Two Coaches & a Coffee

Season 2, Episode 45

• Darren Burgess & Jason Weber • Season 2 • Episode 45

Share episode

Drop us a message and let us know what you'd like us to discuss!

How do top-tier sports teams navigate the complexities of continuity and youth development amid the ever-changing landscape of management changes? Join us as we promise to uncover the secrets behind this challenge alongside the insights of our special guests, Darren Burgess and Jason Weber. From the bustling PSPA event in Fort Lauderdale to the hallowed grounds of the English Premier League, we journey through the intricate web of staff structures and philosophies that bind first teams and academies together. Inspired by a Russian axiom, we ponder the radical idea of placing top coaches with the youngest players and share our takeaways from the dynamic hiring processes within academies.

Our exploration doesn't stop at football; we venture into the realm of AFL training methods, weighing the merits of a five-day training week against the physical demands of elite athletes. Through this lens, we draw fascinating parallels with basketball and soccer, debating the benefits of skill repetition and tactical periodization. Our recent UK adventures underscore the relentless preparation required for back-to-back matches and the cascading effects of global football calendars, including the looming 2034 World Cup in Saudi Arabia. Emphasizing the transformative power of overseas visits, we highlight how face-to-face interactions can elevate professional growth and networking, setting the stage for our upcoming discussions in Sydney. Tune in for a rich tapestry of insights, experiences, and anticipations that promise to enrich your perspective on the world of sports.

SpeedSig Intro

Sponsored by SPEEDSIG.com

Jason Weber:

G'day and welcome to Two Coaches and a Coffee Darren Burgess and Jason Webber. Here with you again, Darren. We're split by enormous distances.

Darren Burgess:

We are. Normally it's just one side of the country to the other, but now it's one side of the planet to the other. You're in Fort Lauderdale, fort.

Jason Weber:

Lauderdale, florida. We're here for the PSPA Professional Soccer Performance Association, which is the main conditioning body of the MLS in the Major League Soccer in the US. I'm here to present tomorrow. We've just landed.

Darren Burgess:

I'm in a time warp Dave Tenney and Garrison Draper. Two outstanding practitioners.

Jason Weber:

Garrison's the, I believe, the president of the PSPA.

Darren Burgess:

Yes, yep.

Jason Weber:

So he's leading the charge there. Adam Parr is from the. He's the head of performance, from physical performance, from Charlotte. He's, I think, the secretary, the guy kind of running it on the ground. So, yeah, I'm sure it'll be very interesting tomorrow.

Jason Weber:

Considering I've just come from a blazing 10 days in the UK racing around, I will say I had the very good pleasure to get on site and spend significant time with some of the biggest teams in the English Premier League, which was fantastic. It was fantastic, it was awesome. I won't deny that. But what I would say, very, very interesting, looking at the staff, some of the levels of staff which you would be familiar with. So one of the meetings I was at was scheduled to go for an hour and it went for three hours, which was actually quite common, but we had all first-team performance staff, all academy, all women and all medical. Great discussion, great discussion and it was interesting to see as the conversation, as the meeting, like my presentation, finished. Have you got any questions? Blah, blah, blah. Then people stayed back and it's really interesting to see get perspectives on where people are at and you get some really hands-on medical guys who I had the privilege of meeting.

Jason Weber:

Certainly you mentioned it. I'll call him out Chris Morgan. Awesome at Liverpool, I thought, and this is not. I do have a go at physios periodically, but I thought no, chris was awesome. Like his understanding of running mechanics was first class was first class. Um, so when you look at how that would integrate into a performance we talked about performance medical model I thought he was awesome.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, he's a good man, Chris. I've had a fair bit to do with him, as you know, and worked with him at both Liverpool and Arsenal, and yeah, he's doing some really good things. He sees it nice and practically keeps things simple. And yeah, he's as good as there is, I think, in the UK from a physio point of view and an unbelievably good dry sense of humour.

Jason Weber:

Yeah, he was pretty straight. I will say I think somehow you'd probably be more attuned to this. But we've got bigger staff now in Australia. But as these places get bigger and bigger, what I saw in one facility, one team I won't call a team out but there seemed to be a disconnect in philosophical approach between the academy structure and then the first team structure, and it's not the first time I've seen it. I kind of wonder what's your take on that mate? What's the influence all the way down the chain, like hey, this is our central philosophy for whatever xyz, or do you think the academy's run off on their own a little bit?

