The strategic power of benchmarking: Elevating player development in academy football

Kognia’s Ryan DeFreitas shares detailed insight on benchmarking in academy football, and the importance of data-led benchmarking and its impact on decision-making, and contributing to the overall goals and objectives of an academy within a professional football club. Ryan has over nine years of performance analysis experience at both first-team and academy level, working with Leicester City and Manchester City before joining Kognia.

From my experiences in academy football and player development, benchmarking is powerful because: 

1. It is difficult to know what “good” is due to the nature of development and lack of knowledge in this area

2. Each club has different goals for their players and academy output

3. It can maximise the chances of a club achieving its specific objectives for any given player

The review cycles for academy players are longer than the game-to-game processes that define successful performance at first team level. Only reviewing isolated performances of young players with nothing to compare to will likely lead you to uninformed decisions. 

With benchmarking data you can investigate complex questions such as what future scholars and future pros look like through at different stages of the development pathway, how certain profiles must develop to get across the line and also review the efficacy of your development interventions. 

If you’re collecting data to monitor your players and create Individual Development Plans, an easy way to make the dataset more insightful is to have benchmarks to compare against. Without some mechanism for comparison it is difficult to understand if current performance is good, bad, indifferent or where a player requires further development. Comparing player data to benchmarks that define what good performance is in your environment solves this.

What is considered good can be established by your club’s purpose: What are your desired journey end points for your players? 

What is “good” can be established by your club’s purpose. What are your desired journey end points for your players? Your strategy might be to develop players for your first team. It might be focused on preparing assets for sale into the lower leagues. It’s probably both. Regardless, whatever the strategic outcome, the performance required to achieve these can become your first benchmarks.

If the aim is first‑team progression, you already have the required performance level: your first team. Their data (technical, tactical, physical) defines the standard your academy players must reach to have a realistic chance of being first team ready. The same applies to playing style. First‑team profiles give you a benchmark for not just the quality of player, but also the profile of player. If your model includes selling players, league‑wide profiles could become your reference. They help you understand whether your players are ready for that level of football and where they might fit in the market.

If you have data on all of the above you can begin to signpost where your players might end up; playing for your first team or which league might be an appropriate match for their ability, either to sell into or to continue their development on loan. It’s not a crystal ball but can be really powerful for better informing your player development decisions.

Using benchmarks you can start to see where players exceed desired performance level and where they need further development to be at the required level. You can assess if they are of the correct profile or if you have a different type of player that may require a different environment to continue their development, such as a loan or future sale, or maybe is good enough to dictate a style change for the team. All this is possible because you are able to compare to the required level of performance in your context and you can therefore make better informed decisions.

How does it look in practice?

So if we have data and we have benchmarks, how do we use them on a practical basis?

The below image demonstrates a resource that is enough to use in almost all your review points assuming you have selected the metrics that are most relevant to the development of the player OR aligned with the successful performance of the team. 

By establishing our benchmarks our academy players can easily be evaluated against them, in this instance our Winger against the Elite Winger benchmark profile.

You can see that our player is fairly proficient at holding width for our team and threatening the box with dribbles. It is also easy to pinpoint where we need to develop him further in order to fit our profile of winger. Expecting our winger to drop down and receive in the middle third and then take on the full back, he is not performing this action as much as we would like so we can create interventions to develop this area of his game. Depending on their age and requirements we can focus on whether we want changes to volume or success. It’s also simple to see that he has a super strength in running in behind. That might not necessarily fit our version of a winger but it is something we might want to exploit and continue to develop. This will give us options to use him in a different way to our current wingers or increase the saleability to a club who requires a winger of his profile. These development and methodological questions are made possible by the simple presentation of data and benchmarks.

We can also add our other wingers to the data table and visualisation. Comparing the players and watching their relevant videos to have a full, multidisciplinary discussion to evaluate development, performance and even discuss things like squad depth planning and potential end points for players; first team, loan or sale.

Clearly the approach fits the longer term processes at a club, like assessing player development plans over longer mesocycles. However, you can also still use it week-to-week to review performance in specific games. Doing so raises interesting questions around a player’s ability to be consistent in their performance and also how other factors; such as opponent quality, formation or even match state, impact the performance of your players.

When to ask the complex questions

As your data collection and use becomes more mature you can begin to create benchmarks that answer specific questions. What level of performance is required for an U16 player to be offered a scholar, and how does a scholar ensure they are offered a pro contract? What did the profile of that U16 player who received a scholarship at the club (or didn’t) look like at all of the preceding YDP ages? 

Your benchmarking can become a tool for not just comparison to the desired end point, but for how players move through the whole development journey and ensure they reach the shorter goals. 

Moving from YDP to Pro Phase to Pro Contract to first team feels more achievable than trying to visualise how an U14 player becomes a first team player in the future. Understanding that players will continually develop is important and knowledge of how players must develop to get across the line and also what players that don’t make it look like can be the difference between good decisions and uninformed decisions. Naturally you can keep organisational strategy at the forefront of development throughout the development pathway and not just have an abstract concept hanging over you with no practical influence.

Informed decision making to support your strategy

The power of benchmarking is that it allows you to make more informed decisions. This should see your decision making around player development be more accurate and targeted in that your interventions are informed by your strategic missions and the actual gaps in performance of your players rather than perceived ones in comparison to ideal performance in your specific context. You have a real method of informing exactly how players need to perform in order to have a chance to play in your first team or to have the ability to a career elsewhere and be a saleable asset to your organisation.

For more information on how Kognia can support with young player benchmarking, please get in touch: info@kogniasports.com

In addition, you can reach out directly to Ryan on LinkedIn to discuss the article in further detail.