Talent Identification, Scouting and Athlete Development – Part 1
Scouting and analysing performance in football is harder than it seems. These departments take an important place in the world of football.
Especially, after the pandemic, due to the financial problems, clubs and organisations started to give greater importance to their academies and youth teams.
As a result of this, clubs aiming to minimize transfer costs, aim to select talented and open-to-develop players from the lower age groups and bring them to the team and provide a certain amount of financial support from their sales.
The critical question is how we evaluate the player who is talented and how can we support his or her sportive and athletic development.
The main purpose of this article is to examine the factors that play an important role in the selection of actors and the systems that provide optimised development in terms of psychological, physiological, and physical aspects of the chosen actors.
As a result of the studies, the following factors are very important for the clubs and organisations while evaluating player:
-
- Clubs and their staff have to know and understand significantly the physical development of players.
- Clubs and their staff have to understand the requirements of the game from the academy level to the Professional level.
- Clubs and their staff have to understand the factors that affect performance in a complex game like football.
- The basic needs of players like education and socialization should be optimized by the club.
- Clubs and their staff need to consider players’ social and family relations.
- We will evaluate the physical development of a player in our first article.
UNDERSTANDING THE PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT OF A PLAYER
For years, studies have been done on whether genetic(nature) or environmental (nurture) factors override elite sportive performance.
The majority of the findings revealed that genetic predisposition is an important factor in athletic success. At the same time, genetic factors play a major role in the physiological response to the given training program. YET, we cannot unsee the environmental factors.
As an example of those factors, the role of discipline, social support, psychological resilience, and belonging can be given. HOWEVER, among them, the factors that will stand out according to the importance can be shown as training and practice.
In this context, from the studies and applications, there are two approaches in the branch of talent development. The first one is early specialisation and the second one is the highly planned games which are considered to be important indicators of successful sportive performance. The preferred system here is to combine two approaches, that is, to provide access to elite performance with both early specialization and planned games. The other thing that we have to consider is the maturity and growth spurt* of a player.
*Growth spurt means when the growing speed of an individual reaches its peak point in a certain time. Increasing training at this growth rate peak, which is 10-11 years old for girls and 15-16 years old for boys, can be considered as a good strategy to ensure development. The question is can we give sufficient training when a growth spurt occurs in an individual?
As a result of the investigations, it was revealed that the average training time of players between the ages of 10 and 20 without injury was less than 6000 hours.
How can we increase this number? One of the ways to increase this time is to transfer players from the age of 15 to schools or academies where they can be more active in sports.
This transfer provides players with a significant amount of training time between the ages of 15 and 18 without being negatively affected academically. The increased training tempo also has a significant impact on the adaptation of the game to the physical, physiological, and psychological tempo.
After arranging sufficient training time for the player, the other thing that has to be done is to develop perceptual and cognitive skills. Examples of these skills are strategic thinking, pattern recognition, and visual search behavior. Those skills are the main distinction between elite and nonelite player.
One of the studies on player observation shows that early-developed players are even seen more by the scouts of the clubs. In sports where body size, strength, and power are important, individuals who developed early were observed to have more advantages than late developers.
It was also found that the rate of growth significantly affected aerobic capacity, muscle strength, power, endurance, speed, and body composition.
It was also observed that individuals with early development were reported as talented by the observers and competed in better conditions and in higher leagues.
This situation is called the “relative age effect” by the experts. It is possible to observe this effect in many professional football clubs and organizations. In a study conducted by the author of Soccer Science, Tony Strudwick, and his colleagues at a Spanish club, it was clear that players born in the first and second quarters of the year were represented more than those born in other quarters.
When we look at the result in this section, we can see those early growing players are noticed more by the observers due to their physical superiority. On the other hand, there has been an increase in the rate of dropout from the age of 12 for players who are born in the third or fourth quarter of the year.
Here, the main task of the observers is to measure how much the players are able to fulfil the demands of football rather than their physical superiority due to their early development.
In the next part we are going to examine the requirements of the game and how can we develop skills for those requirements.