Thu
23
Nov
2023
In many cases the midfield of a team plays a vital role in football competition and the quality of players might have a decisive role.
Sat
26
Mar
2022
It seems like an ongoing debate if an academy can actually develop the next world class player and if that one (player) out of ??? (players) is actually worth the work or money from an economical side (having in mind that in some leagues the clubs must have an academy).
Fri
19
Oct
2018
The footage below shows the pre-match warm-up of the Hamburger SV players before their game against SV Darmstadt '98.
Wed
17
Oct
2018
As the title proposes, the video below shows the pre-march warm-up of the HSV goalkeeper.
The footage was taken before the game against SV Darmstadt '98 (2nd German division).
Wed
24
May
2017
I was able to visit my one and only Bundesliga game for the closed 2016/2017 season.
Obviously, I brought my camera and took some footage of the goalkeeper warm-up of both teams.
Unfortunately it is not the entire warm-up as I focused on the teams later on. However, please enjoy the two videos below, the first one shows the FC Schalke and the second one the Eintracht Frankfurt goalkeeper warm-up.
Wed
17
May
2017
The video below shows the pre-match warm-up of the german Bunesliga team Eintracht Frankfurt.
Fri
12
May
2017
As already mentioned in previous two blog posts, I was able to visit the UEFA Champions League semi-final BVB against AS Monaco. Furthermore, I have posted the two pre-match warm-up of Dortmund HERE and of Monaco HERE.
Nevertheless, I was able to take some footage from the goalkeepers warm-up as well. If interested, please check out the video below.
Fri
05
May
2017
Chapter 9 of the European club footballing landscape was about squad cost and wages
Generally, wages absorbed 63% of the club’s revenue in 2015.
Tue
02
May
2017
As mentioned in previous post about the BVB warm-up HERE, I was also able to tape most of the pre-match warm-up of AS Monaco.
The warm-up can be seen below.
Thu
27
Apr
2017
Chapter 8 was about the UEFA clubs and their revenue.
Generally, revenue has grown over the last year with an average of more than 9% per year. The club’s revenue are now six times the level of 1996.
Sun
16
Apr
2017
Due to a good friend I was able to visit the UEFA Champions league match of Borussia Dortmund against AS Monaco.
Tue
21
Feb
2017
The 6th edition of the annual Al-Kass U17 international tournament was held in Doha in January.
My former colleague Ioannis Grammos was able to visit some games and kind to record some warm-up procedures of PSG and the Aspire Academy.
Sun
05
Feb
2017
The fifth chapter of the UEFA Club Footballing Landscape was about (foreign) club ownership.
Forty-four clubs in major European leagues are now under foreign ownership, by owners of 18 different nationalities.
Foreign ownership is still centered in England, where more than half of the clubs in the top two leagues now have foreign owners.
2016 was the most active year for foreign club takeovers, with ten new acquisitions by November, including eight new Chinese owners.
Fri
03
Feb
2017
Chapter 4 of the UEFA Club Footballing Landscape was about the supporters.
Over 170 mio people went to European league matches in 2015/2016 with 55 mio in England and Germany alone. Overall there was a significant increase and 14 leagues achieved their best attendance
figures in more than 10 years.
Tue
31
Jan
2017
The 6th edition of the annual Al-Kass U17 international tournament was held in Doha until today.
My former colleague Ioannis Grammos was able to visit some games and kind to record some warm-up procedures of Eintracht Frankfurt, AS Roma and Kashiwa Reysol.
Tue
17
Jan
2017
The second big part of the "The European Club Footballing Landscape", from the 2014/2015 season, was about the players.
The average age of first-team squads (in January 2016) can be seen in the following maps below. It seems that the talent-importing leagues tend to have a higher average first team squad compared to talent exporters (such as Netherlands and the Balkan countries).
Sun
15
Jan
2017
The head coach plays a paramount role in every football club. Consequently, UEFA investigated different topics "around" the head coach in its release "The European Club Footballing Landscape".
The manuscript highlighted some data evaluated from the the 2014/2015 season.
First topic was about "Head coach security" and it seems that it remains a problem and it i getting worse in many places. Please have a look at the first European and global maps below.
