Functional Football Podcast Functional Football Podcast

In Episode 13, we speak to William Vazquez, former Central Coast Mariners U20s coach and Youth League Assistant Coach. Will discusses the importance of developing relationships with players, patterns of play vs decision making, the process of preparing for a game and the pre-game routine.

In Episode 12, we speak to Jess Ibrom, UEFA A Licensed Coach who has 19 years experience as an Elite Youth Developer, National Coach and High Performance Coach. His roles have taken him from working in his homeland the UK, to the United States, Mexico, New Zealand and the Cook Islands. Jess was an Academy Coach for the Wellington Phoenix of the Australian Hyundai A League, has worked with the Houston Dynamo FC of the Major League Soccer as well as working with Chelsea FC of the English Premier League. In this episode, Jess discusses developing youth players, setting up an Academy, accelerating Academy players to first team environment and adapting to different footballing environments when coaching abroad.

In Episode 11, we speak to Mark O’Sullivan (@markstkhlm), youth coach at AIK Stockholm in Sweden. Mark is a coach educator, a consultant, completing a PhD and founder of the footblogball blog. Mark chats about designing learning spaces from an ecological dynamics perspective, where tasks are representative of the game, where perception and action is coupled, using repetition without repetition and promoting an external focus of attention.

Mark discusses designing sessions where players search discover and exploit gaps and space using football interactions. Sessions that move away from theme based sessions and give more autonomy to the decision making of young players.

Mark also outlines the importance of the relationship between player and the learning and the interactions within the learning space.