Research sources for this section includes:
My own class work
Talent Identification
Talent identification (TI) is spotting talent from a performer and referring them to academies with the resources and facilities they need to reach their full potential. The performers are usually spotted at a young age depending on the sport. In football, performers are spotted at a young age. The disadvantages of TI are that when spotting a performer at a young age, when they get older there performance levels can be affected physically as their body matures and mentally if they have any experiences that could affect them.
Academies
Academies are training schemes to help young players develop into professional footballers and getting them to their maximum potential. All premiership teams have them as a lot of high quality English players are brought up through premiership teams academies.
Most players do not make the required standard to be in the team’s first team at a high level but many players have signed for lower level clubs and have returned to the premiership to make a great career.
Funding
In the image to the right is the amount of money allocated and invested into each type of sport. As you can see a large proportion of the money has gone to sports like swimming, cycling and athletics. The money has been invested into these sports because they want them to do well in the Olympics and get as many medal winners as possible. Personally I thought more money would have been invested into football as its one of the most popular sports in the UK.
The image to the left shows us investment going into the FA and what the FA’s intentions are and what they want to improve using the money.
Mainly, the FA’s goals are to increase the number of participation from adult, female and disabled, develop the number of school to clubs links, improve the service of clubs and leagues, sustain the FA skills programme and also use the investment to build and improve facilities used for the game.
Below is more evidence of funding into football and the improvements that want to be made.
Government funding into sport includes:
- 686 million into building new sports facilities.
- 459 million invested in PESSCL.
- 10 million to improve school playgrounds where needed.
Schemes
Schemes TOP Sport and Active Sport are schemes/programmes used by sport councils to promote sports like football to children to increase the number of people in the foundation level.
The Football Foundation runs a facilities scheme which provides money to build or improve facilities for the use of community. It also can provide money to support projects that aim to increase the participation level of football.
Disability Football and Women’s Football
One of the FA’s goals was to get more women to get into football and that’s exactly what they have achieved. The number of players has increased from 10,400 to over 150,000 to today’s date. ‘There are 50 licensed FA Centres of Excellence in operation across England providing weekly quality coaching and a localised fixture programme for talented girls from the age of 8-16.’
Girls4Gold is a campaign to find as many women they can that have the potential to be olympic champions and bring as many medals back for England in the olympics. First they put the girls that apply through training excerises and tests to see their fitness levels ect. If they look good they will keep them on the proggramme. They target events like cycling, bob skeleton, canoeing, modern pentathlon, rowing and sailing and then they train them to reach there potential.
The image to right is what the FA for disabled have provided as to what the player pathways looks like for disabled footballers.
‘For the most talented players, there is a player pathway in place to ensure that they are given the very best opportunities and support to reach their full potential, which at the elite end may mean representing England. This is no different for disabled footballers, who could go on to play in one of the six impairment specific squads.’
Critical Comments
The only problem I think the FA can improve on is putting more money into getting children into sport. The FA need to build / improve national football academies in through the UK that can give youngsters a passion for the game and give them real aspirations. England has one of the highest level played leagues yet our national team fails to impress that nation which could be inspiring the children just by good nation performances. Also to help the national team the FA could also get people in managing and produce top quality English managers.
Bibliography
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