Bruno Oliveira Assistant Football Coach in Al-Arabe SC, Al-Duhail Sports Club, Leicester City FC, Swansea City AFC, Queens Park Rangers FC, FC Porto, Lekhwiya, Beijing, Renhe FC
Co-author of “Mourinho – why so many wins?” He as a Degree in Physical Education and Sports by University of Porto – Sports Faculty (focus Football).

TP: How you deal with this reality of the Performance Departments?

Like everything, it’s a lot of common sense and a lot of man management skills. You cannot arrive, in my opinion, or if you are Mourinho, Guardiola or Klopp, you arrive and you do whatever you want and you sack whoever you want or you set up the departments however you want. But in a normal circumstance, in a normal situation, you have to adapt.

And I’m not saying that we have to adapt our philosophy or our idea, but you have to know how to control this department to not disturb your job and this is what I always do. I always try to analyze the person or the persons, see how can I make them happy, how can I make them not disturb my job and not make me having problems with them. Making it in a way that they will not be a threat to me or to the head coach in the future. I try to create a good person relationship and slowly push them to our side,

convince them with the ideas and make them understand that their job is important and that their data is important, but it’s not the most important and doesn’t influence as much as sometimes they think.

You need to try to find the balance with this. Sometimes it’s not possible because you find this type of gurus that have 40, 50 years of experience and that have the university with them and the science with them and the data with them and when it’s like that, you have to gamble and when you are in a strong moment, you have to put them out. When you are in a winning run or when you win a title or something, you put them out.

But sometimes many people don’t arrive to that situation and you have to manage it week by week. But, It’s not easy because as you know today, I was in a congress recently, supposedly for coaches, and two days were full complete days of presentations and seminars and I only heard about data. About coaching and about football I heard very little and we are talking about one of the top education organizations in the world.

It’s a complex phenomenon because you know that people need to work, they need to have jobs and they need to feed their families. We also have to understand the business side of football and this side more human of people needing jobs and needing money to live. This is why also they proliferate so much now. These things about control, data, and thermography (the measure of muscle temperature) before after the session. You start to see things that for me are not important, but I also have to understand that people need to work as long as they don’t disturb my process.

This is what is not negotiable for me, once you step the line of interfering with the players, with my methodological process or with what is our guidance regarding the training, the load or the right way to achieve an idea of playing. These are things that for me are not negotiable and I have zero tolerance. This is why sometimes and even recently in one of the clubs that I worked I had two extreme positions and had to let go one of the start members because of this. Some things are not negotiable which for me are interference with the process, with what we believe it’s the right way to achieve an idea of playing.

Another thing is you can challenge me in a constructive way but you cannot put seeds to grow something bad in what is the game idea of the coach. For example, we are the staff and we are we are talking in a meeting about the game or about the training session and one guy goes outside and tells one of the players something funny like “today’s the session will be really soft “or “really hard”.

Do you think this is a seed or not? For me this is a seed of something. You have to know how to behave yourself but inside the meeting you can tell me. “I think it’s not a hard session or I think we should do more or less.”

This for me is not a problem because I can discuss, no problem. What I don’t like is we go out of this environment and someone makes a silly/funny comment about something that we discussed privately. This is the type of things that I have to explain to you, what is negotiable or not or what is “white or black.”

For exemple one player gets injured and one guy says “we’ve been training too much. That day we did 50 shooting or that day the warm up was 15 sprints or was only two sprints.” This type of comments are corrosive and this is what we have to be aware.

You need to be sharp all the time and assess. When something like this happens you need to act and you cannot close your eyes in my opinion. Setting boundaries, setting the limits and then it’s easy, even if you’re coming from different backgrounds.

Even if you’re coming from a physical, completely analytical background of training you can live together in the same environment as long as they know the boundaries and the boundaries are set by the leaders of the process.

TP: What is your opinion in the increase of soft tissue muscle injuries that doubled in the last 20 years?

Bruno Oliveira: A lot of coaching staff they abuse this so-called scientific way and then you have this contradictory results that the number of injuries of soft tissue injuries increase. I don’t know about the others and I don’t want to speak about the work of the others because I think that this is something that is good for us and for the people that believe in the methodological way that we believe.

I think this is still an advantage for us because a lot of people don’t know how to manage the process properly. What guides their work it’s good for them but for me it doesn’t make any sense. I believe that we are still in advantage because I see a lot of criminal stuff around, you just open the internet you see a lot of atrocities and a lot of nonsense around football.

So football is a typical environment for proliferation of this type of people. It’s very easy to fool with numbers, with lectures, with powerpoints, with information taken out of context and with fake or non-significant testing out of context. For me there this is a lot of nonsense, it makes no sense. Because this is what I always tell my fitness coaches and my staff about the pre-activation and the activation and the post activation “for me this is all training and I include that all in the training total time.”

When I arrived to a certain club the fitness coach was one of these guys that use American elastics and this methodology of exos and the guy was doing pre-activation and activation every day 45 minutes before the session. When we arrived the guy was taking 45 minutes and then we were taking the rest of the session. The players were good and happy because the guy had a good relationship with them and had “them in the hand” completely in the hand and convinced.

So you have to dismantle this slowly and I was arriving to this club with a coach that didn’t know me and my methodology. That didn’t know the difference between water and wine. You understand? He didn’t know the difference.

So this was a very tricky situation. You know how long was the pre-match warm-up with this fitness coach when we arrived to the club? One hour! Between pre-activation and elastics and the activation and the core exercises and then the warm-up in the pitch again. Between all that the players already with one hour in the legs before the game you know.

And then you have to know, this type of things it’s very easy to convince the players and it’s very easy to make them believe in you. It’s very attractive especially for the players that like to work, because you always have in your squad a group of players that are fanatics of work. Why? Because they believe that they achieved a certain level in their career because they worked a lot and you have these workaholics. Normally are the players that have more injuries, because they overwork.

They spend half an hour in the gym every day before training and then they go half an hour after training. If you don’t manage them and if you don’t control them well on the days-off they come and they do a fartlek or they do a 15km run just to recover, 15km! “I want to recover coach. I’m used to it. I go very slowly 15 kilometers.” I had this, I still have. I always had two or three players that are fanatics for that. They believe in the duration of the work. They believe in repetition of shooting. They believe in the repetition of crossing. If it’s a midfielder he loves to do a box-to-box run.

TP: It’s very surprising in how all this non-specific work is still engraved in players beliefs…

Dont miss Bruno Oliveira question on the next article.

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KEYWORDS: TACTICAL PERIODIZATION; TRAINING; FOOTBALL; SOCCER; SPORTS SCIENCE; GPS.