10/11/2026
Tuesday Diary #3 | Learning From Professional Clubs vs Replicating Their Methods
Having worked in both professional and semi-professional football, I’ve had the opportunity to experience two very different training environments. It’s something that has shaped my opinion on how we approach training and player development.
One thing I’ve noticed is how often coaches adopt training methods simply because they’re being used by successful professional clubs.
We see a training session from Manchester City, Real Madrid or another top European club and assume that if it works for them, it should work for us.
But are we actually considering the environment in which those sessions are being delivered?
From my experience, the differences between professional and semi-professional football go well beyond the quality of the players.
Training hours, recovery opportunities, staffing, facilities, monitoring systems and, importantly, the training history and physical conditioning of the athletes can be completely different.
A professional footballer will generally have accumulated more training hours, developed a greater tolerance to physical demands and benefited from years of structured training. A semi-professional player may not have the same training background or physical capacity to tolerate identical workloads.
Yet we sometimes expect the same training methods to produce the same results.
I’ve seen how important it is to adapt training to the players and the environment you’re actually working in, rather than trying to replicate what happens elsewhere.
I’m certainly not against learning from elite clubs. Having worked in professional football, I’ve seen the value of structured training programmes and the reasoning behind them. There is plenty we can take from those environments and apply at different levels.
But we need to understand why something is being done, what physical or tactical outcome we’re trying to achieve, and whether it’s appropriate for our own players.
Good coaching isn’t about replicating what the best clubs do. It’s about understanding why they do it and knowing how to adapt it to your own environment.