Darren Burgess:

yeah, yeah, in theory. So the sporting director, in theory, um likes to keep things uniform at a club, but you can imagine a new manager comes into the first team environment and they say, no, I want to play my way and I want to play this way. And if you take, say, liverpool's example and I don't know this, but let's just speculate that new manager comes in after Jurgen Klopp and maybe the academy was aligned with the way Jurgen Klopp wanted to play football. And then new manager comes in and says no, I'm going to do it this way. The academy probably shouldn't and probably doesn't change their whole philosophy based on a new manager at the top, because the average lifespan of a manager in the first team is under 18 months.

Jason Weber:

Is that true? 18 months Under 18 months, there's a voluntary job choice for it.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, so the academy probably shouldn't change the way they do things. So, yeah, I think it's hard to get a continuity throughout the entire system, particularly when, in the first team, they might bring in their own people and so they have a very different philosophy. So, yeah, it's probably prudent for the academy to almost run itself using sound principles and all that sort of stuff, and not necessarily be influenced too much by what's happening in the first term.

Jason Weber:

So I had this conversation. I was invited to a pub. Well, my English lawyer took me out. We went out to Richmond and watched Chelsea and Spurs play at a pub on Sunday afternoon, lovely afternoon. But we were just talking in general and we were talking about academy structures and setups and he's a very big Chelsea fan and so he was telling me all about the structures and, being King's Council, which is the highest level of legal in the UK, he had his fingers in all sorts of pies, so he's telling me about how this works. And I sort of said look, one of the things I do see in academies and this is not only in the UK but I've seen everywhere is we often put our youngest coaches with our youngest players. And if you read the old Russian axiom is the best coaches with the youngest players. So you should put your oldest coaches down there to get a consistent system, a consistent feed through. What are your thoughts on that mate? You've done a lot of hiring. What do you see?

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, I'm actually hiring someone at the moment who's for Western United, who I do a little bit of work for, and I spoke to him yesterday for the academy system and he's adamant. He wants to, you know, stay in that system and really determined to work with kids and youth. And you know guys like Nathan Parnham and those guys have made careers out of staying within the youth system. It's traditionally seen as a stepping stone into the first team.

Darren Burgess:

So, yeah, you can see why a lot of people go down that path. However, if you can get a specialist, a youth specialist, they're worth their weight in gold, because it really is a bespoke way to train and you just can't. It's like saying, oh no, you just try and apply men's principles to women training. That's a disaster.

Darren Burgess:

No no of course, completely different athlete and with individual requirements. So yeah, I agree with you With the best will in the world, you hire people who are youth specialists. It's very hard to determine whether someone's a youth specialist because they'll say, yeah, I want to stay in the academy, because I want to ultimately work in the first team. But I think the plan is definitely look at people's track records. If they've been successful with youth, then they'd be certainly the favourites to hire.

Jason Weber:

Getting somebody who has experience into academies, I think, is a win, because not only have they not got their eye on the next step up how do I get out of here but they're often focused on that speciality. As you suggested, I spent over the last couple of years while I've been getting speedy up and going. I spent probably three years running a private school in Perth. I think it made me again a better coach, spending time with younger athletes and working that development thread through. But highly rewarding, highly rewarding.

Jason Weber:

Yeah, it's definitely a, like you say, a niche skill set, but, um, it really does force you to uh, um, to coach more hands-on and to coach more thoroughly and what we, what I, what I did with the school and what I've subsequently since I left and we got someone else in to take over me is have older guys in there. So not having 24-year-olds coaching 15-year-olds because there is something about young men just having an older figure to work with than having other kids. Because one of the other comments I would say that I've seen over recent times is some of the younger conditioning coaches just reinventing the wheel. Sometimes I feel like we're stuck in a rut. We're not so much not progressing, but I seem to see things coming back around into trend and it's like hang on, we've been through all this. We've been through this 10 years ago. How do we not, have we not, moved on from this?

Jason Weber:

You know whether it's travel, whether it's the number of training, you know what do you do on. You know T plus two, game plus two, game plus three. Take, for instance, the AFL Do we train one day a week? Do we train two days a week, which was certainly a thing last year?

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, yeah, it's an interesting one. Let's have a quick pause on that. I presented yesterday morning at 3.30am my time, jason, so I was doing your hours to the Finnish Football Association around planning for pre-season. They have quite a unique pre-season in football speak in that they have 13, 14 hours, 13, 14 weeks even, which is unusual for football. We have lots of breaks in there for cup games and for, you know, for Christmas and things like that. So it's a bit of a unique strategy. And we talked a lot about tactical periodisation and where that might fit into a pre-season and MAS versus anaerobic threshold training and then the Norwegian method which is in vogue at the moment with triathletes and marathon runners. It's this tactical periodization model which is gaining, or has gained, a lot of traction. A lot of their managers go five days on the bounce and in Australia we talk about training two days. So it's interesting that the broad philosophy of tactical periodisation methods and the most common one is to do four days leading into a game. How do you reckon they'd go in the AFL?

