How inFORM Metrics Helps Coaches See the Complete Player

I've been coaching youth soccer for more than ten years. If you've coached for any length of time, you'll know that you carry a ridiculous amount of information about your players around in your head.

I know which player is becoming more confident on the ball. I know who is starting to see passes they weren't seeing six months ago. I know who struggles after making a mistake, who needs a bit more encouragement, who responds well to being challenged and who has quietly improved at something that used to cause them problems every week.

You learn all of that by coaching them.

The problem is remembering it all.

Think about how much you see in one season. Training two or three times a week. Matches. Conversations before and after sessions. Assessments. Injuries. Changes in confidence. Good spells. Bad spells. Then all the little things that aren't important enough at the time to stop training and write down.

You notice them. Maybe you mention something to another coach. Then you get on with the session.

Four months later, you're sitting down to do an evaluation and trying to remember how that player has actually developed.

I've been there plenty of times.

What frustrated me was that the information wasn't missing. We'd seen it. The problem was that so much of it lived in different places, or just lived in my head.

That's really where inFORM Metrics came from.

A player rarely has a one-dimensional problem

One thing I've learned as a coach is not to become too attached to the first explanation for something.

Say I've got a player who keeps losing the ball when receiving under pressure.

The obvious answer is first touch.

And it might be.

But maybe they aren't scanning before the ball gets to them, so they're surprised by the pressure. Maybe their starting position is poor and they've given themselves nowhere to go. Maybe they know exactly what they should do but become hesitant as soon as somebody closes them down.

Or maybe they're absolutely fine for the first 45 minutes and the problem starts appearing when they're tired.

Same outcome. Player loses possession.

Completely different coaching problems.

That's one of the reasons I wanted inFORM to look at Mindset, Technical, Tactical and Physical development.

I don't see those as four separate versions of a player. They're four ways of helping me understand the same player.

Their technical ability affects what they can execute. Their tactical understanding affects the decisions they make and the information they recognise. Their physical capability affects what's available to them in the moment. Their mindset can affect how they respond to pressure, mistakes, competition and coaching.

As a coach, I'm interested in where those things meet.

What does that actually look like?

Go back to the player struggling to receive under pressure.

I notice it in training and record an observation.

I'm not trying to write an essay about the session. I just want to keep hold of something I've seen because I think it might matter.

Then I see it again.

Maybe we do a First Touch assessment and I get some technical evidence. In training, I start noticing that the player isn't scanning consistently before the ball arrives. Now I've got some tactical context as well.

Over the next few weeks I might notice something about their confidence when they're pressed, or about the decisions they're making once they've received the ball.

One observation doesn't tell me very much.

But once I've seen something five, six or ten times in different situations, I'm paying attention.

That's what I wanted inFORM to help me with. I didn't want those pieces sitting in separate notes, spreadsheets, assessments and conversations. I wanted to be able to come back three months later and see what we'd actually been noticing.

Because that's much more useful to me than simply knowing what happened at training tonight.

Mindset matters because coaches are already watching it

Some of the most important things I see in young players don't show up in match statistics.

What happens after they make a mistake?

Do they want the ball again?

Will they try something difficult?

How do they react when they're coached? Do they take responsibility for a decision? Are they communicating with teammates? Are they becoming more confident in situations they used to avoid?

Coaches notice these things all the time.

Where I think we sometimes struggle is in turning those observations into something useful.

It's easy to say, "Great attitude."

I've said it myself.

But what does that actually tell me about the player? What behaviour am I seeing? Has it changed? Is it consistent? Is there something there I can coach?

The Mindset component in inFORM gives me some structure around those observations so I can be more deliberate about what I'm seeing and come back to it later.

It doesn't tell me what the behaviour means.

I wouldn't want it to.

I'm the coach. I know the player, the session and what was happening around them. That context matters.

A technical score doesn't tell me everything either

Technical development sounds much easier to measure.

Then you coach for a while and realise that the outcome can fool you.

I've seen plenty of shots go in that I wouldn't describe as particularly good finishes. I've also seen players miss while doing something technically much better than they would have done three months earlier.

The same applies to receiving. A player might control the ball successfully but leave it in a position that makes their next action much harder.

That's why, with technical assessments in inFORM, I'm interested in the evidence behind the action rather than treating the final outcome as the whole story. First Touch and Shooting assessments, for example, can give me another piece of evidence about how the player is executing.

Then I can compare that with what I'm seeing when I coach them.

If the assessment is improving and I'm seeing the same improvement in training, great. I've got more reason to believe the change is real.

If the assessment says one thing and Saturday's match keeps showing me something different, that's interesting too.

Now I've got a question to investigate.

That's how I think measurements should be used in coaching. Give me better information. Don't pretend the number has made the decision for me.

Sometimes the problem happened before the player touched the ball

This is especially true tactically.

A lot has already happened before the ball reaches a player's foot.

Where were they standing?

Did they scan?

What did they see?

What options had they recognised?

What did they expect to happen next?

If all I record is "poor first touch," I might spend the next month working on the wrong thing.

Maybe their touch genuinely needs work.

Or maybe the player is recognising pressure half a second too late and every touch is becoming an emergency.

That's a very different problem.

It's also why I find the connection between Technical, Tactical, Physical and Mindset information useful. One area can help me make sense of what I'm seeing in another.

Physical information can help explain changes too

Young players change physically. Sometimes very quickly.

