THE 12 QUALITY AREAS FRAMEWORK
32 Do players receive learning support from the club, e.g. access to teachers or help in understanding the study materials they receive from school? 31 Are any non-coaching staff (e.g. psychologist, HR, pedagogue...) involved in delivering any team-level activities for players within their normal weekly schedule? 31 How many separate training fields do you have? 29 Do you have a full-time sport psychologist at youth academy? 28 Do you maintain a database with information about potential youth players (technical, tactical, physical, psychological, sociological, pedagogical)? 27 Do you have full-time individual for education at your club's youth academy? 23 Do you have full-time individual for welfare at your club's youth academy? 23 Do you have defined regular goals or KPIs for academy staff apart from sport results? 22 How many of those are full-sized? (i.e. official pitch size) 22 Do you have a full time match analyst at the academy? TOP 1O MOST INTERRELATED WORKING PROCESSES
Productivity, containing 133 instances. This is almost double the number of Talent Identification, the second on the list, with 78. This is clear evidence that for clubs the results of the academy’s work and the mechanisms by which
they bring talents into their system are the most crucial items on the agenda . Other important Quality Areas are Human Capital and Cognitive Care, which
sophisticated and comprehensive structure for viewing football academies and their key focus areas. Further developing this as a practical tool for academies wishing to improve their standing could be an interesting undertaking, especially if it’s combined with a focus on knowledge exchange and sharing of know-how Furthermore, once we master the different Quality Areas and the working processes they contain, the next stage of development is to establish success markers and key success factors. Working processes that are more aligned to successful academies can be recognised and analysed, and may offer us a unique shortcut to understanding the unique triggers that lead to very successful outcomes depending on club/academy's strategic goals. Finally, we should also underline that this is a dynamic process, which depends greatly on the environmental conditions. So, to remain relevant, we should constantly re-evaluate the professional football youth development environment and keep checking the validity of the 12 Quality Areas framework, and the continued significance of the various youth development processes, on a regular basis.
statistically unknown reason appear in the academy as well). The list of the top-10 most interrelated working processes, logistics or strategic subjects appear on the right. This list suggests that education, including non-football content, plus facilities, presence of specific positions such as sport psychologists, educators and welfare support, and keeping track of scouted players for better recruitment, are some of the nodal processes within youth development. This is also supported by our empirical experience of youth development. The interview process We targeted academies based on several factors, such as their level of development, recognised success in the field of youth development, and geographical representation of various regions around Europe. This process saw us collect more than 40 hours of information, and we selected what we felt was the most relevant, and which bits represented examples of best practice. We also used this process to get clarity on data collected from the surveys and statistical analysis.
“Every successful academy will be successful in its own way”
seems logical when you consider that coaches and other backroom staff are the individuals tasked with delivering the various educational and development programmes to the players. This then forms the basis of the transformation work an academy carries out. Understanding which working process are most interlinked gives us an insight into the relations and their position within the process hierarchy, and we searched for these using what is called Pearson correlation analysis (see glossary p148). In this way, we can arrange the working process by their level of influence on all other processes within an academy. It's important to understand that we don't Most interrelated working processes in academies talk about causality (i.e. where one working process is the reason why another working process appears), but correlation (when one working process is fulfilled within the academy environment, other process or processes from some
Future outlook The 12 Quality Areas assessment methodology offers a concise yet
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YOUTH FOOTBALL 2021-23
YOUTH FOOTBALL 2021-23
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