Francisco Fardilha, Elite Speaker in our School, completed a PhD in Sport Studies at the University of Stirling (UK), on the topic of creative development in professional football academies. Founder of “Special Interest Coaching Research Group”, Higher Education Academy member, British Association of Sport and Exercise Scientists member, Portuguese society of Sports Psychology member, Teaching Impact Award winner (2019). Former Assistant Academy Manager at LOSC Lille and Technical Director at FC Girondins de Bordeaux Women, he is currently Women´s Technical Director of FC Bayern Munich, in Germany.

TP: Great IQs, gifted people, do they have an advantage?

Francisco Fardilha: Professor Daniel Memmert, the leading researcher on sporting creativity conducted a study, with what are called gifted people. These are people who have an IQ over 130, (IQ, for those of you might not be familiar with is an intelligence quotient), and what he found out actually is that, even though these gifted people, who had a superlative general intelligence, were more creative than their peers, their teammates at initial stages of the study. over time, the less gifted or non-gifted peers caught up with them.

So, in the end there were not really big differences between gifted and non-gifted people when it came to creativity. Which also builds on this idea of non-linearity of development, meaning that it is  very important that academies have patience with young players.

This is a bit like the maturation discussion. Some people will mature later than others. But there’s a problem here, for example, you might have heard of something called the relative age effect. There is a kind of bias which means that players who are born in the first months of the calendar year, are usually selected first than the players who are born later in the year because they tend to develop faster in physical terms. Coaches tend to like players who develop earlier because they usually perform better faster, at least in the short term. Then, they usually re-enter a bit of a vicious cycle because then they get better training, and then it’s almost like a “self-fulfilling prophecy” because they get better opportunities, better training, so naturally they become effectively better than the others. The initial gap keeps widening.  And that’s a bit of a danger with so-called gifted players. And even though I don’t agree with a lot of the things that Memmert defends with regards to sporting creativity, I think this study is really important in the sense that, he shows that over time, things tend to level up. So, giftedness might not be that important for creativity in the long term.

Furthermore, we must also remember that most of the studies on sporting creativity, like most of the studies in sport science in general, are done with either university students or with children that are physical education students. There’s not a lot of stuff done with elite athletes or people who are recognized as being at the top of the game. So, it’s also important when we draw our conclusions, that we also don’t skip the part of the research paper where the method is described. It’s really important that you are critical in the sense of understanding how the authors of the study have come to their results and conclusions, you know, having a critical understanding of what they did in order to understand if the conclusions are realistic or not from an implementation point of view.

TP: Are there fewer creative players?

There´s a lot of debate on this question. There’s indeed a global perception that there are fewer creative players in youth football nowadays. I remember well that in one of the academies I visited both the Head of Coaching and the Head of Recruitment mentioned that players look more homogenous nowadays, that “there are less bad players, but fewer special ones”. They justified this with the fact that there is less play on the street, and everything kids do is supervised by adults. There’s always an element of instruction: play one touch, play two touches, do this, do that. This in turn prevents players from exploring the game and from exploring themselves. And this is where the constraints led approach and Vítor Frade’s idea of giving birth to the context instead of the behaviors have a relationship with creativity.

TP: Is there an optimal age range to stimulate creativity?

At the academy I was embedded in, I spent a lot of time with the under-13 team, which is quite an interesting one. This is because Memmert says that’s kind of a sensitive period for creativity, until the 13 years of age, where it’s especially important to develop it. It doesn’t mean that it cannot be developed after. But until 13 years of age players are a bit more like sponges. They are building their personality, they are a bit more open to change, to experience. And this is why I was particularly interested on u-13. So, I focused a lot on them.

What were the individual characteristics of the players that you observed on professional academies in that age?

Generally, they are quite passionate, quite joyful and engaged. Even though we usually state that street football doesn’t exist anymore, and tend to picture kids as if they just sit in the house playing computer games the whole time, I found that actually in Portugal they spent a lot of time playing outside, but also because they had available facilities to do so. In Portugal the weather is quite mild and there are quite a lot of outdoors, council facilities that you can access for free, which is something that, for example, in Scotland is not that common. So, that’s something already important. It’s a constraint for creativity.  Interestingly as well, players reported that they really watch a lot of matches on TV. And they tend to focus on the role models based on their own positions, For example, if you’re a fullback, you would look at Marcelo. If you’re a center back, you would look at Sergio Ramos, Van Dijk, etc. And they also referred to YouTube as a source of inspiration for tricks and skills. So, actually, the fact that they are online and that they have these tools available shows me that internet is not necessarily a bad thing for creativity. It can also be a source of inspiration for them.

TP: What were the main things that the technical staff did that you thought helped the development of creativity?

In terms of the team level, I found there was a lot of good practice by the coaches. The team that I watched, they had two coaches, an older coach who used to be a player. Not at top level, but he had reached professional status at the club, and he had to stop because of an injury, which led him to focus on an academic pathway. He is now a physical education teacher and a part time coach with the under 13. He was the head coach. And then we had the 26 year old assistant coach just fresh out of university, who really wanted to “climb the ladder”. They had a bit of this “good cop, bad cop approach” in which the head coach was a nice guy, very supportive of the players, trying always to make them confident and the bad cop was the assistant coach who was very rigorous in terms of the of the tactical behaviors, the positioning of the players, etc. And I found that it worked really, really well for those players. The approach was quite good, addressing both divergent and convergent thinking. For me it was anecdotal evidence that such a kind of combination can work quite well. Curiously, the days when there was only one coach present, depending on who it was, training was not at the same level. It was either too relaxed and wild if there was only the head coach present, and too structured and not fun if there was only the assistant coach on the pitch.  Moreover, the coaches were usually spot on in terms of what the research suggests as beneficial for creative development: they had little instructional interference, meaning that they planned the training drills in such a way that they did not have to talk a lot, the context spoke for itself; and on top of that they were always incentisiving players players to take risks, sometimes even provoking/teasing the best players like “you’re the worst player here, you cannot do this, you cannot do that”, but in a really cheery funny way, with a smile.

Don’t miss Franciso Fardilha in our next week’s article.

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KEYWORDS: TACTICAL PERIODIZATION; TRAINING; FOOTBALL; SOCCER; CREATIVITY; PLAYER DEVELOPMENT.