METHODOLOGY
valuable learning points for others. This valuable insight also enabled us to understand more about the quality of these working processes, and what they mean for youth academy directors. The interviews also allowed us to delve more into the ‘why’ you do ‘what’ you do, and ‘how’ you conduct your daily activities . We used some general topics like sport policy, scouting, development of players and coaches, to name just a few. You can read more about these interviews from page 70, while the interviews themselves start on page 76. As an additional step, we also met with Liam Brady, an expert within the youth academy landscape and long-time former Director of the Arsenal FC academy, to discuss our results. His opinion is precious for understanding how youth academy experts perceive this overall project. You will find Liam Brady’s influence at various points throughout the publication. Finally, we have interpreted data and triangulated them into final conclusions, which you can read on page 148-149. We sincerely hope that the results and conclusions using this methodology will be helpful in your daily work as youth development practitioners and experts. Ultimately, we hope you will be able to develop or enhance your operations. Perhaps this methodology will be also useful for club management to look at their academies from a new perspective, and better understand what youth academy experts are dealing with.
These 12 QAs help us to assess the quality of the youth academy ecosystem and each academy within it . What are these 12 QAs? Which ones are most frequently used and intercorrelated? These questions are answered in the next few pages, but we found this approach acted as a learning point for us to understand the relation and hierarchy between the QAs, and therefore the effectiveness of academies across Europe. To reach our goal, we needed to identify a criterium for assessment. That criterium was threefold: working processes, logistics, and strategic documents which may occur in daily routines in youth academies. The working processes consist of questions that relate to the development path of a football player, the development of coaches, other employees, playing style and entire teams of players, interaction with other
All working processes were allocated to one or more QAs. Although each working process is linked to all QAs to a degree, we have segmented them on the basis of primary connection. Finally, we have identified how many working processes fell into each QA, and identified that some QAs are covered more densely than others. We used two research methods, survey and interview, to collect our data. Our main interest when conducting the surveys was to determine which of the working processes were used by each youth academy, as well as what their logistics looked like, and how formally they were used . You can read more about our surveys from page 44. To analyse these surveys, we used descriptive and inferential statistics. For the descriptive analysis, we identified which working processes are most used across academies in Europe, before looking at which QA they fell into, and identifying which QAs were most represented. For the inferential statistical analysis, we again assessed which QA these working processes fell into, classified them using inferential statistics and statistical correlations to see which processes had the most correlation (significance level 5%; those marked with ** have significance level 1%) with others. Interviews enabled us to go into more detail, and we were fortunate enough to be able to talk with some of the best and most interesting academies across Europe. We found that every academy regardless of its size has some
departments, community, schools, academic community, and how decisions are made. They start with Talent Identification (TID). An example of a question in this working process is: 'do you have a partner club?' The questions then follow the journey of youth academy development, and finishes with the transition to first team or leaving the club. These questions relate more to organisation and strategy than technical, so the ‘what’ rather than the ‘how’ or ‘why’.
Talent identification › E nvironment perspective › C lub perspective Youth academy › P laying style › P layers › C oaches › T eams › S couting THE ORDER OF WORKING PROCESSES
› Sale of players › Infrastructure › Staff › P arents › P layer agents
› School and academy community Transition from youth academy to first team › Selling/leaving the club › O ther departments › D ecision making
1 Correlation is a statistical measure that expresses the extent to which two variables are linearly related (meaning they change together at a constant rate). It is a common tool for describing simple relationships without making a statement about cause and effect.
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YOUTH FOOTBALL 2021-23
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