Players Expectations of Factors that Contribute to On-Field Success

As a coach, sometimes it’s nice to get inside the players heads and see what it is that they feel gives them success on the field. From this information we can decide whether or not we need to educate them on the importance of a particular soccer modality, or if we need to encourage more drills to help them develop a particular area.

We asked a group of 70 soccer players (high school boys and girls) to what they attribute their success on the field and to what degree each of the following areas had on their success. The answers are graphed in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1: The category “Physical” is comprised of answers that related to strength, power, conditioning, and the physical effort or drive. The Tactics category was comprised of answers relating to coaching and knowledge of the game. The players were not give a list to choose from and were only asked to rate their answers by giving a percentage value that would add up to 100 percent.50% of the athletes in this survey were from a high school girl’s team currently ranked #1 in the country according to the USA Today Newspaper.

Based on this information, success in soccer is due more to “Physical” ability than any other specific area. If you lump “Speed” into the “Physical” category it boosts the “Physical” up to 58% of the game! I interpret this to mean more than half the game can be developed off the field! When you consider speed, agility, strength and conditioning work as “Physical” characteristics of soccer performance, and the players think that “Physical” characteristics contributes to almost 60% of their success, then you as a coach should have an easy sell to the players to implement a solid strength, conditioning, speed and agility program.

Another way to look at this information is to see it as a look into how to set up your yearly training programs. If this was the case, 60% of the yearly training volume (games included) would come from strength, conditioning, speed and agility work, 20% of the volume would be designated to skill development, 10% to tactical development and 10 % to actual game related experience. This model would especially benefit young players, and would significantly raise their level of athleticism.

This comment of training volume is based on a yearly model, not a per practice model. I do not think that a practice should be set up as 60% physical to only 30% skill and tactics. But if you include off seasons, pre seasons and even off days during the season, you can easily see how this model becomes much easier to use.

Obviously this survey was done on a very small population of high school girls and boys and a much larger survey should be conducted with coaches, college and professional players as well, but regardless, surveys like this can be used to further educate and promote the total development of soccer players… not just as skilled players, but as skilled athletes!