Jason Weber:

Wouldn't work. Question is how long they'd do it. I mean my short tenure in A-League, we did similar things. We trained multiple days back-to-back and for the most part it's doable if there's a balance in the task being set. We had a period where we did this one drill repeatedly, which was short passing, but in my opinion the load was so high on calves we ended up popping three calves doing it. I said to the coach can we just, can we just not do as much of that drill? We can still do a good portion of it, but you're doing it every single day, mate. That's not. That's got nothing to do with any form of periodisation. That's just ramming home the one thing you think you like.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, it's a, it's so common in soccer, global football, we'll call it that. I just don't know that a transfer and the players in AFL it would take such an adjustment, even though I think they could physically do it. It would take such an adjustment in philosophy from players and coaches. At the moment most teams in the AFL are doing, I don't know, probably 13, 14k sessions, somewhere in around the 10 to 14K sessions. So loading is fine. It's just the spreading out of that load over the week rather than on individual days which soccer players have been doing for years and coping yeah, and it's the same, you know.

Darren Burgess:

I know there's contact in AFL but traditionally before Christmas there's not a lot of contact in AFL Yet. Pre-season in soccer we would regularly do 45, 50 Ks in the first few weeks of pre-season soccer. We would regularly do 45, 50ks in the first few weeks of pre-season, including friendly games, and that would be training every day and sometimes doubles. I just don't know that it would fly in the AFL. It would be too much of a radical change.

Jason Weber:

I think my experience of going to 50K in the AFL probably wasn't ideal With younger players and probably surface we ended up with some bone issues. But what do you think if the AFL? Let's say again, let's just posit the question If we did that, do you think there's a value? So let's say you're not at the Crows, you're at whatever, you're at your own AFL club. We've got a little bit more flexibility. Would you choose to go five days a week and spread it around, and if so, what would be the benefit you think above what we're currently doing?

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, I probably wouldn't. I don't think there is a massive benefit in doing it that way. Yeah, even in global football, I'm not sure that five days on the bounce is better. I'd rather load up on some of those days and allow some adaptation time and recovery time. That would be my way of doing it. What about yourself?

Jason Weber:

A bit out of our spectrum, but one of the things I've heard from coaches in different sports is we've got to touch the football, we've got to touch the football right. So, five days a week, if I'm touching the football every day and we acknowledge that global football is a higher skill sport than AFL, would you concur? I would Yep. So is that part of it? Does that give us more touches on the ball? Is it something we could benefit from? That's the only question. I think physically we'd struggle, because I don't think if you spread the load in an AFL week across the week, I think you would struggle to get some of the duration you require to run. We need to run this time of year, you need to be running big sessions.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, I think so.

Jason Weber:

Because we're going to do 15K in a game.

Darren Burgess:

I think the thing about AFL and this is probably more tradition than logic, which is pretty common I have found that if we take basketball and I haven't had a heap to do with basketball other than some consulting or if we take, um, uh, soccer, certainly they don't get bored with practicing the basic skills, whereas in afl, um coaches, players, by and large, tend to go on, you know, just doing handball, basic handball drills, um, basic ground ball drills. No, no, players will get bored. We need to do something else. Players will get bored when it no, just keep doing the basics. Like, how often do you think I don't know, and I'm making this up steph curry gets bored of shooting frees? I'm pretty sure he wouldn't.

Darren Burgess:

Now I understand there is a load in practicing the basic skill of afl, which is kicking, and so there's a load going through the hips and I get that, yep, but the more we expose it, the more we can adapt to it. And there's no load in handballing. And you've got, you know, we can name some players who are not outstanding kicks but are incredible handball players who've won best and fairest and brown lows, and you know, based on their ability to execute that skill under pressure. So it does frustrate me when you're working with coaches and players and I just get bored of doing those basic drills, whereas in soccer it certainly isn't the case, and you can come up with a million ways to practice your passing and practice your first touch, which is just vital.

Jason Weber:

Yeah, and I mean that's decision-making in sport in general. I mean, I think AFL could probably and I've often thought like given that I was involved very heavily in the process for an AFL team recently, I had gone through the process in my head of saying, well, what would we do? What would I be recommending? We're coming into a season, We've got X, Y, Z players. What would we be doing?

Jason Weber:

I think there's a really strong argument for rotating the types of week you run in a tactical periodization type macro, so that you might have, like, where your physical load's not super high, we overload those skill type things. So we might train every day because we don't have super high load, but we're going to touch that football all the time. Again, it was just a concept that you'd have to work out with coaches if they fit into that, but I think that there's ample ways to cut it a little bit differently. I think there's things we could learn from global football. No question, I mean that's the thing that's impressed me the most.

