Do heads of performance deliver the goods?
The year is 2010. The FIFA World Cup is about to start in South Africa and I am travelling in the wrong direction.; I am leaving Johannesburg on a flight to Melbourne, much to the dismay of friends and colleagues with whom I have been attending and presenting at the international science in soccer conference in Port Elizabeth.
The reason for me leaving town before one of the biggest events in the football calendar is a study visit: an opportunity to spend some time with teams competing in the National Rugby League (NRL) and Australian Football League (AFL) and learn how they prepare their athletes and structure the departments responsible for fitness, medical services and recovery. Australia, since the inception of the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra, has been recognised as a world leader in sport science, with practitioners who traverse the space between applied practise and research. Most of the professional clubs have links and formal agreements with universities so that they can access expertise in a variety of areas including nutrition, recovery, effective training and performance analysis. It was for this reason that I wanted to visit and take a look behind the scenes.
On the trip I was introduced to someone with the title of ‘head of performance’. The person in that role was at the Carlton Blues, a successful team in the AFL. The hospitality extended to me was unrivalled. I spent time at the training ground, watched sessions, spoke with coaches and attended a game with access to the pre-match routines, team talks and debriefs. One of the most striking things about the visit was that the head of performance wasn’t too concerned with delivering to the players, that wasn’t his job. His role was to organise and give a common goal to the fitness and medical staff including disciplines such as physiotherapy, sport science, strength & conditioning, nutrition and psychology, ensuing their work was coordinated and in line with the philosophy set out by the head coach. He was also responsible for the quality of their work with direct accountability for the performance of staff in his department. He was ably assisted through a relationship with a prominent university and their research staff who helped him make sense of the data he was collecting and to ensure he was making effective, evidence based decisions. What I observed seemed to be a good way of doing things yet starkly different from many sports I had worked with, or at least how clubs were structuring their performance department at the time. It was more likely they would have individuals, each with their own specialism but no one to quality assure or coalesce the work they were performing.
What’s in a name
A lot has changed since 2010 and it is no longer hard to find staff with roles in sport with the appointed (or self-appointed) title of ‘head of performance’. So is the increase in sports who have appointed a head of performance representative of a change in what clubs are looking for from people in these positions, a change in their organisational structure, or both? Or, is it simply a rebrand for the traditional fitness coach and/or physiotherapist? Have individuals in these positions improved the way that athletes are prepared for competition or helped coaches make sense of the growing mass of data that comes with each training session and match? To answer some of these questions we need to interrogate the roles and responsibilities commonly allocated to heads of performance.
Staff Management
It is difficult to imagine a scenario where you have a head of performance with no staff to manage. For clubs who have practitioners across a range of disciplines it makes sense to have someone capable of managing their work, directing their attention toward a common goal and quality assuring the processes and practises that athletes encounter on a day-to-day basis. A question clubs face is whether a head of performance can oversee physiotherapy, medicine, and sport science related disciplines given that traditionally they will have operated as an expert in one of these specialisms earlier in their career. Each club will have their own view on this, likely influenced by the skills, experience and expertise of staff they have at the club. What is important, however, is that the person charged with this tole is adept and skilled in managing people, influencing, shaping culture and extracting more from the team of practitioners than the sum of its individual parts.
The role is not about being an expert practitioner, more the ability to bring people together, formulate a shared ethos and track progress toward that goal. In fact, as the number of support staff employed grows, it could be argued that there is no requirement for a head of performance to be well versed or display specific expertise in any one discipline; their most vital skill is likely to be found in managing people. Such an approach may make it easier for individuals in this role to maintain a dispassionate objectivity given that are not aligned, biased or prejudiced toward any once facet of the support team. Is sport ready for the appointment of ‘managers’ from outside of the industry? Only time will tell. Someone who is navigating this space is Robert McCunn, head of performance at Heart of Midlothian FC, who had this insight: “The ability to confidently interact with a range of audiences is paramount for any head of performance. On any given day it is very conceivable that you’ll have touch points with your backroom staff, the manager and players but also a host of operational staff in addition to the CEO and board of directors.
