What will the elite end of soccer look like in ten years time? This was the question we posed to the group of coaches who met at Wokefield Park Reading this weekend for the first ever FA Elite Coaches Programme.

The English Premiership is now 20 years old and some would argue the game has moved on for the better. The trends suggest that it is being played by athletes who, at the top end, are tactically astute technicians who anticipate and solve problems at speed.

In this period in the Premier League we know that there is now:

• 90% plus pass accuracy in many games (with two players at 100% in two separate games)
• 3 seconds average time between passer and receiver
• typically 2 seconds per player in possession, with just over 2 touches on the ball and under 3 seconds to make a decision as the ball come to you
• heart rates increasing over 90plus minutes to 180 and beyond
• more distance covered at pace
• fewer instances of balls going directly from front to back

In the Champions League in the last six years we know that:

• there are at least 1400 direction changes per game with 12 – 17 km covered by individual players per game.
• 15% of time is spent on low speed running, 10% on moderate speed running, 2% at high speed and 1% flat out
• In the last six years there has been a 13% increase in passes and a forward pass increase  of 10%
• 84% of passes are successful one touch passes!
• positional fluidity is dramatically up with more teams defending deeper and counter attacking

So the challenge for our modern coaches is to design development programmes and prepare players for a game which requires quicker decision-making, improved technical ability, increased stamina and speed and more tactical nous!

The answer, despite all the fuss about 10,000 hours of directed practice, is not more and more of the same. The answer lies in coaches understanding the principles of athletic development, who know how to encourage effective and instant decision-making in game contexts, have deep understanding of changing tactical demands and an obsession with working towards technical perfection.

We had sixteen of the best young coaches in the English game for less than three days. We debated the future game, the future player and the future coach. In the next eighteen months we will take the theory onto the grass and into the clubs. The word we kept hearing over the weekend was obsession! Let’s get obsessive together!