Soccer, as we all know, is very complex sport. When I say complex, I mean that success in soccer is dependent on lot of factors, individual and collective (team). Individual factors are usually technical, tactical, psychological and physical preparedness, with numerous sub-factors among each of them. Team factors are especially complex and depend on team organization, style, cooperation, team spirit, communication and other numerous factors.

The goal of training is to bring up those factors to an appropriate (maximum?; optimal?) levels, and also during the important time of the year. The problem is that ’important time of the year’ is longer and longer in modern soccer competitions.

Conventional wisdom suggests that preparedness should be increased during the preparatory period and peaked (reaching of ’sport form’ or ’top shape’) during the competition period. But the problem is that the ’peak’ cannot be held for long, and usually after a peak there is a drop in quality of performance. This wave-like cycles

are something that is natural and normal. Another suggestion is that preparedness developed in preparatory period should be ’maintained’ during the competition
period via maintenance loads. The second problem is that the competition period is longer than preparatory period in most of the cases, thus maintenance is not an option, due the

Player Development

fact that you simply cannot maintain something that is not developed in the first place. This two suggestions (peak and maintenance) comes from individual sports with short competition period, and it is questionable whether this approach is appropriate for long season sports such as professional soccer. This conventional wisdom may be also called in another names: traditional periodization, linear system, etc, etc.

in season periodization

A possible solution to this problem may be two common sense suggestions: (1) do not peak too early, and (2) do NOT maintain preparedness, but rather work on its further development (but with clearly defined priorities). Theoretically this may look like depicted on the following picture.

The following questions may arise from the mentioned theoretical approach: (1) how to
avoiding ’peaking’ too soon, and (2) how to continue with development of preparedness in competition period without overtraining and burning-out and without affecting match performance negatively?

In his book ’Total Soccer Fitness’ (2007), Ian Jeffreys suggested the usage of ’summated microcycle’ during the competition period (in-season), which stimulated me to develop this ’theoretical’ solution to the mentioned problems. I say ’theoretical’ for the reason that I haven’t tried this approach in practice yet, due the reasons that I will not address here, so basically this is a theoretical solution which have to be checked in practice.

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Mladen Jovanović is a head strength and conditioning coach in F.C. RAD in Belgrade. Mladen is about to graduate at Faculty of Sport and Physical Education at University in Belgrade. His final paper is titled ’Training and testing agility in sports’. Mladen plans are to emigrate after graduation and to continue his studies regarding physiology of HIIE sports and also continue his profession of strength and conditioning coach, preferably in soccer.