Fri
06
Jan
2017
As previous literature updates, I have performed a PubCrawler search looking for football articles in NCBI Medline (PubMed) and GenBank databases.
Following studies were retrieved for this week:
Sun
26
Jun
2016
Below you will find some random (but still entertaining/interesting) facts about the current EURO 2016.
Thu
02
Jun
2016
Whilst on summer break it happened that the French National Football team held a short preparation camp at the "Stubaital" (Austria) for the European Championship 2016 in France. Coincidentally the camp was a 30-minute drive away and I was able to tape a session from outside the training ground (and the fence - obviously I missed to book a ticket beforehand).
Thu
18
Feb
2016
The Al-Kass tournament was played at Doha last week. Its an international tournament in which U-16 age group teams of several top clubs faced-off in a 10-day competition.
Unfortunately I was not able to attend the games from this year. However, I have not had released the videos from last years tournament. Clicking on the provided links below will give you the warm-up procedures of the selected team.
Wed
27
May
2015
The 3rd FIFA Medical Conference has started this morning and will continue until tomorrow evening.
Zurich was chosen as the host venue and the conference program can be downloaded HERE.
Wed
25
Mar
2015
As part of their winter training camp at Doha, Red Bull Salzburg played a friendly match against local club Al-Sailiya at Aspire Zone.
The video below shows the goalkeeper pre-match warm-up.
I have also posted the goalkeeper warm-ups of Ajax Amsterdam and Schalke 04.
Thu
19
Mar
2015
As part of their winter training camp, Schalke 04 played Ajax Amsterdam at Qatar Sports Club in Doha in January 2015.
I have already posted the Ajax Goalkeeping warm-up HERE.
The following video shows the pre-match warm-up of the Schalke 04 goalkeepers.
Thu
12
Feb
2015
As I have received some interesting comments on the previous "Individual Training Session of Ajax Amsterdam" through social media, I thought the coaches, strength/conditioners and critics might want to see the following video as well.
It shows the identical training session from Schalke 04.
Mon
02
Feb
2015
FC Bayern Munich had its VW winter training camp in the beginning of January. I was able to get some footage from one of the evening training sessions.
Unfortunately I was not able to get some information about the duration of each part, however, I still hope you will enjoy the video of the training session.
Mon
26
Jan
2015
Ajax Amsterdam is holding its winter training camp here at Doha and I was able to visit a morning training session.
The session was ~ 90 minutes in length and consisted of:
Mon
12
Jan
2015
Schalke 04 is holding its winter training camp here at Doha and I was able to visit a morning training session.
The session was ~ 90 minutes in length and consisted of:
Thu
08
Jan
2015
Ajax Amsterdam is holding its winter training camp here at Doha and I was able to visit a morning training session.
The session was ~ 90 minutes in length and consisted of:
Sun
23
Nov
2014
Just in case you missed the groin pain conference at Aspetar a couple of weeks ago, HERE you can find all
videos/presentations from the conference.
Tue
28
Oct
2014
As part of the “football” software updates I have given already HERE a
couple of month ago, I was lucky to find a very useful, simple, yet practical application lately.
The application is called planet.training and is an online database which can be used to create, categorize and store exercises/training sessions.
Wed
02
Jul
2014
Another interesting statistics from the CIES Football observatory.
The statistics takes into account the number of World Cup participants trained per nation, per club as well the number of leagues matches played by footballers per team up to the age of 23.
In order to be recognized as a club, their players needed to be at least 3 years at the club between the age of 15 and 21.
Fri
27
Jun
2014
There were already many penalties during the ongoing 2014 FIFA World Cup at Brazil.
With the second round/knock-out stage around the corner, it seems possible that following matches will come to a conclusion with a penalty shoot-out.
As a consequence I have taken some time to scoop through the scientific literature about penalty taking in football. The first paragraph shows some information for the penalty taker, while the
second parts deals with important considerations for the goalkeeper.
Considering that a penalty shot only needs about 0.2 to 0.6 seconds (4) for the 11 meters from the spot to the goal, the goalkeeper has very limited chance to react and jump to save the shoot,
not even considering the reaction time.
As a result the goalkeeper need to start diving prior to the shot (however, needs to wait as long as possible) to not show the penalty taker the dive direction.
