A Footballers Self-Assessment Starter Exercise
January 7, 2008
Where to start? It’s a new year and it’s a great time to reflect on the past, the present and look forward to the future. As a footballer, one great way to begin the process of improvement is through personal reflection or self-assessment.
Going through such an internal process allows you to discern clearly what your strengths are and areas in which you feel you need to make improvements or manage weaknesses. The idea or culmination of this reflection is to come away with planned improvement actions that can be monitored for progress.
The key to any self-assessment process and action plan is executing and monitoring your progress. Thus, it’s important for your to personally reflect and measure your progress regularly. It is also important for you to have support and guidance from others like teammates and coaches who have a vested interest to see you succeed.
So, how do you get started you ask? Well, before you rack your brain thinking and reflecting it’s best to have some criteria in order to make a personal assessment. Many of the world class football systems use what is called benchmarking or best practices to assess players. Benchmarking is simply the process of evaluating performance of a particular task in comparison to a perfect performance of such a task or action.
Although evaluating the skill of a footballer is subjective and not exact. Generally, a comparison with the best footballers at the highest level is a great way to benchmark and assess one self. Ok, what do you look for you ask?
Let’s quickly look at what some of the common player attributes produced by a few of the best known football development systems like the Brazilians, the Dutch and the Germans. Brazilian players are famous for being very technically sound, highly creative, very tactical with positional play and are always fit and fast. Dutch players are also known for having very good technique, are very tactically sound and systematically structured in creating support. German players are known for their tactical play, strength, determination, fitness and precision.
In short, three of the top footballing nations produce common attributes among world class players: technical ability, tactical thinking and comprehensive fitness. Strong footballers must focus and continually assess their Game, Body and Mind to achieve world class technique, smart tactical play and excellent fitness.
Now, we need breakdown some specific components to your Game, Body & Mind which we will do in the next blog post. First, let us do a short assessment exercise. On a scale of 1 to 5 with 5 being highest or “World Class” rating, rate yourself in these core elements. Write it down and keep your personal rating in a safe place.
Your rating could look like this:
Game – 3
Body – 4
Mind – 2
Total Score = 9
World Class Player = 15 (Pele, Cruyff, Beckenbauer)
Next we will be break down several components of Game, Body & Mind to consider for a detailed self-assessment. What’s your score?
