Youth development solution for early adopters: Millwall Football Club

Dan Mlinar, lead Youth Development Phase Coach at Millwall Football Club (holding a UEFA A License), has been coaching youth football teams for 9 years.

Dan was introduced to PlayerMaker in January 2018. Previously, he was only familiar with the use of physical performance data in clubs but when he heard that it was possible for me to track technical and tactical analysis on players, he understood the coaching benefits right away.

“Quite simply, the players put the sensors on their boots before entering the field; we deliver the session and 5 minutes after training finishes, we already have the data on the team’s profile page within the PlayerMaker dashboard”

A few months later, Millwall FC Academy decided to implement the PlayerMaker smart footwear for the U16s team as well, bringing Jim Summersby, the Sports Scientist for this age group into the conversation in order to further understand how to correlate the physical data with the technical and tactical data in the reports produced for the coaching staff.

For Jim, being able to cross-reference physical parameters with player-ball interactions is key to understanding the actual loading on the player. The ability to monitor technical loading is a big factor when trying to get the most out of every session without causing injuries. The ability to measure touches per leg helped him gain extra insights on the session’s outputs. Together with the physical analysis, it gave him a holistic understanding of what’s happening every time each player is out on the field. Next season, when PlayerMaker release the functionality to monitor kick velocity and biomechanical load on each leg, it will allow him to take the monitoring of technical loading one step further.

“The amount of data collected means we get a holistic understanding of what’s happening every time the player is out in the field”

Jim Summersby

Sports Scientist, Millwall Football Club

Lately, besides generating physical/technical reports for player feedback and load management, they have started using the data to categorise match performance and rank them as green, yellow or red. This meant they could look ahead to the next season and refine their coaching “Analysing our fixture outputs and colour coding them allows us to take a step back and review what kind of season we can expect.” Jim Summersby, the Sports Scientist, Millwall Football Club They used some games to working on specific developmental needs - and the data produced in these games helped them gain these specific insights. They then used this information to plan ahead for next season’s fixture decisions, such as whether they needed more green games to work on press and finishing or more red games to work on ball retention and more intelligent defending.

Dan Mlinar coaching his team