When Ruben Amorim took his first training sessions as Manchester United head coach recently, Christmas had come early, content-wise.
Plenty of photos and videos detailing what went on were put out via various platforms, but one clip in particular seemed to get a pretty widespread reaction. Amid much talk about how the new boss would deploy his favoured formation, a clip of Amorim working with his players and fitting them into his signature 3-4-2-1 shape was online catnip.
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It led to some excited United fans studying the footage and deciphering which players were being deployed in which position. Luke Shaw at left centre-back! Mason Mount as one of the No 10s! Antony as a wing-back! This was despite half of the United squad being away on international duty at the time so, in terms of indications for the club matches to come, the footage was almost certainly functionally useless.
But this didn’t seem to matter hugely and is indicative of the role videos such as this play in the broader footballing culture.
No longer are they merely entertaining pieces of content for a fan, but a source of intelligence, something that provides a scrap of information about what could be ahead.
It’s not just limited to significant events like a new manager taking his first training session. Even the most banal clip of a squad doing sprint warm-ups or a rondo will be picked over. Player A isn’t in the video — is he injured? Is that a brace on Player B’s knee? I think I saw Player C in the background, should I put him in my fantasy team?
These videos aren’t new. They started to become regular fixtures in any self-respecting top club’s content machine around the early 2010s. Manchester City, a club always keen to put a glossy sheen on their image, were among the first to take this sort of thing seriously, and now they’re a staple for most teams.
But they have evolved from simple footage of training exercises to significant productions with narratives, slick editing, suitable music and drone shots.
The odd thing is, these clips are often almost intentionally boring. Or at least don’t reveal too much about what’s going on.
The format will typically be: footage of the players walking onto the training pitch, and if you’re lucky they will acknowledge the camera in some way; a few rondos or warm-up exercises; some larking about, but not too much; some shooting practice; hopefully a few moments of skill or spectacular goals.
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And that’s generally it. While clubs are always keen to bring outsiders in a little bit, they can’t show us too much. Training is never filmed the day or two before a game, when a team might be working on shape or match-specific routines. If a player’s fitness is in any question, they are not to be in the package either.
“If ever there was a player coming back from injury, and they were in the background doing other stuff, we would never include those shots,” says Chris Grierson, former head of video at Premier League club Crystal Palace. “Even if they were on the rehab trail and they weren’t going to play that week, we didn’t want to share their progress, trying to keep it as a bit of a mystery.”
And yet, despite the insistence on keeping the entertainment levels relatively muted, the videos remain popular: Liverpool’s most recent training video got almost 700,000 views on YouTube.
Perhaps more than the numbers though, it’s the intensity with which some study them that is extraordinary.
“I couldn’t believe how much people would pause the videos and count the players to try to work out the team,” says Grierson. “So we would have to do that ourselves — every single shot, we had to pretend that we were the most obsessed fans in the world so that we didn’t give it away.“
The primary purpose of these clips is the favourite word of the marketer or PR person: engagement. A football club simply playing football matches once or twice a week is no longer enough. They have to be content machines too. Bring in the views, and someone can slap it onto a PowerPoint presentation somewhere and serious business people will murmur approvingly.
There are other purposes. Making money is one: clubs will frequently ‘sell’ a certain number of clips to a sponsor to have their name on, or make them part of a sponsorship deal. That makes things a little more awkward when a manager doesn’t want something to be filmed: sorry Gaffer, it’s a contractual obligation, speak to the commercial team.
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But managers will also use them to put across certain messages.
It will perhaps not surprise you to learn Jose Mourinho has been particularly hot on this sort of thing. The clips of training that have gone out at his clubs will always have been approved by a member of his coaching staff: if there is something in there they don’t want to be public, it will be cut.
Equally, if a player is featured who they do not think deserves to be featured — let’s say, someone did a dazzling bit of skill that was prime social-media fodder but had otherwise been training badly — then Mourinho’s team would make it known. He would not want to give even the tacit impression that poor performance in training was being endorsed by the club.
Beyond Mourinho, the interest taken in what goes out will vary.
At the bigger clubs, the manager will usually have far too much on his plate to care about what is going out on Instagram or YouTube. Others simply won’t be aware of it. But one media-savvy former Premier League boss — who shall remain anonymous, as with other examples in this piece, so sources can protect relationships — would actively point out to the video team what training-ground exercises would make for good content.
Coaching staffs are usually keen not to let any tactical cats out of the bag and, for the most part, the decision to exclude those from the published footage is governed by common sense. Set-piece routines won’t be filmed, or if a particular team shape is being worked on. Sometimes, more theoretically innocuous things are flagged: at one club, a clip had to be taken down, hurriedly re-edited and republished when the coaching staff objected to an exercise with overlapping full-backs being included.
Often, stuff like a snippet of conversation heard in the background, not intended for public consumption or featuring some fruity language, would be removed. Equally, if a coach’s iPad is in shot, with something such as details of training routines or ranking of players based on certain metrics on the screen, that would have to either go or be blurred out.
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What’s particularly interesting is the impact these clips have on the training sessions and the players involved. The observer effect applies here: the very act of something being observed will influence or change it. And while you might think that professional footballers, who are constantly under scrutiny, might think of the training ground as the one place they can get a bit of privacy, it seems the opposite is the case.
“The players would say that they liked the cameras being there because it added pressure to the exercises,” says Grierson. “And any added pressure is better for them — to recreate a matchday.”
Players also seem to benefit in more individual ways: if one of them scores a goal or pulls off a particularly outstanding piece of skill, they will often immediately check that it was caught on camera. The next step will be to request that their moment is clipped up for their own personal social media feeds, which are sometimes run by the same people who work in those areas for the clubs.
This can work both ways: for every player who wants the world to see an example of their excellence, there will be one keen that other moments remain on the training ground.
At one Premier League club, an argument over a particularly egregious nutmeg continued for days, with the nutmegger haranguing the content team to make sure it went out, and the nutmeggee adamant it should not see the light of day. Goalkeepers generally hate it when shooting practice gets featured, which is understandable, given they typically show goals being scored past them every five seconds.
Players are more conscious of their personal coverage than you might think, often about what isn’t included rather than what is. One defender at a Premier League side even complained that the video team didn’t feature him heavily enough in their finished clips, and focused too much on their attackers. The club advised him not to worry too much about it.
There are also plenty of stories about players’ partners complaining to clubs that their fella isn’t featured enough, which must be a bit embarrassing. Still, at least it’s not their mum.
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One player had a quiet word with his club’s content team and asked that, as he was wearing boots in training made by a company that wasn’t his official boot sponsor, could they avoid showing his feet in the videos? Which presented a challenge.
Getting too invested in the content machine can get a player in trouble, though.
“There was one time when Adlene Guedioura had scored a bicycle kick in training, so we did a video with him about how to do a bicycle kick,” says Grierson. “But he hadn’t told us he was supposed to be in a team meeting. Neil Warnock (Palace’s manager at the time) was in a room with the first-team squad and he looked out the window and saw us getting Guedioura to do bicycle kicks and landing on the floor over and over again. I think he went out on loan in the next transfer window.”
Some clubs have moved away from the standard training video, and towards more varied content: the ‘Stop players walking into training and ask them all the same question’ format is particularly popular.
But the classic old clips remain successful, providing fodder for internet super-sleuths everywhere.
(Top photo: Nikki Dyer – LFC/Liverpool FC via Getty Images)