PORTO, Portugal — There is an office at the end of a quiet corridor on
the ground floor of the sports faculty at the University of Porto. It is not
the sort of place that attracts much foot traffic, and it is not decorated as
if it is intended to do so.
The room’s
occupant, Vítor Frade, is retired from the teaching post he held at the
university for more than three decades. He keeps the office, though, as a
convenient place to receive the steady stream of visitors who come from across
the world to pick his brain, seek his advice or simply hear him talk.
Over the
course of his long career, Frade achieved no small academic success, but he
could not be described as famous, not in the sense that soccer usually means
it. Fans do not sing his name in stadiums, nor do they ask him for autographs
in the street.
He was not a
player of any great note. He has never managed a club. Instead, Frade, 73, is
that rarest of things: one of soccer’s most noteworthy theorists.
His great
contribution to the sport is tactical periodization, an approach to management
that is often characterized — much to his evident frustration — as a coaching
style. “It is not a method,” he says, almost as soon as he sits down. “It is a
methodology. You have a methodology so that you don’t need methods.” The last
word is issued with disdain.
To Frade, his
approach is a management philosophy, a personal dogma and a belief system
rolled into one. It is a way of thinking more than a way of playing, one
conceived and crafted in this office, at this university, but that can now
claim devotees around the world.
Its most famous evangelist is José Mourinho, who deployed it to
considerable success at Chelsea, Inter Milan and Real Madrid, and who now hopes
it can revive Manchester United. But Mourinho is not alone. Most of the great
Portuguese coaching diaspora carry some of Frade’s imprint: André Villas-Boas
and Vítor Pereira most directly, from the time they spent at F.C. Porto, but
also Monaco’s Leonardo Jardim and Hull City’s Marco Silva at one or more
removes.
Then there
are the foreign adherents, the managers and coaches whose ideas draw to a
greater or lesser extent on Frade’s work. Brendan Rodgers, the coach of Celtic,
became convinced of the approach’s value while working under Mourinho early in
his career. Eddie Jones, the Australian coach of England’s rugby team, is a
convert, too.
In recent
months alone, Frade has welcomed, among others, visitors from Australia,
Brazil, England and Scandinavia. Every so often, with the help of a friend, he
puts together an email blast for anyone who has expressed an interest in his
work. It goes out, he said, to 542 people, including Mourinho.
The emails contain
poems composed by Frade — Pepijn Lijnders, a former Porto coach now working at
Liverpool, shares them with the Brazilians Philippe Coutinho and Lucas Leiva —
but also “articles I have read, interviews with interesting coaches, book
recommendations and summaries.” Frade is as likely to include a paper on
robotics or neuroscience as one on soccer itself, the product of a brain
fizzing and whirring, its synapses forever fusing links between unrelated
thoughts.
All of it is relevant, though, to the system that Frade created.
“Whenever I
read something, I am always thinking how it applies to football,” he said.
“That is true whether it is something on biology or epigenetics. It is always
football.” Periodization, he said, draws on everything, because it is an
attempt to account for everything.
“Football is
not a linear process,” Frade said. “It is not a sum of things: If you do this,
plus that, you will achieve this.” Instead, “the coach must consider every
aspect, of the individual, of the team. Football is not two-dimensional. It is
multidimensional.”
It is an
imperfect parallel, but the game, as Frade envisages it, is not unlike a
Rubik’s Cube: Every thing a manager does, every single turn, has a consequence
elsewhere. It does not work if the they try to fix one side alone; the problem
must be considered in its entirety.
That is why Frade’s methodology — as employed by Mourinho and the rest —
decrees that there should not be specific physical, tactical or technical
training sessions, no separate fitness coaches or artificial skills exercises,
such as the rondo, the one-touch passing game that forms the basis of Pep Guardiola’s approach. Because every
aspect of the game is interconnected, Frade argues, they must be treated as
such.
That is not
periodization’s only calling card. Everything is related to possible in-game
scenarios: no running to build up general stamina; only running to build up the
exact sort of stamina that might be required at given moments. No practicing
passing; only practicing what pass is needed and when.
Training is
never gentle, with all sessions carried out as fast and as hard as the number
of players on the field allows. And it is not scripted. Players are not told
what to do; they are given a problem and encouraged to solve it for themselves.
“What matters is the process,” Frade said. “They have to work out the answers.”
The week’s training is governed by what Frade and his disciples call the
morfocycle. Throughout the season, each day is devoted to a specific aspect of
play: Tuesday, for example, might always be what to do when in possession,
Wednesday when out of it, Thursday to the opposition’s strengths, and so on.
The exercises
can vary from week to week, from opponent to opponent, but must always be
designed to reinforce the coach’s guiding principles: A team’s identity must
not be compromised to stifle a given opponent. “A chameleon changes color,”
Frade said, “but never forgets it is a chameleon.”
That is not
to say that periodization wants to produce teams of automatons. Because
Mourinho is the highest-profile adherent of Frade’s system, tactical
periodization has a reputation as being defensive, stifling.
Frade rejects
that critique. He is not an adherent of one style or another. The teams he
currently admires — Chelsea, Juventus, Bayern Munich and Napoli — are the ones
that know their own minds best, the ones that have an idea and set out to
accomplish it.
“There is no
attacking football or defensive football,” he said. “When you have the ball,
you have to think about what will happen when you lose it. When you do not have
it, you need to know what you will do when you get it back.”
The game only
exists, in his mind, as a whole. How his system is applied depends entirely on
the interpretation of its messengers. Whether that is the caution of Mourinho
or the verve of Villas-Boas or Rodgers, the creator, their mentor, does not
mind. He does not want to see his invention restricted to one thing or the
other.
It is, it can
be, everything.
Source: The NY Times by Rory Smith
