Tactical Periodisation is a football training methodology. Its most famous exponent is Jose
Mourinho, who won the Champions League with Porto in 2004 using the concept.
It’s also shaped the ideas of – among others - Andre Villas-Boas,
Nuno Espirito Santo, Paulo Fonseca, and Brendan Rodgers.
But what is tactical periodisation, and why is it so successful?
Periodisation as a concept has existed in sports since the 1950s, and designs athletic training
in cycles that seeks to not only keep athletes in good physical condition by not overworking them,
but also to build towards specific competitions.
These cycles – micro, meso, and macro – referred to time periods. So, an Olympic sprinter might
work in micro cycles on strength, muscle elasticity, and explosive power for starts,
while building to a series of specific races in the calendar in a meso cycle.
The backdrop to this would be the run-up to the Olympics,
which is every four years, on macro cycle.
Tactical periodisation takes this concept of cycles and applies it to football.
It is a complicated model built on the simple premise that everything that happens on the pitch
is based on tactics and so training should reflect that.
But tactical periodisation takes all the other aspects of football, fitness, technique,
psychology, and trains them within the framework of tactics. It’s more complex than simply doing
every session with a ball at your feet, but that’s a good place to start when thinking about it.
The periodisation structures this, so each training week is built around a cycle that
builds up to a game and then allows players to recover from it, before building to the next one.
Tactical periodisation was developed by a sports scientist called Vitor Frade,
who worked at the University of Porto before taking his ideas out of the lecture theatre
and onto the training pitches at Porto, working first with Sir Bobby Robson.
Frade blended various ideas, including systems theory,
sports science, and psychology, to build a model that has influenced coaches around the world.
Perhaps the easiest way to understand how tactical periodisation actually works is by demonstration.
Let’s say we’ve just taken over Tifo Town FC
and want to institute tactical periodisation as a method.
The first thing required is a Game Model. These are our tactics, shaped by the club’s situation,
its requirements, playing squad, and the coach’s own philosophy of football.
Tifo is going to play a 4-4-2, with wide players tucking infield, based on pressing,
counter-pressing, and fast transitions in attack. Let’s assume that the club is happy with this,
and we have a squad that is fairly well suited to this style already.
Next, we apply this Game Model to the four phases of the game.
This is a key part of tactical periodisation, because everything is geared towards training
players to know what to do in each situation that arises within these four phases. They are:
Attacking organisation: when the team is in possession, facing an organised defence
Defensive transition: when the team has lost possession,
but is not yet organised into its correct defensive position
Defensive organisation:
when the team has achieved a correct defensive position and is trying to regain possession
Attacking transition: When the team has won back possession and the opponent is not yet
in their organised defensive structure
Within each phase, different parts of the team are going to need to do different things,
and this is where we can start to build our training schedule
according to the principles of Tactical Periodisation.
Firstly, we construct a schedule that builds up to matches.
Let’s assume that Tifo Town play every Saturday.
Sunday is our rest and recovery day,
and the cadence of training builds to its most intense on a Wednesday.
Within our training week, every session is then organised according to scales and principles.
Scales are the whole or parts of the team;
principles are the actions we want out team to take during a game.
So, on Monday, we might train the back-four and defensive midfielders on defensive
shape in the defensive organisation phase, while they face the attacking
four who are – simultaneously - working on their attacking organisation phase.
On Wednesday, the most intense day, we’ll train the whole team on the main tactical principles,
pressing or counter-pressing for example. And on Thursday, with a specific game in mind,
we might work with just the right-sided full back and midfielder on how to attack the opposition’s
left back, or work with a striker on training runs behind a centre back we know is slow.
Everything is done with these principles in mind – how we want to play in each of the four phases,
and then broken down into smaller and smaller groups and elements
so that we can refine these principles, adjusting them so that specific opponent
strengths and weaknesses can be countered or exploited.
This is what our training schedule might look like.
And because the training is periodised according to cycles, each training element is designed
to ready players for individual games, while also preparing them for the season as a whole,
refining principles, and building in any developments that occur in a coach’s game model.
Tactical periodisation works as a methodology for several reasons. Firstly,
by keeping tactical principles at the heart of everything a team does in training,
players learn to respond to whatever happens in a match according to those principles.
Players get used to making decisions and responding under physical stress,
which mirrors what a game is actually like. Done well, it should mean that a player is very
rarely confronted with a situation in a game that they have not been trained to deal with.
Integrating physical and technical work means that the training gets as close to match situations as
possible. And the structure, working to a schedule in cycles and training according
to principles and within groups, gives coaches a chance to focus on phases of the game with
real intensity while also not losing sight of the overall tactical approach that the manager wants.
This is why the idea of tactical periodisation as just being fitness training with a ball
is too simplistic. And the reason is that football is complex game,
chaotic even, and players need to be able to respond to a huge number of situations
quickly and correctly while operating at a certain level of physical stress.
Tactical periodisation is one answer as to how to get players to do this
and, as Mourinho and others have shown, if done well it can be successful and influential.