Francisco Fardilha, Elite Speaker in our School, 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), University of Porto – Sports Faculty. Currently is the Football General Director of Bayern München Women.

TP: What did you identify as limitations that affect the positive development of creativity in professional academies?

Francisco Fardilha: There were some issues in academies and this is what I found really interesting because we’ve been focusing so much on the individual level, on the training context, on the training drills, on what we can do on the pitch. And we have overlooked, we have ignored the impact that other things within the organization may have on creativity. A lot of the academies nowadays are using what I call biometric profiling to exclude players or to select players from a very early age.

One of the most common and maybe you have come across is a bone density test. So, this idea of predicting how tall you’re gonna be when you are an adult player.

So, they do this kind of bone density test, normally for goalkeepers, center backs and for strikers. So, if you were predicted to have less than one meter 85, you would be kicked out. And for me this sends a message in terms of what are the beliefs in terms of the development of creativity, etc..

The other interesting thing that was a bit problematic was the salary structure in the academy. So, the under 13 coach got maybe half of what the under 15s coach got, and these even less than the under 17s and less than the under 19s. And if you think of this, maybe in the traditions of football that might be normal. But that sends a message that maybe those age groups in which creativity or creative learning is so more important, maybe they’re not really that important. If you think about it from a sports management or from an organizational perspective.

Other thing is that then coaches, because they wanna climb the ladder, they wanna get more money, then he’s gonna start behaving in a way that he wants to get noticed. It’s not so much about the players or the player long-term development, it’s also then about how can I show myself? And usually the way it works is by showing results. So, then there’s another vicious cycle.

There’s this idea that I’m gonna select the tallest, I’m gonna select the ones that give me the guarantee of achieving faster results. And this can be a constraint for creativity.

Then something that is typical, at least in the Portuguese reality, but I’m pretty sure it’s quite universal, has to do with the parental pressure. The clubs had to forbid the parents from attending training because they used to train openly and you would have parente-coaches. I’ve watched matches in which the coach was saying one thing on the other side and the parent was saying another thing. And yeah, it’s quite prevalent that parents sometimes want it more than the kids themselves. You get a lot of this air dryer talk in the car and kids are always afraid of making mistakes, of taking risks. So it sticks to basically the basics because he always gets this talk after the matches.

Then there’s the issue, more at the end of the season, because there’s always new players coming for trials. So you could see that the players who were there already, they lived in a constant fear of being released or being kicked out. So they tended as well, especially in this period, to stick to what they thought was expected of them. So they didn’t really wanna try new things and take risks.

You could see when the head of scouting was in the training or when the head of coaches was in the training, that players were a lot more stiff, the environment was much more serious.

Also, there was not really a lot happening in this professional academies in terms of opportunities for coaches to debate, to discuss, to talk between themselves. There was this big rivalry between coaches. It’s like almost everyone wanted to take the job of the guy that is above them, that is better paid. And this was problematic. And the other thing is, all right, academies are nowadays responsible for providing the conditions, I say, for players to develop.

They have an interest on players being creative because creativity has a commercial value, I’d say, because it’s something difficult to achieve. It’s more valuable in terms of money. So, academies would have an interest in developing more creative players.

The problem is, academies nowadays even have schools inside the academy. So, what I’ve realized in there is that the players didn’t know anything or anyone outside the academy. They didn’t have any other activities that didn’t involve being with the same people all the time.

There were not really opportunities for any kind of differentiation. And over time, these players were becoming the same.

So, I think it’s really important to start thinking of creativity, not only in terms of a property of the individual, but as something that needs to become what the Danish guy called Rasmussen in Aalborg says, a developmental resource, in the sense that creativity, in order to be developed effectively, needs to become something that is part of the whole organizational culture that is present in every department and that is actually lived from the CEO, from the president, from the chairman, down to the coaches, to the psychologists, to the players, and obviously to the parents.

TP: Creativity in footbal is normally associated to the moments when the player have the ball. Is it possible to be creative when defending?

There’s a paper from 2010, Memmert, Baker, and Bertsch. They look into the connection between attention, expertise, and creativity. And there was one line there that made me wanna do my PhD on creativity because they said this sentence, and I know it by heart, “creativity can only occur in the offensive phase. Creativity can only occur in attack.” And I thought, “I don’t agree with this.”

So that was kind of what motivated me to do. Important distinction to make here on creativity as well. There is something called incremental creativity and there’s something called radical creativity. These are two modes of creativity. So, you can be creative by adding a little something, not necessarily something amazing, but adding something small, or you can do something really disruptive, something that have an amazing factor, and both things are considered creative.

There is maybe a higher focus on creativity, but as a very famous player called Bernardo Silva said to me, “if everything is perfect, there might not be a lot of room for defenders to be creative or to need to be creative, to work outside of it. But in the end, you’re dealing with humans and you know that bad things can happen,”

So, if we grow up with this idea of we allow the young players to grow up with this idea that you are a defender, you’re not supposed to be creative, then it’s almost like that thing of the relative age effect of this kind of self-fulfilling prophecies, then they’re not gonna be creative because it’s also not stimulated in them. You know, it’s really about this idea that I think it’s important to demystify, this idea that creativity, it’s only like the magic, you know, only about the dribble, only about the skill, the “wow” thing.

I think if you grow up with creativity as this idea of developmental research as something embedded that you can tap to when needed, I think it doesn’t really matter if you’re a defender or an attacker, if you have the ball or you haven’t the ball, because for example, as a defender, it’s not that you’re just passive, it’s not that you don’t have any kind of agency when you’re dealing with an attacker, it’s a relationship. As a defender, the way you move your body, the way you know, the way you kind of act, my constraint, you can limit the agency of your opponent, it’s not just because he has the ball that you’re just there, you know, he might have some decision, like some enhanced decision making ability, but it’s not like you, and these are the ideas, you see, if we grow up with these kinds of beliefs ingrained in our minds, that I play in position X, I can only do this, and this is also a way that we can think about creativity in, within academies and as coaches.

Sometimes players want the opportunities, or even we can be proactive in the sense of making them experience new positions, you don’t need, and this is me a bit sometimes being a bit overly critical, but I’m not sure when you think about differential learning. For example, you saw the guys doing all those kind of tasks, you can put your hands on the floor, do things with a head down, you can do all these things, but you can also do little things like change the player’s position, in a training, and by doing that, you’re already creating new constraints, you’re already creating new opportunities for action and for the player to explore, you know, different behaviors, different opportunities.

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