So far we’ve focused on team-wide principles and designed KPI’s to track them. It’s now time to turn our focus onto the individuals who make up our teams.
Just as our teams can benefit from an evidence-informed approach, so can our players. It’s now extremely common for clubs to have a positional profile with a set of customized expectations can benefit their players.
Some clubs are now going as far as hiring Individual Development Coaches who’s sole task is to focus on players at the individual level with far less responsibility for team-wide issues. The APFA has a course specifically designed to work on an individual development plan much like the team planning document from this one.
The course features tasks, match video examples and professional Analysts, Coaches and Technical/Sporting Directors and guides the learner through a step by step process of developing an individual development plan for a player, as well as measuring targets, information feedback and training session design.
Think back to our playing philosophy and the performance measurement framework we designed earlier. What can our individual players do on a game-by-game basis to help the team as a whole achieve it’s goals? If we’ve set a target of taking a certain amount of shots from the gold zone, then who’s expected to be taking them and creating them?
Lucy Rushton and Matt Pilkington share details on why setting individual targets for players can aid development. Lucy in particular expands on her points, giving real life examples of times when focusing on individual targets helped a player in the games immediately following review:
New York Red Bulls have one of the most productive youth academy’s in Major League Soccer, and produced a template for their players named the ‘Red Print’. The US Soccer Federation also make their individual profiles available to the public for coaches across the nation to access:
US Soccer Position Numbers and Profiles
Leicester City famously used positional profiling to identify transfer targets on their way to winning the English Premier League/ They identified Riyad Maharez & N’Golo Kante using position-specific metrics.
Leicester Statistical Scouting
Matt Pilkington explains how players are often involved in the target setting process at New York City F.C. He believes this can help players become more aware of their objectives, which aids their development:
For this module’s first task we’re going to use some Major League Soccer data to show how a positional profile can be built for a wide midfielder.
Please download the spreadsheet and open the task document below.
Individual Profile Data
Profiling Wingers Task
The second task for this module is to create positional profiles for our own players.
If we don’t believe something can be realistically measured due to our resources, a simple 1-5 scoring system is used by some clubs and coaches for certain aspects of performance.
Example – A holding midfielder needs to be positioned correctly to provide cover for the back 4. If we don’t think the amount of tackles or interceptions they make in a game will suffice, could we personally give the player a score of 1-5 for this aspect of their game and keep track of it?
Below are some examples of how one might go about presenting individual expectations if we wanted to take things a step further:
Premier League Positional Analysis



Finally, think back to the team-wide targets we set earlier. Do the individual targets we set correlate to your team? Are we setting individual targets that ask too much or too little of our players based on what we’d like the team to achieve as a whole?
Take the time to make any necessary adjustments to our plan and make some comments below if needed.
I really like the different templates provided in this module-The one by NYRB was the most appealing to me. At Columbus Crew, we have a player profile document, where staff and players can see which areas of the game the club sees as important and where we need to develop.
I also agree with Matt when he says you need to bring the player into the conversation when deciding on their individual development plans.
I think that it is always important to link data targets back to video so that the player can be helped-Showing them specific visual examples sounds simple but is incredibly valuable.
It’s also important not to take data targets too seriously in the course of 1 game, where context can have a huge influence. For example, if someone on your team gets sent off after 5 mins, you forward might struggle to get 3 shots off-On the reverse side, your center back may get more actions in.
Given that we are a possession based team, our individual targets should correlate to that style of play. However, there ought to be caveats to this in that possession for the sake of possession is not what is preferred, so there should be specificity in terms of what possession is most sought after that should then be applied to metrics for judging individual performance. Instead, we aim for possession that leads to progression up the pitch, so progressive passes (measured by any passes that are forward) would be a better measurement to apply to individuals.
This would be done by tagging progressive passes, and determining the amount of progressive passes that each player makes. This would be a useful metric for the majority of our team given our desire for possession that leads to progression. However, it would not be applicable for all players on the pitch given that our most forward players are already very high up the pitch where it is difficult for them to make passes that go even further forward plus if they are close enough to the opponent’s goal we would prefer them to make passes, crosses, or cutbacks that lead to assists, or shots that lead to goals.
This ties into how metrics need to be adjusted for individuals depending on their position. We could use progressive passes as a key metric to evaluate how each individual is contributing to our game model and style of play for defenders and midfielders, though for attackers we would need different metrics for the aforementioned reasons. This demonstrates both the refining of metrics to measure for individuals based each position, though also how our style of play/game model needs to adjust to this given that it should entail a distinct approach to how we attack. This would then lead to using particular metrics that would be most important to judging the success of our forward players, rather than using progressive passes for all positions as this metric should instead be used for our defence and midfielders but not our attackers.