Coaches Corner by Spiideo

Part 3: Using Spiideo in Training

Written and recorded by David Selini (UEFA A), Assistant Coach in Sweden's top-tier football / soccer league 'Allsvenskan'
Intro

Advancing Performance: Inside Our High-Tech Coaching Approach

Video analysis is at the center of everything we do. Before training we have video meetings, during training, we record everything thanks to our Spiideo camera system, and after training we use Spiideo Perform to evaluate training. It’s always ready to be viewed instantly. It’s the same with our matches, we prepare for upcoming opponents by analyzing their games in the Spiideo League Exchange setup for Allsvenskan, and then all our games are recorded automatically by Spiideo cameras. Spiideo is like a silent colleague – and one we really value.

In this series of blog posts, I will be guiding interested readers through our everyday work with Spiideo. The four parts of this series are the following:

Part one – The analysis process of breaking down a game
Part two – Analyzing the opposition
Part three – Using Spiideo in the training week
Part four – Individual development work

Part 3

Using Spiideo in Training

In the first and second parts of this four-part series I discussed the role Spiideo plays in our analysis of the upcoming opponent, how we use Spiideo during the game to get a better overview of what the opponents are doing, and how we use Spiideo and its tools to analyze our games afterwards. In the third and fourth parts I will now turn to how Spiideo is used during the training week – both in a collective way and on an individual level.

Use of training footage

Our Spiideo setup allows us to have a camera on two of our training pitches, one grass and one artificial grass, and in our stadium where we sometimes train as well. This means we can film every training session with our Spiideo cameras. The club also has a portable Spiideo camera which we sometimes use to get two angles in training, often behind the goal when working on final third attacking and defending the box.

Video is a massive part of our training week and we have video meetings before virtually all of our sessions. The footage for these sessions is often taken from games, but we also do a lot of video work on training footage. This means the ability to film the training sessions with our Spiideo cameras helps us in providing learning material for our players.

The tools within the system can also help illustrate certain points easily. The below video highlights how training footage can be used in the video room the following day.

The recorded material can also provide a good starting point for training idea discussion within the club with other coaches, mainly those from the academy teams, but also within our first-team coaching group when we evaluate how the session went.

Live tagging

One key feature which has made our workflow more effective for us is the ability to live-tag training. We play 11v11 every week and then spend a lot of time analyzing these full-pitch sessions to then give feedback to the players both collectively and individually. Previously, we would film the session and then go inside to rewatch it and start analyzing it. This is a good process, but it is very time consuming.

Since we often run two of these 11v11 sessions in the same day, we have around three hours, including lunch, between the sessions to find, create and prepare the clips we want to show to the players before the start of the session. This means that those hours can be very stressful for us coaches.

With the possibility of live tagging the session, we can save a lot of time as one of us coaches will tag the session in the Spiideo app on his iPhone or iPad whilst the session is underway. When we then go inside, a lot of the clips we then use in our video meeting will be easy to find in the Spiideo app and we don’t have to spend as much time looking through the entire session but rather just find the appropriate tags and create our clips from there. It’s a very smooth tool that helps us a lot in our daily work.

Live tagging

Finally, the possibility to film training and watch it live also provides the chance to provide video feedback to players during training, which is a huge plus. Perhaps more importantly, it can also help us referee games because some calls are difficult to make in real time. I attach this image below, is it offside or not on the blue winger in the bottom left corner? I’m still not sure…

In the fourth and final part I will go deeper into how we use Spiideo in our individual communication with players.