Jason Weber:

So, spending the last 10 days in the UK speaking to a lot of people, a lot of Speedsie clients, a lot of new people, but just the three games, Like we played Saturday. We're coming out Wednesday and we're going Saturday again and the preparation, like what's gone in before that to have them ready. Like most teams, you say well, who's cycling through? And they go. Not all this is cycling, we're just going, we're just sending the same guys again because we need to win.

Jason Weber:

Yeah, yeah, it's tough, tough and as you know, it's a tough, tough market.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, it's a different way of looking at things than what we've traditionally looked at it down here and it takes a different mindset. And there's a lot of people that go over there and think, oh no, I'll do it better and I'll change their mindset. But when you get in there and see it's just relentless. And part of the stuff that we're doing with Beef Pro is to try and protect the players a little bit.

Jason Weber:

I don't see how you're going to though.

Darren Burgess:

That's a tough one when you've got competing bodies. I just saw, literally minutes before this, we were recording this podcast, which started at 8.30am Adelaide time, to give people some perspective on when that is. And FIFA have just announced, have confirmed the Saudi Arabia World Cup in whenever that is. And so you've got these global competing bodies of FIFA and UEFA and 2034 World Cup.

Darren Burgess:

It is in Saudi Arabia, which will have to be in wintertime because of the temperature, and so that'll just smash the calendar even more, and new FIFA Club World Cup, and I could talk about it all day, but it's business, mate, like at the end of the day, to be blunt, it's business.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, but the players ultimately and this will, like I said, it could take another half an hour Ultimately, if the players are injured, and we saw in the World Cup in Qatar that players who sustained tiny little injuries missed in the World Cup in Qatar, that players who sustained tiny little injuries missed the entire World Cup. There's not that lead-in period like there is in a European Summer World Cup. So you're not going to see the best players in Saudi Arabia because they will be injured and they'll also be massively fatigued, so you're not going to see the best players um being our best and then what we did see after the World Cup is more injuries and a lot of declining in the players, because there was just this mental letdown after the World Cup.

Darren Burgess:

So they go back to their clubs and they go. Oh well, you know, you know I'm not. It's not as important as playing for my country in the World Cup. So, yeah, any way you cut it, it means a lesser product for the fans. So if they want business, they want fans to keep turning up and buying money. They need to make sure the integrity of the product is high.

Jason Weber:

Well, just as we pull up stumps, as we reach our time, I will make one comment, absolutely ubiquitously, about the car parks at EPL clubs. Holy moly, mate, I have never there are cars there. I've never, I mean, I've heard of a Bentley, I've seen, but there are cars there that you look like, mate. To be frank, they all look like Batmobiles to me. They are all trucked up, dark, they look like they could hover, like they could fly, like unbelievable, mate. I've seen cars. I think they outdo the cars in the NFL car parks by quite a margin.

Darren Burgess:

Well, it's a little different to the AFL car park, which is traditionally full of utes For those overseas. Have a look up what a ute is, because they probably wouldn't know.

Jason Weber:

Well, yeah, farm car, but very, very impressive car parks, mate, Very impressive. And I will say that the security to get into some of these places is unbelievable. Short of passport and fingerprinting, which I had to do today to get into the US, there's some pretty cool security getting in, I mean.

Darren Burgess:

Well, you've got to think about it in terms of the value of the assets in the building. Oh, they're unbelievable. Yeah, Imagine what you would have if you had a I don't know. You've just been at Liverpool's car park. So let's say, if you had a Aussie probably $1 billion house, you'd probably want some security there.

Jason Weber:

Oh, mate, it's impressive. But you look at the scope of the fields and the infrastructure and, like I said, the staff, the academy, the women's, the men's, it's all happening. They are big, big, big businesses. And I think you're maybe just to finish off like if you think you're going to come from Oz and get up there and change the world. I know there's plenty of guys up there doing it, doing their best, but they are big, big machines. There's no question about it. Very impressive.

Darren Burgess:

I want to put on the agenda the value of overseas visits for people in the industry. You know they always say I want to go and do a tour of America or do a tour and catch up with different people rather than spending time on the phone with people. Let's have a chat about that for CPD.

Jason Weber:

Will do, mate. We'll probably, with any good fortune, we'll do the next one when I'm in Sydney back next week, which will be awesome. I look forward to being back on Aussie time. But to all our listeners however innumerate they are hopefully growing we wish you the best and we'll speak next week.