And
that’s why there is no secret because if it was a secret we wouldn’t want to do
it. We would want to keep that in house but its good quality basic coaching—well
resourced and well planned and well organized with an integrated structured
curriculum.
We feel that most of our kids the best learning they do is
actually by doing it by training so long hours on the pitch. We organize our
club in such a way that the boys get a lot of coaching hours. But secondary to that is visual learning so
it’s important that they have a chance not only to take part and do things but
to see those things in action. So apart
from this as a coaching resource which shows the structure and organization of
our sessions, gets the key points over that they can keep referring to, all of
their sessions are filmed and they are filmed in such a way that they can then
be fed back as feedback to the players so each of them can look at their own
clips they can look at their own training clips and they can also look at their
match performance clips any time they like via the coaching app which is on
their iPad—the iPads that they are given and of course the coaches can sit with
them in little groups and go through those things with them and support that
feedback. That’s been a fantastic tool
for us the ability to see yourself and analyze yourself. They have a period every week where they have
to go through their clips and put into their own files their feedback, their
own commentary, their own ideas about how they are preformed and so on. Every game before the game they identify
their own personal key targets for that game and the coach identifies team
targets for that game and then they debrief them afterwards, but the debriefing
is done visually through the resources that we’ve got and the technology we can
use.
What it really boils down to at the end of the day is
excellent players, excellent coaches, excellent facilities all brought together
with an integrated curriculum that is based on a firm philosophy.
In terms of excellent players, that comes down to talent
identification. That’s one thing I think
that really underpins everything we do is our talent ID program. We have a big scouting department. It’s structured in such a way that the scouts
specialize in a particular type of scouting.
They are trained and developed in order to make sure that they are
profiling the players they watch in a way that we believe they need to be
profiled to come into the academy and move forward. So there is a lot of hard work that goes on
in that respect.
The scouting and recruitment department is also the analysis
department. Natasha [Patel?] who has
been here this week works in the most fantastic facilities that you can
imagine. It’s like mission control in
there. Their place has been specifically
designed for purpose but she deserves it because he has spent the last three
years working in a Portakabin. They did
the job fantastically well before and now they can really get to grips with it.
But that was something we felt was worth the big
investment. The reason is that our
scouting and talent ID is not simply the old fashion scout on the side of the
pitch picking out the best or most effective player. It’s the modern scouts that sit on the side of
the pitch identifying potential and being able to almost fast forward to what
he thinks a player will be with the coaching and development we put in in 3, 4,
5, 6 years of time.
Everyone can spot the 9, 10 year old who is bigger, stronger,
and quicker than everyone else and
scores 25 goals in that age group who really should be playing higher up
physically. Everyone can spot that. The parents on the line know who the most
effective player is. They watch them
every week and know that he beats everybody and scores lots of goals. What is very tricky is looking at the rest of
the team and working out he’s very thin, he’s a bit skinny but he looks like he
has a got the understanding and potential to go in years to come. So that is the first point.
The second point is doing some due diligence on him. Continually tracking players that are
identified. Continue monitoring them to
a point where you want to now bring them in and see how they respond to the
work of our coaching.
We have two academies.
We have one in Bath University which is part of the Bath University schools
complex where we produce all our Commonwealth gold medalists and Olympic gold
medalists and so on over the last few years in different sports. So that cross fertilization of high level
elite environment with everything it brings with it and the elite development
of young players is a terrific tool for us to use. All the resources that are at Bath are
replicated at our main academy at Southampton and that enables us to get really
into the bits and pieces of talent identification. So when they’ve been spotted in their own
environment, we’ve done the due diligence, we feel that they have got the
potential to be a player, we bring them into our talent development centers and
around Bath University we have 8 talent development centers and we have the same
around the Southampton one. We are just
about to open a new one on the fringes of London. We cover the whole of the south east. It is very rare that we will go to the
midlands or the north to scout and the reason for that is that we believe that our
success is based on actually being the best in our own environment. So south of London right the way down to Cornwall
and across to the Kent coast is where we feel we specialize. We dominate that area and we get the best
players very young in that neck of the woods.
We feel that if we concentrate and focus on that rather than the method
employed by some other clubs which is to spread their wings further and their
tentacles further also to recruit players who are already in the system by paying
compensation . We do that very
rarely. What we try to do is make sure
that there is no kid in our region that we haven’t seen.
Coming to the development centers, they spend six weeks
working with the coaches and the sport scientists and they are then profiled. They are—through that six week period—either
identified as being ready to move into the academy or they will be invited back
for further a period of time to maybe just reinforce or confirm things. Once they go, they are never forgotten. So they come through that and they don’t
actually make it into the academy 8 or 9 or 10, they are consistently monitored
because they may come in at 12 or 13 or later.
So they are never forgotten. They
are returned back to the environment they are in and no big promises made to
them in the first place. They understand.
It’s well communicated that they’ve got an opportunity, but we are not
promising anything, but we will always tabs on how you do in the future. That goes all the way through to 16 where we
have a second chance program.
We have another scholarship program down at Bath and another
scholarship program at Southampton. Not the
academy scholarship program but the second chance scholarship program where
there are 16 year olds who have either been released at other clubs or haven’t
made it into our academy, but still show talent who are brought in on a full
time basis. They study the same course
that our scholarship boys do in the academies and they have the same
curriculum.
One example is a boy who came through that system; came into
the academy; did very well in the academy; unfortunately, he was a left back
and the same age as the left back we’ve got and we have another left back
younger than him who also plays for England so there was no pathway. And we have always had this philosophy that
we create a pathway. If we can’t create
a pathway, we will help you move elsewhere.
He just signed a two year professional contract to Aston Villa.
So it shows that sort of parallel system working. If they come through that system at 8, 9, 10,
11, 12 through the development centers and then are registered with the academy
they then go on to the full time education program. We have seven teachers in the club full time
at our club. The boys do all of their
education and academic work with us which gives them more time on the training
ground. We don’t have a school. They are still registered at their normal
school and from 12 years of age or under 12 they come in once a week. They stay with a host family which gives them
two days training, one day of education with us and that increases 2, 3, or 4
days until they are 16 and are full time and move on to the sports deployment
course.
We have 85 host families in and around the Southampton
area. We find that a better way of
developing the kids than putting them into a hostel or boarding school
environment. They develop very strong
relationships with the boy’s own family and some of those relationships like Alex
Oxlade-Chamberlain still go on now. The host family and his parents are good
friends. They go out to dinner. They meet and Alex is always visiting them so
we found that socially that works a lot better than putting them all in one
residential block which we used to do.
The communication between parents, host family parents, the
educating teachers, and the coaches is paramount. You have to have a structure where all of
those people are focused on developing the young player for professional
football. We are not embarrassed to say
that. Everything is geared to that. However, we always have 100% pass rate on
their B. Tech [?] courses to the level where if they don’t make it with us they
have a university entrance qualification. We are quite proud of that, but it
also accesses more money for us as well to develop the academy so that is useful
as well. However, we find that if you
develop all those things together we think it makes for a better professional.
We have a brand now. Southampton academy is a brand. Kids that don’t make it with us but have
spent some time with us always seem to do very, very well when they move
on. Very rarely do we release scholars
who do not get a professional contract somewhere else. We put all our efforts into making sure that
happens.
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