Developing strategy
Some may feel this sounds a little fluffy; why would the staff tasked with keeping the players fit and injury free require a strategy? The truth is, if individuals from different disciplines, for example, medicine, physiotherapy, sport science and strength and conditioning are to work together in an effective way, they need to be guided by a strategy, a common aim and shared language. In instances where the does not exist, you get an outcome that is decidedly less than optimal. The strategy that a head of performance sets may include how things like injuries and classified and reported, the metrics that staff use to quantify how intensive training was and how staff interact and work together to return injured players to competition in the shortest time possible.
Depending on your point of view, you may feel like the strategy developed by a head of performance should be informed by the head coach, or be separate so that there is some degree of continuity in instances where there are regular changes in personnel. Irrespective of this, we should expect a head of performance to guide the staff they are responsible for in adapting to the needs and philosophies of the head coach. In some respects this should give new managers and coaches comfort that the staff supporting them and the players are working for them and not against them.
Providing a Filter
Never before has it been so hard to be a coach, with data arriving at their door from multiple sources and an expectation they should be able to assimilate this data into their coaching plans on an almost daily basis. I consider myself to be well versed in sport science yet still find it hard to fathom how I should interpret the data that is produced by GPS units each and every training session, or, how this may interact with injury incidence, let alone the performance of the team.
The head of performance should act as a filter for this information, to spend time understanding how the head coach or manager wants to play and reporting only the data that helps achieve this goal, or avoiding pitfalls that will derail progress towards it. As Damien Hughes, the liquid thinker has suggested: ‘It isn’t the number of balls you can throw that is important, it is the number of balls they can catch’. Where disagreements between members of the support team arise, the head of performance should be able to view the situation objectively and dispassionately, make a decision and present a clear and coherent message to coaching staff. This is perhaps the most difficult yet important role that the head of performance plays, utilising high level skills in communication, critical thinking and how best to present complex information in an easy to understand format.
Research and development
When coaches become qualified there is a requirement for them to undertake regular CPD (continuous professional development) to maintain their status. This is also true of some (but not all) of the disciplines in the back room staff. As the football season becomes more intense, with less time allocated to the off-season period, opportunities to engage in such development activities reduces, especially for the backroom staff charged with working with injured athletes, of whom there are usually some, even during the off-season break.
To combat this, clubs have taken the step of bringing in experts to present at the club, or, in some circumstances, to organise their own conference. Such an approach means that staff have CPD brought to them rather than having to find time outside of their normal working hours. Clubs like Arsenal and Paris St Germain have led the way in this field, each with their own head of performance who has championed the process.
Given the reduced requirement to be hands on, heads of performance have the capacity to develop relationships with experts in academia, share best practise with other clubs and undertake projects that result in a better understanding of how best to prepare athletes.
Most top clubs now have a formal link with a university so that their staff can access the latest research and, in some cases, contribute to scientific literature themselves. It is the ability to ‘think slow’, to coin a phrase from Daniel Kahneman’s best-selling book, that should be a fundamental role of these tasked with being head of performance. Dr Hugh Fullager - who has worked with the University Technology Sydney and more recently at Reykjavik University - regularly collaborates with heads of performance across a range of sports and has himself held roles with the University of Oregon and the Oakland Raiders in the US, had this to say: “when we work with professional teams or athletes, the critical thing is that the questions being developed are created by them - we see ourselves as a helping hand to get the answer in the background whilst the practitioner manage on the ground, but we must be answering questions which are organisation-driven, transferrable to the applied context and relevant to issues the coaches and players encounter on a day-to-day basis.”
Making a commitment
The arrival of heads of performance across sporting clubs has the potential to make a positive impact on the way that players are prepared, recover and are managed through injury. However, this will only happen if the sports who employ them make a commitment to upholding standards for those who occupy the role.
More could be done in sport to benchmark and standardise the role and the responsibilities incumbents are expected to undertake. Such a pursuit will prevent self-appointment to such roles with little thought for the wider implications it has in terms of developing the staff around them or detailing and communicating their strategy.
This article first appeared in Nutmeg, the Scottish Football Periodical.
