Peterborough United’s academy is thriving. Last year the club was awarded Category Two status for the next three seasons - the second highest ranking available for academies in English football - after being recognised for their outstanding approach to developing young talent.

The club’s investment in youth is paying off. Academy talents Harrison Burrows, Ronnie Edwards and Ricky-Jade Jones have become first team regulars, while Flynn Clarke, Adler Nascimento and Sam Proctor were sold for a combined £1.2 million plus add-ons in 2021.

While Category Two status has seen the club receive more money to invest in the recruitment of the best coaches and facilities, the club has also invested in our Tactic video analysis software, which is playing a key role in the development of their academy players.

Tactic gives Analysts and Coaches the tools to manipulate training and matchday footage in seconds. The software enables them to make annotations on screen, highlight individual players, add shapes and drawings to illustrate space and even drag and drop players to different areas of the pitch to give them positional and tactical feedback.

“In previous generations, coaches would just give players feedback verbally,” says Peterborough’s Senior Academy Performance Analyst, Matthew Saunders. “Now, we’re able to show players exactly where they’ve made mistakes in a game using video feedback and give them coaching points to improve their performance.”

Matthew Saunders, Senior Academy Performance Analyst, Peterborough United

Saunders says Tactic’s visual tools are vital for the development of young players. “I like my presentations to be very visual,” he adds. “I think players respond a lot better to more visual presentations which I believe Tactic provides. A combination of visual and verbal feedback really gives players the best chance of learning and improving.”

The benefits of telestration - the ability to draw on stills or moving video - for footballers have been endorsed by Analysts and Coaches over the past decade as the technology has evolved and become a staple of clubs’ pre-match preparation and post-match analysis. But until recently there was very little research that rubber stamped its benefits in elite sport.

That changed last year when Jordan Smith, Bournemouth’s Training Analyst,  Steve Rands, Head of Performance Analysis at Nottingham Forest; Michael Bateman, Lecturer at the University of Worcester; and John Francis, Senior Lecturer at the University of Worcester carried out a study assessing the impact of video analysis on the learning and development of footballers.

Their findings validated what Analysts and Coaches already knew - that telestration is helping players to learn and recall information more efficiently and improve their performance. Players and athletes who used telestration during video analysis sessions recalled 30% more information compared to those who did not.

Telestration is also helping coaching staff to do their jobs better. A 2008 study examined the ability of coaches to recall critical moments from a game accurately. The results showed that the probability of qualified, experienced coaches recalling critical events accurately is 59.2%. That means there is a huge opportunity for coaches to improve the detail and amount of quality feedback they give to players and minimise the risk of missing key learning moments.

Matthew Loades, Peterborough’s First Team Performance Analyst, revealed how the club is using Tactic to improve their coaches last year: “We film a lot of the training sessions at the club to enhance the coaches’ knowledge of what their practices look like and how their session designs comes out on the pitch,” he said. “We look at interventions, session rolling time, how the coaches have interacted with each individual player, there is so much scope.”

As the club’s coaches and analysts have embraced video analysis, so too have the club’s players. Tactic has become a staple of Peterborough’s pre-match analysis. “We work with the Under-18 and Under-21 teams and we’ll do opposition analysis at least once a week,” says Saunders. “Telestration plays a heavy role in this in terms of highlighting areas of the pitch where we believe we can exploit the opposition.”

Telestration is also key in critiquing Peterborough’s matchday performance. “The post-match analysis is all about highlighting how we want to develop ourselves both individually and as a team,” he adds. Saunders and the club’s other Analysts carry out team and individual telestration sessions to emphasise coaching points. “Individual sessions really help to get the message across in a focused environment. You can also create individual performance plans and use telestration to tailor the analysis to that.”

Image copyright: Joe Dent / www.theposh.com

Telestration has become so embedded within the club that analysis sessions begin with players at Under-9 level. Saunders says it’s helping to create a video analysis culture at the club. “With the Under-9s it’s their first introduction to analysis and telestration so it’s very much a watered down version of what we use with the older age groups. The aim is to introduce them to it, explain why we’re using it and ultimately make it enjoyable for them.”

The simplicity of Tactic has ensured Performance Analysts also find the process of using the software a positive one. “I really like the player tracking tools,” he says. “Being able to attach a trail to a player and track his movement is really useful. There are also very simple but effective tools such as the box tool to highlight areas of space. This is really useful for opposition analysis if there are areas of the pitch we want to exploit.”

As video analysis software continues to develop, so too does the delivery format. The club uses a video sharing platform to upload all their Tactic-annotated clips so players can watch the videos at home via their smartphones or laptops. In the future, Saunders believes video analysis software will eventually be able to incorporate increasing amounts of data to give players a complete picture of their performance.

“I think the integration of data from other software into one package would be a big advancement,” he says. “So, being able to see physical data such as top sprint speed, distance covered and also technical data points - for example the quality of a pass in relation to pre-determined metrics for different types of passes in different areas of the pitch.”

For Peterborough’s next generation of young talent, video analysis is certain to play a key role in their development as the club looks to maximise the potential of every prospect and continue its impressive record of developing academy players.