Preparation (Part One)

Neal Ardley is the Director of Cardiff City’s successful academy. It has produced top players, including Aaron Ramsey, but Ardley measures success in other ways as well. Young players are impressionable and need to be prepared for life’s challenges, so how does the club achieve this?

“We have a philosophy with our academy,”  Ardley told us exclusively. “We consider the academy to be like a greenhouse where the players can grow. The coaches aren’t just there to teach them football; they are there to teach them a little bit of life-skills away from it and social skills as part of the coaching set up.”

A laudable aim, but how do they do this in practice? “There will be loads of interaction,” he said. “Loads of questions and answers, loads of fun games where players have to take responsibility and be vocal, so there’s a variation of things. I just think that being around people of your own age – enjoying it – that helps your social skills and they do see each other a lot.”

However, they need to be pertmitted to express themselves. That is Cardiff’s philosophy, but young people can be influenced, especially by adults they trust. How does Cardiff's academy teach them to cope with pressure?

Pressure:

They start with the parents. The academy’s staff know that they are dealing with children and realise that expectations should not be put on them too early. The coaches are aware of this and they need to prevent pressure being put on young boys by their parents, especially ones who thought that they could have been players themselves and want to live out those dreams through their children.

“I think it’s very important to educate the parents on what we are doing – to inform them that everything we are doing is for a reason, because I think parents can create pressure on the children themselves,” Ardley told us. “A lot of people would give their right arms to be a football player. It’s such a big thing and I think sometimes the pressure on the kids can come from the parents themselves, where they don’t want the kids to pass up the opportunity that they are having.”

So how does Ardley and his staff lessen that pressure? “We just try and educate them because we’ve got a philosophy here that we want our players to play with no fear,” he said. “We’re not results based – academy football isn’t results based. Generally we try to get them to express themselves and we try and teach the parents too. I think we can get that message across because a lot of kids that make a mistake in a game will look over to the sidelines to see what dad’s reaction is and that’s not right.”

Ardley has methods to deal with it. “What we try to do is to explain to the parents that they perhaps don’t realise it sometimes,” he said. “If the kid asks a question in the car on the way home we try to educate them on what sort of answers to give and they should try and talk to the coaches rather than give their opinion or force their opinion on the kid.”

Of course their football education has to change priorities as they approach the age where results matter. “Obviously once we start getting to Under-16s football we’ve got to start teaching them a winning mentality and get the habits right in winning games and start to prepare them for what might be with the first team,” said Ardley. “It does start to get a little bit more intense at that age group.”