By Samindra Kunti
September 8 – AC Milan’s director of academy performance Domenico Gualtieri has indicated that the holistic training approach at the club in the past may have been a mistake, but has stressed that such approaches are flexible of conception.
For many years, Milanello, AC Milan’s state-of-the-art training centre, closely nestled to the lakeside town of Varese, has been an epicenter of the performance culture in football. As an exponent of the training complex’s dynamic work, the Milanese club reached the final of the 2006/07 Champions League, wherein AC Milan defeated Liverpool with veterans Paolo Maldini, Billy Costacurta and Cafu in their ranks.
In the long run Gualtieri admitted to Insideworldfootball on the sidelines of the 2015 Aspire Academy Global Summit on Football Performance and Science in Berlin that Milanello’s approach of holistic training may have been a mistake.
“Milanello’s approach was to investigate the different aspects of the performance-driven model,” explained Gualtieri. “The approach was to look at the different components of performance – the mental aspect, the physical aspect with provision, balance, use of energy, etc., the technical and tactical aspect.”
“The holistic approach that we had was probably a mistake, analysing different aspects,” said Gualtieri. “In the holistic approach you can’t divide. It’s one and you can’t divide it. So now, since two years, we are trying to be really holistic with our methods. It’s different from coordination, it’s a co-generated approach.”
The debate about a holistic approach and integrated training sessions in football has been raging within the performance culture for years. Sporting Lisbon’s technical director Paulo Leitão spoke of a divide between physical fundamentalism of the early 80’s and current tactical radicalism with the former referring to a cult of physical exercises coming from athletics and the latter referring to a training method centered around a compulsive need for tactical purposes.
Leitão hackled tactical radicalism, negating a need for training exercises to always have a correlation with tactics. At Milanello, the approach is different with no room for oscillation between the two schools. As a counter reaction to the holistic approach of erstwhile, AC Milan have switched to a co-generated training approach since 2013.
“In the performance you have some specific aspects, but that’s still inside the global context. You lose a bit of the specifics, but the reality is not specific, it’s global and not divided,” explained Gualtieri. “In our methodology now we co-generate the training. All together we decide we want to improve the players, what our methods are, what our specific trainings are.”
Nearly every morning Gualtieri and his staff meet at Milanallo’s office to co-generate, more loosely put brainstorm – but based on a substantial sports scientific approach, the training sessions for their players. The doctor in physical education, however, is not rigid in his ideas.
“I told him [Leitão] that we are radical,” said Gualtieiri. “You can make mistakes by being radical, having a radical position – it’s an easier way of telling that you are making mistakes. Our position is clear – we can’t stay in the middle. In our history our position is radical, a radical idea and radical methods, but this method is not a frozen concept. Perhaps in one year or in a decade’s time we will change a lot, so we are not rigid in what we do. What we are doing is what we believe in.”
While Gualtieri may disagree with Leitão, he acknowledged that the personalities of players remain key in the success of any approach. Dutch legend Johan Cruyff had called for personality to take center stage rather than the athlete at the start of a player’s career.
“We believe in this,” affirmed Gualtieri. “It’s part of the history of our club. Mattia De Sciglio is one of the younger players, who plays in the first team. He is an amiable person. In reality, a lot of players have a good heart. It’s not so simple to do what they do – to control a situation of riches when you are very young. You think it’s simple, but in reality that’s not true. We had a project concerning the use of the cellular – in Italy the use of mobiles is bad. We involved some of the players to explain with a video how to use the phone properly. That was one of the projects. The person is important. We are educators, not only trainers.”
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