The optimal player development pathway to expertise in soccer

Evidence-based analysis and practical practices

Finding the optimal path - does it exist?

To answer such a question, it helps to investigate the work of others who have asked the same.

The performance approach (EPA) is a strategy to study elite performers that seeks to confirm retrospectively, differentiations in experts to amateurs. This leads to the idea/finding of deliberate practice (DP), which positions structured, and effortful training as a central driver toward expertise, but alone does not get to the heart of it. A missing piece is the concept of “talent”, a complex resource / potential widely socially accepted yet diversely understood. “Talent” does not go without scrutiny once taking a closer look at what underpins such a thing, with evidence of conflicting data and ideas involving genetic-environmental relations, learning, skill, physical and psychological characteristics. To further complicate things, no such topic ever unfolds in isolation or a vacuum, since soccer player pathways and associated talent development environments exist in unique socio-cultural context microsystems nested within larger scale systems which interact complexly. Such complexity influences values, processes and beliefs around coaching, coach-educating, playing, selecting/deselecting, and training.

Overall, there is little support for the possibility of an optimal pathway to soccer expertise for everyone, but there are research informed recommendations of “good practice” that appreciate the nonlinearity and inherent impossibility of expecting any predictable outcomes.

What does studying experts uncover?

Starting with a cross-sectional analysis of experts to explore what makes experts different from non-experts. An aim to try and understand the expert phenomena, and how we might reverse engineer a path to get others there. Ericsson and Smith [11] were pioneers in studying expert performance in this way. Leading us to the EPA “a three-stage approach involving: i) identifying representative tasks that capture the essence of expertise in the domain; ii) having expert (and possibly novice) performers participate in those tasks, recording the mechanisms that mediate the expert’s superior performance; and iii) tracing the acquisition of those skills and mechanisms” [13]. The EPA is a form of inductive reasoning to study experts who have achieved such a status defined by the levels they have reached in a domain, in an applied example, “elite and sub-elite soccer players are not meaningfully discriminated on nonspecific tests of visual function throughout late childhood, adolescence, or early adulthood. Instead, elite players develop superior perceptual and cognitive skills that allow them to perform more successfully in each of the respective age groups” [39]. However, to muddy the waters further, the ways that perceptual and cognitive skills are understood, tested, and observed can differ amongst approaches. A weakness in these findings [39] from an ecological perspective [16] is due to “requiring participants to undertake non-representative actions” [28] potentially as false determinants of the enhanced perceptual-motor ability they argued for. Araujo [1] suggests a lack of behavioral correspondence regarding relevant affordance selecting, promoting action fidelity, and differentiating degrees of task goal achievement, observing intentionality in real time, not as a posteriori judgement [1]. Research on whether non-representative perception tests transfer on-field found that the performance of talented soccer players, is not predictable based on performance in common set of tests of perceptual-cognitive skill [36]. The test of pattern recall appears to be driven by a different underlying process from that used when performing tests of contextual anticipation and decision making [36].

Insights from the expert performance approach, led to deeper rooted concepts that formed the deliberate practice framework, [12] which posits that “performers must be primarily motivated to engage in practice to improve performance and not for some other reason (e.g. enjoyment, social interaction)” [7]. Deliberate practice (DP) is defined retrospectively from cross-sectional studies and qualitative interviews with current experts, where more and better DP is argued as a potentially causal and cumulative resource toward becoming an expert. Upon much contemporary review, misunderstanding, and academic discourse, the underlying additive relationship (monotonic) between DP, expertise is weaker than originally proposed, involving tremendous amounts of variability in amount and effect on individuals [7, 18]. Although practicing is a statistically important fact, assumptions on the amounts, and intents of such practice are largely variable and alone hold no substantial predictive validity.

A practical example of deliberate practice effect, or the 10,000-hour rule [56] in present day is Neal Kennedy, showcasing his journey to go from amateur to national team player for the US through hard, not immediately effortful training toward and expert destination. The underdog, put on display to see if they will “make-it” by training on their own or with a specific individual coach is a story that excites many, from cinema to the hometown local here, or now on social media with the Neal Kennedy journey with 100+ million views.

An underlying force nested within concepts of becoming an expert in soccer is TALENT, “an extremely complex attribute; genetically determined, complicated in structure and subject to environmental conditions” [35]. This classic nature vs nurture debate resonates in the field, although “research consistently shows that expertise cannot be explained by genes or environments alone; instead, it reflects complex interplay between genetic propensities and environmental experiences” [30]. Further, “so far there appears to be no single gene that accounts for even a few percent of the variance in any of the athletic characteristics” [10]. “Genes are expressed across developmental time, which results in unpredictable patterns of development. This is especially true when dealing with complex outcomes like sports performance where the traits are polygenic and multi-disciplinary” [5].

Who is selected, when, and why has reached no justifiable universal consensus in the field of talent whatsoever. The relationship between strategies of best practice for talent development and predictable future expertise is an empirical mess. There are mixed findings across the board. Support for, and against early: selections, diversification, deliberate practice vs play, all have supporting and often contradictory evidence [3, 6, 8, 9, 14, 25, 29, 41].

