I’ve written a lot here about perception and it’s critical role in elite performance. Almost any decision starts with what an athlete perceives and, crucially, how soon he or she perceives it. Should we design training to develop players’ eyes? Absolutely.

The flip side though is that we should also train for deception. It’s not just whether they can do they skill but whether they can buy a bit of time and space by making the opposition think something else is about to happen. I think there’s a real opportunity to spend more time asking players to focus not just on what they do but on how to disguise it.

That’s a bit of a long-winded intro to this great clip of my friend James Beeston of Beestera Soccer Training  working with two players, Joe and Ryan in a simple passing triangle.

James’ goal is to get them to explore and wire more deceptive movements into their play and in particular to spent more time thinking about deception before they receive the ball or as they receive the ball to, as he puts it, “unbalance or throw off the defender.”  I really love this point of emphasis. Players often conceive of trickery or deception as something you do with the ball. But at the highest levels you often don’t get time for that. Or you create time for that my trickery even before you’ve touched the ball. So I love that James focuses on that here.

I  also love how he layers on the details. First work on unweighting your opponent with, say, a jab step. Then use your voice to amplify the false visual signal. Then think about adding a last second change in foot shape. You can how interesting it all is to Joe and Ryan and how much their execution improves as they go. [I should note that the rounds of practice were significantly longer than I’ve shown here; i shortened the video for ease of viewing.

Again I think there’s a huge opportunity for more of this. Players might start training with an activity like this to activate. But 90% of the time the focus is just on skill rather than on skill-with-deception. And if i had to bet i think I’d bet on core skills executed with a high level of deception over high level of skill executed without deception.

Last note. One of my favorite things about the video is how well James teaches by modeling ideas. He orients players attention to focus on movements before the ball arrives. He names a few ideas (“jab step”) but he is so intentional about showing them variations on the theme with his own play. And you can see them use and adapt his ideas as they work. 

Thanks to James, Joe and Ryan for sharing their work.