This book applies research findings from soccer match analysis, coaching analysis, decision making in sport and motor skill acquisition to inform the coach on best practices, with a view to improving performance of the individual player and the team. Soccer match analysis has become more and more important in recent years. No professional soccer club plays a single match without having analyzed their own and their opponents matches to find the best possible plan for success. In Soccer Analytics Ian M. Franks and Mike Hughes explore soccer match analyses and use the results to develop realistic, progressive practices to improve the performance of the individual players and the team. Research is directly applied to the coaching process and technical and tactical practices are designed to accommodate these findings. Not only is the players behavior during practice and matches analyzed but the coaches as well. This helps evaluate different coaching practices to find your ideal coaching style. Coaches of soccer from elite levels to recreational players, directors of coaching clubs and teams, undergraduate university students, college professors involved in coaching and teaching soccer, physical education teachers, parents of soccer players will develop insight from the ample material presented.
Ian M. Franks, PhD gained his full English Football Association Coaching Award in 1975. He was head coach at the Olympic Soccer Training Centre at the University of British Columbia. He then took a position as Director of the Centre for Sport Analysis at UBC where he developed the first computer analysis system for soccer and conducted research into the analysis of international soccer matches. He has published over 200 research articles, 22 book chapters, and 5 books in the areas of Sport Analysis, Skill Acquisition, and Movement Control. Professor Franks is also a Fellow of Canadian Society for Psychomotor Learning and Sport Psychology as well as the National Academy of Kinesiology.
Mike Hughes, PhD has conducted research into Match Analysis for over 30 years. He has worked with National Sports Great Britain teams as a notational analyst in soccer. He has published over 160 research articles, written and contributed to 24 books, and organized 18 international conferences on sport analysis. His areas of expertise include modeling, sport system perturbations, tactical and technical game analyses as well as individual movement analysis. Mike was the founder and is now President of the International Society of Analysis of Sport (ISPAS) as well as being the founding editor of the International Journal of Performance Analysis of Sport. Mike is a BASES (British Association of Sport and Exercise Sciences) accredited Sport and Exercise Scientist and a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society.
