This series of 11 articles across the last year has encouraged coaches to traverse the craft of player development, representative of what is both important in any given context and what has utility.

Associating the way we coach with what the people in that environment value - alongside the methods that support players to get better at playing soccer - is the landscape we should explore together.

Our methodology can bridge these two critical aspects. However, mapping this methodology should consistently be a cautious and tentative, yet inclusive, exercise. 

Our human desire to abstract reality into a theory, model or map is often a natural consequence of our want to attempt to understand the complexity of soccer, and the people who come together to play it.

While perhaps a natural human instinct, there may be benefit in resisting this tendency to abstract player development programmes into rigid models that are convenient, yet unable to reflect the complexity of human beings playing soccer.

Principally, this tendency associates to the well-intentioned yet obstructive industry intentions to, for example, segregate physical training from our psychological development, or the development of technique from the tactics that inevitably shape those techniques.

"Mapping learning is seductive - but when the map is drawn, the territory changes..."

Freeing ourselves from rigidly constructed, routinely repeated cycles of a syllabus removes many of the shackles that can limit coaches’ ability to respond with their players - instead, enabling us to adapt, flex and morph as the modality moves.

Mapping development or learning is seductive - however, the moment the map is drawn, the territory changes.
The opposition may play differently from what was anticipated, the players in our care may grow, plateau or regress unexpectedly or we may embark upon a significant winning, or losing, streak.

The alternative suggestion is not to be non-committal or to just blow in the wind. We can have clarity of what we are committed to without it being condensed.

The early elements of this series challenged us all to consider the kind of club we are - or aspire to be. This is the light that illuminates; guiding our decisions, shaping our interactions and informing, in an integrated fashion, our practice.

Ensure this integration shapes the judgements we make and is central to how we reflect upon and analyse what we did to further influence the judgements we make in the future.

This is learning - and learning perhaps needs reconsidering and reconceptualising. For so many of us, learning has become about remembering, recalling and retaining.