Why Sydney FC adopted a fully game-based approach

In this first part of the series, Technical Advisor Kelly Cross explains the philosophy behind this model — why Sydney FC deliberately moved away from traditional, drill-oriented training and what it means to “think differently” about football development.

When Sydney FC launched its academy ten years ago, the goal was clear: to produce more homegrown players capable of performing in the first team, representing Australia internationally, and succeeding overseas.

But achieving that required more than simply refining existing practices. “If you keep doing what you’ve always done,” Kelly says, “you get what you’ve always got.” The academy needed a new way of thinking — one that questioned the mechanistic, linear worldview that often shapes youth training.

Rather than treating development like an assembly line — with pre-defined steps and predictable outcomes — Sydney FC embraced the idea that football is a complex, adaptive system: human, interactive, and unpredictable. In such systems, learning happens through relationships and interactions, not isolated drills.

In Kelly’s view, traditional training methods — breaking the game down into isolated skills like passing or dribbling — miss the essence of football. Just as removing a brain from a body stops it from functioning, removing elements of football from their context — opponents, direction, decision-making — kills what makes the game alive. “It might look like football,” he explains, “but it’s not football.”

Instead of fixing “problems” in isolation, Sydney FC chose to keep the whole game intact, allowing players to learn in authentic environments where decisions, perception, and execution remain interconnected. This shift also required a new mindset for coaches: moving from analysis (breaking things apart) to synthesis (connecting and understanding the whole).

The decision wasn’t made on intuition alone. The Sydney FC model is grounded in sports science research — particularly in perception–action coupling and representative learning design. By maintaining the full game context, players continuously practice perception, decision-making, and action together, creating conditions for deep, transferable learning. 

Kelly references an exercise design model developed by Hodges and Lohse, which evaluates training activities on two axes:

• Specificity to competition (how much it resembles the real game)
• Difficulty or challenge

Learning happens in the “optimal zone” — where exercises are both game-like and demanding. If the training looks nothing like a game or lacks challenge, learning and transfer are limited. “You might get good at the exercise,” Kelly notes, “but it won’t transfer to real performance.”

Sydney FC’s training philosophy draws on Einstein’s principle: “I can’t teach anybody. I can only create the conditions for them to learn.”

In a game-based approach, the coach’s role is to create meaningful, game-like environments that trigger authentic learning — not to control every action. Players stay engaged because they see the relevance of every activity: there are goals, direction, opposition, and competition. “Nothing motivates players more than a game,” Kelly says.

• Football is a complex, human system, not a mechanical process.
• Removing elements from the game removes essential learning interactions.
• Training should combine realism and challenge to maximize transfer.
• The coach’s job is to create conditions for players to learn through the game.

The next article explores how Sydney FC puts this philosophy into practice — and how it changes the role of the coach.