How Australia use player profiles to identify talent and educate coaches

When a coach assesses a group of young players for a national youth side, what exactly are they looking for? This sounds like a simple question, but getting a group of coaches to agree on a youngster’s potential is harder than one might think. Football Australia has tried to make it easier by creating seven player profiles designed to show players, scouts and coaches exactly what is expected of future Australian internationals in the men’s and women’s game. In this session, Trevor Morgan, the Technical Director of Men’s Football and U-20 Men’s Head Coach, explains the process behind those profiles and how they are shaping Australia’s approach to talent development. The second half of the presentation includes a discussion between Morgan and FIFA High Performance Expert, April Heinrichs.

• The first step to creating a player profile is to define the skills, values and behaviours you want to see in your players.
  
  
• Once you have drawn up your profiles, it is important to ensure that coaches and other stakeholders are aware of them and use them consistently to assess players’ performances, wherever they are in the country.
  
  
• Raising awareness of your profiles should help make sure that coaches at club and national level are singing from the same hymn sheet, which will in turn help to develop more and better players that suit an association’s style of play.

Part 1: What is a player profile?
Since 2020, Football Australia has developed and refined seven player profiles designed to highlight the skills and behaviours they expect to see from Australian internationals in specific positions. As Morgan explains, the profiles themselves grew out of the association’s “5 Ps” strategy of Pressure, Protection, Positioning, Possession and Penetration, which serve as the guiding principles behind the national sides’ style of play (a sixth P, Presence, has since been added). To embed that playing style quickly during short international training camps, Australia’s coaches worked together to define the qualities they wanted to see in each position on the pitch, and then used the videos shown in this section of Morgan’s presentation to demonstrate the skills and behaviours they expected from young players.

Part 2: How can player profiles develop players and coaches?
The second half of the session is devoted to exploring how these profiles are used to develop both players and coaches, including as part of the FIFA Talent Development Scheme (TDS). One of the main benefits of the profiles is that they give coaches at all levels a common framework for assessing players, which in turn informs the way they design and deliver training sessions. They are also invaluable as a benchmarking tool, because they allow coaches across the country to assess players on the same criteria and compare them against their peers. This is particularly important in Australia, where the size of the country makes it very difficult to organise national competitions at youth level.

The discussion between Morgan and Heinrichs in Part 2 covers a range of topics, including:

• How the video clips for each profile are used to educate coaches (00:10);
  
  
• How steep the learning curve is for practitioners who are not familiar with the profiles (03:13);
  
  
• The challenge of ensuring clubs are familiar with the “6 Ps” (12:41);
  
  
• The future of Football Australia’s “6 Ps” and continued engagement with the FIFA TDS project (13:46); and
  
  
• Advice for technical directors looking to assemble an initial set of player profiles (15:30).