The Next and Most Necessary Thing: How to instill a transitioning mindset
11.03.2026 13:30
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The Next and Most Necessary Thing: How to instill a transitioning mindset
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GRAVITY AND DISPERSION: HOW BARCELONA’S ATTACKING CHANGED FROM XAVI TO FLICK
Barcelona under Xavi and Barcelona under Flick had many of the same players. Yet attacks look completely different.
By analyzing their highest xG matches, a clear pattern emerges in how each team responds to the ball’s gravity.
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TRANSFORM PASSION INTO EXPERTISE: Four Essential Skills For Your Coaching Journey
If you coach, try this: Write one observation immediately after training. Just one.
Save this post, do it for a month, see what changes, and come back and comment what you noticed.
These notebooks become time portals of learning. You can literally see the insight developing over time, taking a hold of actual actions in my coaching.
Reflection turns experience into learning. Otherwise, it’s just another training session that disappears into mental entropy.
Touch limits with the correct pressing number is useful, so pairing pressing numbers with touch guidance became a useful constraint.
5. Numbers change decisions. Adjust accordingly.
In a possession game with controlled pressing numbers, I noticed something: The bigger the numerical advantage, the fewer touches players should take.
Energy was high. Repetition was massive. Finishing confidence grew.
Reminder: not everything has to be complex to be valuable.
4. Sometimes “simple” activities unlock joy and learning.
I ended one session with an unopposed finishing competition. Teams of four. Different finishing actions. Keeping score to maintain the competitiveness.
Honestly, I hadn’t done this often, but they loved it.
Instead of limiting touches, I rewarded speed of finish:
- One-touch finish = 3 points
- Two-touch = 2 points
- Three or more = 1 point.
Now players still attacked freely, but attention shifted toward quicker execution.
Constraint changed. Behavior improved.
3. Not all touch limits are helpful.
In a scoring activity I initially used a touch restriction in the final third. I didn’t like it. Players stopped taking defenders on even when they had clear 1v1 or 2v1 advantages.
So I changed it.
Immediately, both teams wanted to press high. Why? Because winning it high removed the restriction. The game created its own intensity.
2. Design games that invite the behavior you want.
In a session focused on playing through a press, we used a conditioned match: If you recover the ball in your own half, you must complete five passes before going forward.
In one session in December, the most powerful intervention was a simple zonal restriction that created deeper and closer support options.
Small change. Big shift in behavior.
So not deciding in advance what I will use, but being ready with tools depending on what emerges.
If I see no depth → add positional constraint.
If players hold the ball too long → add an appropriate touch constraint.
If positioning lacks clarity → introduce attacking shape.
🗣️ I once heard one of my mentors from Spain say “Knowing how to improvise is the mark of an excellent coach. Constantly having to improvise is the mark of a bad coach.”
1. Constraints are not pre-planned answers. They are prepared possible tools.
Throughout the notebook there’s a theme: improving how I use constraints.
Not deciding in advance what I will use, but being ready with tools depending on what emerges.
The experience fades and the small details that actually matter get lost. Over time, you stop learning from your own work.
Here are the most important reflections from the notebook that I just finished:
Every day, I write down my session in my Duktig notebook, and right after training I force myself to capture 1–2 reflections. What I noticed, what worked, what didn’t etc
Here’s what I know to be true: If you don’t reflect immediately, insight disappears.
Call it mental entropy 🧵👇
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Discover and understand where your team’s chaos is and create the perfect exercise which will balance on that fine line. Train just at the edge of chaos. Doing so, we all adapt and become better versions of ourselves.
We, just like the players adapt, we learn, we grow. We become better coaches the more sessions that we design. However, let’s take some advice from Will Smith; push yourself just beyond your limits.
Don’t just find a training session online without thinking about your players’ capabilities.
And that is the beauty of training. We gain experience from trial and error. When we start coaching we don’t know where chaos is.
We have no idea how big to make the space for our conditioned game, or how many neutral players to incorporate into a positional game, but along the way we learn.
Adaptation Through Discomfort: The Fine Line of Effective Practice
Yes, in theory this is incredibly simple but if you ask Mark and his colleagues how many times they have failed to create the perfect environment the answer will surely be countless.