So what can the goalkeeper and the penalty taker do increase the chance of success?
Sun
22
Jun
2014
The Football observatory is a research group within the International Centre for Sports Studies (CIES), a private foundation affiliated to the University of Neuchâtel, in Switzerland.
Every year they analyse clubs and players in the big-5 leagues from a demographic, economic and pitch performance perspective.
Thu
12
Jun
2014
This is a special post with regards to the FIFA World Cup 2014 as its different environmental conditions at each stadium (temperature and humidity) were fairly often debated in the press already.
Generally, Brazil’s average daily temperature during this time of the year is warmer than many other countries. Research from international matches in Qatar under hot environment significant favored the Qatari team showing the influence/advantage of heat accustomized teams (1 - see references below).
In sport science terms, getting accustomized to a hot (and/or humid) environment is called heat acclimation, which was a topic of interest for many years for exercise physiologists, especially for sporting events such as Tour de France or for military purposes.
Thu
27
Feb
2014
With Real Madrid showing a true Champions League class last night, I had NO look at some game stats/performance indicator or any other time motion analysis, neither do I want to try explain why they just punished Schalke.
I just feel that this is a good opportunity to post the Real Madrid warm-up against Paris St. Germain that I have received from Joao Marques earlier in the year here in Doha.
Mon
17
Feb
2014
Having the UEFA Champions league best of 16 around the corner, I would like to post some more or less random thoughts, however still crucial for coaches, sport scientists and/or S&C
staff.
So how important is the physical component in football – which can also be rephrased into: can physical components be game decisive?
With that question I don’t mean if one single sprint and a finish can decide over winning and losing (and we all know the answer to this question). I meant if aerobic/anaerobic endurance, speed
(in general) or strength will win games and/or Championships. This question is a little bit harder to answer in my opinion.
Sun
16
Feb
2014
John Kobiela sent me the link to some interesting statistics from the Premier League.
The articles on EPLStatistics discusses attrition (rates
of employees leaving an organization) in the Premier League.
Wed
12
Feb
2014
On Tuesday, the expected entry of the insurer Allianz SE with the German record champions became public.
FC Bayern München had already announced its intention to bring a third major partner on board besides the shareholders Adidas and Audi. Allianz secured 8.33 percent of FC Bayern München AG who puts ~110 million euros on the table.
Part of the deal obviously were the naming rights to the stadium until 2041. As a result, the shares of Adidas and Audi will diminish from 9.09 to 8.33%.
Thu
06
Feb
2014
Besides FC Bayern Munich, Paris SG, and Zenit FC, Red Bull Salzburg utilized the Aspire Zone for their preparation for the second half of the season.
The following videos show (in chronological order) the training sessions of the team that I was able to visit.
Sat
18
Jan
2014
Recently, I have posted a couple of different pre-match warm-ups of different professional football teams such as Bayern Munich, FC Schalke 04 and Zenit FC.
Attending most of the Al-Kass (U16-tournament) tournament which hosts nations from different continents, I have made a compilation of pre-match warm-up from different teams around the world.
Unlike professional teams, the staff of these teams (mostly) inherent the same nationality from which the team actually is. As a result, there could be different approaches in football playing styles and therefore warm-up procedures.
Please click on individual team logo to open the video or visit my youtube channel to see the videos.
Sat
18
Jan
2014
This might be a predominantly special topic for US coaches, as I presume (with all respect) that not many (European, Asian etc.) coaches will know Anson Dorrance.
So why is that worth a special "research in football" topic? To quote Wikipedia: "He is currently the head coach of the women's soccer program at the University of North Carolina with one of the most successful coaching records in the history of athletics. His team won 21 of the 31 NCAA Women's Soccer Championships. The Tar Heels' record under Dorrance is 719-39-24 (equals an impressive .935 winning percentage) over 33 seasons as of September 9, 2011. He has led his team to a 101-game unbeaten streak and coached 13 different women to a total of 20 National Player of the Year awards. The NCAA has recognized Dorrance as the Women's Soccer Coach of the Year seven times (1982, 1986, 1997, 2000, 2001, 2003 and 2006) and as the Men's Soccer Coach of the Year in 1987. On March 10, 2008 Dorrance was elected to the National Soccer Hall of Fame.