How to create an effective MDT in football
How to create an effective MDT in football
As the financial power of football grows, so does the number of people involved supporting the players.
Going back in the 1970’s, you pretty much had a couple of coaches and a makeshift physio with the good old magic sponge.
Fast forward to 2024 and support teams are larger than ever.
It’s not uncommon at top clubs to have multi-disciplinary teams (MDT) consisting of 20+ staff in various areas.
New roles are emerging in recent years, such as return to play specialists, data scientists and more.
Whilst the number of people involved are growing, injuries in football remain at an all-time high.
Of course, the increasing fixture demands plays a big role in this, but have MDTs become better or worse over time?
Today I’d like to share some thoughts around how to create an effective MDT in football.
Let’s dive in.
Know your KPIs
Setting clear key performance indicators (KPIs) is essential to measure the success of an MDT in supporting players and performance.
Whilst a number of variations exist, typically the following are main KPIs for MDTs in football:
- Overall player availability (>90%)
- Increased player performance
- Reduce injury rate and burden
KPIs 2 and 3 here essentially feed into the first KPI (overall player availability).
Above the MDTs KPIs will be the club’s goals. This may be to become league champion. Or maybe it’s to make playoffs or even just stay in the league.
Everything around what you do across the MDT should be focused on these 3 KPIs.
Whilst player availability and injury rate are relatively easy to track across the season, player performance can be both objective and subjective.
Many practitioners will focus on physical output (i.e. did we ‘outrun’ the opposition?). But depending on the tactics and specifics of the game (e.g. low block, possession based, red card in the game) then physical output can vary significantly.
Coaches will still have their subjective view of a player’s physical performance.
Therefore, it’s a case of using both (objective and subjective data) to make an assessment.
* taken from Marques & Chamari (2023).
Work together, not in silos
Having travelled to football clubs around the world during my time as a sport scientist for Catapult, it’s interesting to see similar patterns.
Most telling is when you go into the canteen. Most clubs will have a ‘coaches table’, a ‘players table’ then the rest of staff across the other tables.
The same goes for office set ups at training facilities.
Medical staff in one. Performance staff in another. Analysts in a separate room.
This can lead to the creation of silos across the MDT, working in isolation without clear lines of communication.
I believe the layout of a training facility plays a big part in MDT effectiveness.
Recently I visited a Premier League training facility and it was clear the club had though hard about the placement of offices and the ‘traffic’ of players and coaches’ staff so that natural interactions take place everyday.
Same for a high-level academy I visited. Rather than having separate offices for each department within the MDT, they moved the staff together per age group. For example, all the coaches, performance staff, medical and analysts for the U23 team were together in the same office.
This makes communication much easier when all key stakeholders are in the same room together.
Communication: Structured approach
With the increasing number of staff within an MDT, the number of potential lines of communication also increases.
The notion ‘too many cooks in the kitchen’ can come to mind when messages can’t be clearly communicated across the MDT and upwards to coaches/players.
This relates to the spoked wheel or onion approach as highlighted in the image below.
With a spoken wheel approach, there are numerous lines of communication created which can lead to information overload when translating to key stakeholders.
The onion approach relates to adopting a ‘layered’ concept in which key personnel are responsible for communication and responsibility of their departments.
For example, this could be a Head of Performance, Head of Medical Services and Head of Analysis.
They are the staff who sit in the coach’s meetings each day, with information fed up the chain from other members of the MDT.
Take Home Messages
Having an effective MDT can play a crucial role in ensuring player performance is the best it can possibly be.
Below are some key points to create an effective MDT:
- Have clear, objective KPIs across the MDT that can be tracked during the season to understand how effective you are.
- Create an environment within the training facility that promotes collaboration across departments within the MDT.
- Adopt a clear chain of command and ‘onion’ approach when it comes to communicating information to key stakeholders.
If you would like to learn more about how to create an effective MDT in football, check out my football fitness mentorship community here.
That’s all for this week. See you next time!