Anyone reaching the highest levels of soccer is defying all odds, and whether any moment of their journey suggests correlation with a certain aspect of a pathway is statistically happenstance, and impossible to determine if said correlation was beneficial, or a deterrent, and what effects either type had on their path. The evidence shows that “athlete development rarely unfolds in a linear manner. It is a highly individualized process” [2]. In a recent literature review on this subject, Güllich and colleagues [20] assert “The acquisition of the highest levels of performance is characterized by prolonged, variable, and individualized developmental histories”. Evidence that early talent promotion / early specialization is sufficient for the attainment of elite performance is weak [3, 19]. To further complicate it, all processes of talent identification, selection, and promotion are constrained by club philosophies, biases, heuristics, and socially constructed effects i.e. relative age effect, attraction advantages, talent waste, etc. essentially a culmination of serendipity [4, 24, 32, 42]. “The path to expertise can emerge under multiple interacting constraints” [43], and even the ones that would be assumed as “aversive, unconventional learning contexts during development”. [43]

Mangalam [27] sums this up conceptually “any model claiming to identify the “optimal” walking pattern must arbitrarily privilege one function over others, imposing the modeler’s values rather than uncovering a natural truth”. Alicia Juarerro eloquently describes the same concept through the lens of complexity: “had different individuals acted differently, the character of the interdependencies they generated would be different. That said, drawn into a different sort of context, each of us would be different, would behave differently. The coevolution of individual and context generally, including humans and their organizations, makes each journey unique; in the process, each is individuated, uniquely so” [22].

Richard Long — A Line Made by Walking, 1967

So where do we go from here?

Expertise is sociological, involving pathways and outcomes with individuals with richly diverse histories in their youth journeys, sporting backgrounds, cultural-contexts, starting points, and ways of playing the game. Talent is socialized recognition. It emerges when a performer expresses, in a sport-relevant context, an emergent relationship of “skill” between an individual and the environment they learn to live and flourish within, and that is where the expert relationship is formed between the child and the game [45].

The theoretical underpinnings I believe sufficient to study expertise in soccer – Ecological Dynamics

Markers of expertise are witnessed through skillful interaction within a socio-materially entangled landscape of affordances, or possibilities, and invitations for action [16] the environment offers to a form of life, an ecology of relations [37] which “describes the values, beliefs, traditions, customs, and behaviors that influence attitudes towards developing expertise in individuals.” [57].

Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological theory of human development helps to better conceptualize the complexity of a form of life, where “the macrosystem shapes a societal blueprint, conveying the information, ideology, and values that influence organizational structures (i.e., roles, responsibilities, tasks) and events in the embedded microsystems (i.e., classrooms and coaching sessions) where childhood development and education takes place” [37, 46].

These contextually bound “proximal processes” [46, 51] of playing, coaching, and pathways choices of selections, methods, and associated beliefs are lawfully, socio-materially, and constitutively entangled [47, 48, 49, 50].

Expertise is a skillful embodiment, an enactment, a process of learning and continually exercising a functional adaptive individual-environment relationship in a particular domain and the contexts within it. Expertise is the continued process, of deep practice, devotion, reflection, and care.

Recommendations For Soccer Player Development Environments – A growing list

1. Analyze your specific socio-cultural context with reflexive ethnographic methods, and/to cultivate a unique ATDE [58] within your form of life (Fig 1) that promotes a love of play both informally [36] and in structured training contexts. [52]

2. Establish a department of methodology, to carry out these goals adaptively and collaboratively over time [31].

3. Promote unstructured (not adult led) play environments [14, 43, 59]

4. Support players as they enter more deliberate phases, operationalizing “deliberate practice” [15].

5. Establish an inclusive community across ages, fostering important proximal role models [25, 62].

6. Focus on skill adaptation and long-term development [1, 28, 38].

7. Inclusion of psychosocial support/interventions [21, 26, 44].

8. Maintaining a flexible environment structure that allows for entry/exit as players need, with a lifespan focus [2, 44, 62] (Fig 2).

9. Provide opportunities for overall athletic development [9, 32].

10. Enable players in process focused goals. [17, 60, 61,]

11. Build positive relationships with, and collaborate with parents [24, 25].

Michael Jordan — advice to Frank Ntilikina, published in The Players’ Tribune, 2017:

“You can’t be great unless you really love the game. Once you love basketball more than anyone else in the world, then you’re willing to sacrifice. You’re willing to wake up early. You’re willing to do what it takes to be the best. But first, you have to really love it.”

Fig 1. The football in Stockholm ATDE. Reproduced from Vaughan et al. (2022), Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 4, Article 832111. [37]

Fig 2. Overview of prominent lifespan models of athlete development. Reproduced from Baker et al. (2023), Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 5, Article 1179767 [2]

*Ed if you are seeing this, sorry I ended with the frameworks ;)

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