Speed, power, agility and endurance affect what they can do on the field, and anyone who has coached players through a growth spurt has seen what physical change can temporarily do to movement and coordination.

inFORM includes sprint, agility, endurance and jump assessments so that information can stay with the rest of the player's development record.

Again, the number on its own isn't what interests me.

Suppose a player suddenly starts getting to balls they couldn't reach earlier in the season. Maybe their physical development is part of the explanation.

Or I have a player whose decision-making and execution consistently drop late in sessions. Endurance might be something I want to look at.

Maybe a player goes through a period where their movement suddenly looks awkward. If I've got information from before that period, I have some context rather than immediately deciding they've gone backwards.

The test gives me evidence.

I still have to coach the player in front of me.

This gets more useful after a few months

This was important to me when I started thinking about what inFORM needed to be.

I didn't want to build somewhere to collect tests.

I already had spreadsheets for that.

What I wanted was the history around them.

Take our player who was struggling to receive under pressure. Three months later, maybe their first touch is more consistent. They're scanning earlier. I'm seeing better decisions in training. They look more confident asking for the ball when they're under pressure, and a later assessment gives me some technical evidence of improvement too.

Now I can go back and see where we started.

I can see what we noticed, what we worked on and what changed.

That's a much better coaching conversation than, "Your score is higher than last time."

It's also much closer to how I actually think about player development.

Evaluations were where I really felt this problem

If you've ever sat down to complete twenty player evaluations, you'll know what happens.

You remember last weekend.

You remember the brilliant game somebody had.

You definitely remember the terrible mistake that cost a goal.

What you're less likely to remember clearly is the quiet improvement that started four months ago and has now become normal.

That's a problem if I'm supposed to be evaluating development across an entire season.

When I built the evaluation side of inFORM, I wanted the coach to have access to more of that history. Observations, assessments, areas of focus and other relevant evidence can give me context while I'm completing the evaluation.

But I still make the judgment.

That's important to me.

I don't want software deciding whether one of my players is good enough. I want enough of the player's history in front of me that I can make a better-informed judgment myself.

It also makes parent conversations easier

Then a parent catches you after training and asks the question every coach knows:

"How is she doing?"

Usually I know.

The harder part is giving a useful answer on the spot.

"She's doing well" doesn't really tell the parent anything. Giving them a load of scores isn't much better.

I'd much rather be able to say:

Earlier in the season, she was struggling when receiving under pressure. We noticed she wasn't scanning early enough, so that became something we worked on. Over the last couple of months we've seen her start checking her shoulder earlier, her decisions have improved and she's now much more comfortable receiving when somebody is tight to her.

That's a conversation about development.

The evidence hasn't told me what I saw. I saw it because I coached her.

It just helps me hold onto the story and explain it properly.

That's useful for the parent, but I think it's useful for the player as well. They can understand what has actually improved instead of just hearing that they're "doing better."

The same problem gets much bigger for a Technical Director

With one team, I might be trying to keep track of twenty players.

A Technical Director could be responsible for hundreds.

There's no realistic way for that person to watch every session, attend every match and remember everything happening with every player.

They have to trust their coaches.

But they also need enough visibility to know what's happening across the club.

That's another reason I care about keeping this information connected.

inFORM can give a Technical Director visibility into player development across teams without pretending that the director somehow knows the player better than the coach who works with them every week.

They can see where attention might be needed, support more consistent development practices and have better conversations with coaches because they have more context.

I don't see that as monitoring coaches.

The coach is still doing the work and making the judgments.

It's about helping the person responsible for development across the club understand more of what's happening when they can't physically be everywhere.

And then the player gets a new coach

This one has bothered me for years.

Youth players change coaches all the time.

A season finishes. Teams get reshuffled. Players move age groups. A coach leaves the club.

And suddenly a lot of what we knew about that player disappears.

The new coach starts again.

What has this player been working on? What have they struggled with? What gets the best response from them? What have they already improved? Was there something the previous coach noticed six months ago that still matters?

Good clubs find ways to pass some of that information along.

But a lot of it still lives with the coach who had the player before.

I don't think a player's development history should disappear because somebody changed the name on the team sheet.

If useful observations, assessments, evaluations and areas of focus remain connected to the player, the next coach at least has somewhere to start.

They should absolutely form their own opinion. They need their own relationship with the player. They may see things completely differently.

But they shouldn't necessarily have to begin with a blank page.

For me, that's a big part of long-term player development.

This is the problem I was trying to solve

I didn't start by deciding I wanted to build soccer software.

I started with a coaching problem that kept annoying me.

I had spreadsheets.

I had notes.

I had assessment results.

I had conversations with other coaches.

And I had an awful lot of information sitting in my head.

All of those things helped. None of them gave me the connected picture of the player I wanted.

That's why I built inFORM Metrics.

I want to know more than what a player did today.

I want to remember what we were seeing three months ago. I want to know whether something has actually changed. I want to see when a technical problem might have a tactical explanation, or when confidence might be affecting something I'm seeing on the ball.

Most importantly, I want that information to help me coach.

There are parts of this job I would never want technology to take over.

Knowing your players. Building relationships with them. Understanding when to push and when to back off. Reading a situation. Making a judgment.

That's coaching.

But remembering hundreds of small observations across twenty players for an entire season?

I'm quite happy to get some help with that.

Because after more than ten years on the field, I don't think the problem is that coaches aren't seeing enough.

We see a lot.

The problem is holding onto it long enough to see what it becomes.