Well-organised talent development programmes help young players grow and improve their skills early on. To support its member associations in this domain, FIFA has launched its novel Talent Coach Programme – an initiative seeking to establish high-quality youth academies and support for young footballers worldwide. FIFA Talent Coaches, a cohort of expert practitioners carefully selected for the programme, will base themselves across 25 different member associations to assist young talents in fulfilling their potential. This section of the Training Centre covers the FIFA Talent Coaches’ journey, revealing their practices and exhibiting the underlying methodology they use to help players take their game to the next level.

Can we train the future player? To achieve this, FIFA Talent Coaches adhere to a dynamic methodology that uses the game as its foundation. The approach emphasises collaborative coaching and different types of practice, incorporating football expertise from across the globe. By adopting this methodology, which the experts at FIFA constantly update, the Talent Coaches ensure each session they conduct provides players with the best possible opportunity to spiral their development upwards instead of down.

An overriding objective of the Talent Coach Programme is to make a global impact on football development. Ultimately it is the programme’s exercises and training sessions that are steering the programme towards this objective. Below are some of these sessions, which are conducted by FIFA Talent Coaches, as well as Talent Coaches from associations undertaking the programme. To provide more insight into what rolling out the programme entails, this section also consists of interviews with some of the people most involved.

In the practice library, readers can filter through the FIFA Talent Coaches’ activities by any specific training intention. The “Scale” filter categorises activities by whether they focus on the player, a unit or the team; “Practice type”, “Gender”, and “Sort by” filters provide extra functionality, guaranteeing you find the activity right for you and your group of players.