Monthly Archive for June, 2025

The culture of work should allow the coach to go beyond conventional actions, avoiding being trapped in habitual mindsets that often lead to passively accepting training principles and their applications. Instead, one must question their own beliefs and remain open-minded to new solutions.

Coaching is not just about teaching a technique or tactic, and for the player, it’s not just about learning—even if what must be learned is complex and its execution requires a high level of mastery. Coaching and training mean using one’s cognitive, emotional, and motor intelligence to teach and learn how to understand and execute what needs to be done in order to achieve performance levels that aim to optimize match performance.

To plan a training program focused on improving athletic performance, it’s essential that the player and coach—and the team as a whole—share the objectives to be achieved through the intended training.

As already explained, in sports, performance refers to the motor behavior produced in response to a task that can be measured, whereas skill refers to the competence required to deliver a performance at a given level.
To improve performance, training must aim to develop within the team the idea of “thinking while moving,” which means always having a guiding idea behind each game action.
This approach can be applied in a basic way for beginners, or in a technically more refined and targeted manner as experience grows.

There is no game action without thought, so learning or training means moving with a mental representation of what one intends to do.

(Source: Alberto Cei, Palla al centro, Bologna: Il Mulino)

In these days of chaos for the Italian national football team, the main commentators have blamed the defeat against Norway, in the World Cup qualifying match, on the poor technical level of the players, while the coach Luciano Spalletti himself expressed regret at not having been able to do his job to the best of his ability.

I do not want to question these explanations, nor those that blame the FIGC and its president.

What I would like to know, instead, is what was done beforehand to build a united team, aware of the difficulties and the tasks that awaited them.

We all know—or at least we all should know—that if a team lacks great individual talent and a well-oiled playing style, it should not give up, but rather be ready to fight for every inch of the pitch, with players ready to step in when a teammate is about to face trouble. In essence, regardless of everything else, never give up an inch. Be tenacious, which means continuing to do what you’ve been doing, even after you’ve done it.

With this in mind, I wonder how the days leading up to the match were spent, how these issues were addressed in training and technical meetings—or whether, as I have often seen happen, only technical-tactical matters were discussed, detached from the human factor. It’s too easy to claim that the available players were just not good enough—what does that even help?

It’s easy to say they didn’t show pride in wearing the Azzurri shirt—but how were they supposed to develop that pride, when they don’t even play for Italian clubs because they’re overlooked in favor of any foreign player, and have grown up under agents more focused on inflating their fees than anything else? Of course, everyone should develop a sense of belonging—which, after all, is one of our fundamental human needs—but who was supposed to teach them that?

Unfortunately, these themes are of no interest—so let them go on finding a new scapegoat each time.