In an office on the outskirts of Newport, David Adams, technical director of the Football Association of Wales, is explaining just one of the ways in which no stone has been left unturned in the planning of the country’s first World Cup finals campaign since 1958.
We are in the National Football Development Centre at Dragon Park and Adams is telling i about the strategy document he is preparing on penalty shootouts. Yes, Wales must first negotiate Qatar, comprising fixtures against USA, Iran and England but nothing is being left to chance.
“We know in a World Cup, the chances are you might end up in a penalty shoot-out,” says Adams, who has been FAW technical director since 2019. “There’s been a whole piece of work around the psychology of penalties – around the breathing techniques, around your body language when you score a penalty, about making sure you’re nearest to the technical area as the team who win shoot-outs are always nearest the technical area.”
Using FAW research, he addresses also the penalty-taker’s long walk from the halfway line and the importance of receiving the ball from his own goalkeeper. “A familiar face and something positive from the goalkeeper is quite a nice thing to have rather than their goalkeeper giving it to you and making you feel uncomfortable.
“We’re trying to work a strategy based from the minute the game ends to make sure there’s zero anxiety – a timeline between the end of the game and the first penalty,” Adams continues. “When we studied penalties and watched the pitch from a high angle, at the end of the game there’s stuff everywhere so we’re thinking you need stations – a technical area, a medical area, a hydration station, so that people are in their own areas doing their own thing, and have the plan laid out that ‘if these are the players on the pitch, these are our five takers’.”
It is a fascinating insight into just one small piece of Welsh World Cup preparations which also include research that Tony Strudwick, the FAW’s head of performance, is carrying out into the heat of Qatar and the anticipated effect on players’ nutrition and hydration from sweating.
This pursuit of marginal gains became an FAW touchstone under the late Gary Speed during his time as manager and it spawned the Cymru High Performance Strategy whose pillars include not only a world-class coaching system – Mikel Arteta and Patrick Vieira are among the graduates of the FAW’s Pro-licence course – but also productive new approaches to identifying talent and providing it with a pathway.
On this point, a large portion of Rob Page’s squad for Qatar could be graduates of a regional programme created by Adams’ predecessor, Osian Roberts, which brings schoolboys together from the age of 13 until 15 – giving them a head start on their counterparts from most European national associations. “We capture kids young,” he says of a programme established 12 years ago which has forged “a generation” with a strong attachment to their national team. Every year 50 boys – 25 from the south of Wales, 25 from the north – embark on the two-year programme which involves eight get-togethers annually across the school holidays. It concludes with a two-day event, the Cymru Cup, from which 25 boys are selected for the national under-15s squad.
“It gives us time to implement our Welsh way with these kids, getting them used to things like how we sing the anthem and all the values we hold dear to us,” says Adams. “Because they feel part of something and have built friendship groups in that two-year period, when it then comes to picking them in the national team at 15 you have already built those relationships.
“A lot of associations don’t pick players until U15s but once you’ve built those relationships if a player is dual-eligible, there’s a fair chance they’ll stay in Wales. Ethan Ampadu is a really good example. He was asked by England all the way through. It really helps in terms of making sure we keep players in the system.”
Another benefit, explains Adams, is early exposure to international football: Nottingham Forest’s Neco Williams, for instance, had “accumulated 30 caps at least” at youth level before joining the senior squad.
In an attempt to broaden the talent pool, the FAW last year added its top-flight league clubs to the regional programme – “all our Cymru Premier League clubs have academies running as well and play a bespoke games programme” – and this is important, says Adams, for providing a “net” for youngsters living in “a geographically challenged area like Aberystwyth or mid-Wales who can’t travel to a pro club within 90 minutes or whose parents can’t take them to a pro club. For the first time in 10 years we’ve had two players from The New Saints in our U15s development tournament recently in North Wales.”
In the meantime, the conveyer belt keeps rolling with Page giving first call-ups to teenagers Luke Harris and Jordan James for this month’s Nations League fixtures against Belgium and Poland. According to Adams, James, an 18-year-old Birmingham City midfielder brought in to replace the injured Joe Allen, “started with us in our regionals at 13” and “went to one camp with England [at U20 level] but has shown allegiance to Wales”.
As for Fulham midfielder Harris, 17, he grew up on Jersey but, through his Welsh father, “has been with us from 12, 13 years old”. He made his Fulham debut in the EFL Cup last month and signed his first professional contract last week before making the Wales bench for Thursday’s 2-1 defeat in Belgium.
There are high hopes for the national U17 captain who scored an 11-minute hat-trick against Newcastle’s U23s in February and began this season with another treble against Chelsea’s U21s. “He’s very young but he scored a hat-trick against Chelsea when they had a really strong backline of [Trevor] Chalobah, Ethan Ampadu and [Ben] Chilwell. He has huge potential as a long-term replacement for someone like Aaron Ramsey.”
It is not just Harris. Thanks to more than a decade of innovation, the future looks bright for Welsh football – whatever happens later this year in Qatar.
Wales’s ‘game-changer’ for girls
It is not only boys who benefit from the Football Association of Wales’ innovative approach. Last year it set up a girls’ academy for the nation’s best female players aged 12 and upwards, split between the University of South Wales’ Sport Park in Pontypridd and Colliers Park in Wrexham.
What makes it especially innovative is they play against boys’ academy teams. “It has been a game-changer, a really positive change for us,” says Adams. “They left grassroots clubs and came to us, playing matches against boys’ teams from academy sides aged two years younger.”
There are 30 matches a year, on top of technical training, strength and conditioning support and a gym programme. Adams says: “Basically they’re out of grassroots football and just go to the academy because the girls’ game was so small and grassroots football not at a level to develop young talented players.
“Our girls’ academy under-16s play boys’ U14s and our girls’ academy U14s play boys’ U12s. There are very few examples of this in Europe.”
A four-year study is under way to measure the impact and Adams can already see pluses. He explains that if “some 16-year-old girls find it difficult playing against 14-year-old boys who’ve been through early development, when you see the U14 girls v U12 boys, it’s really competitive.
“If you’ve not got a games programme where you can play best v best in the girls’ game, this is the only real way you can do it in a small country.” In a recent tournament against Concacaf nations, the U15s “competed on a physical level which we’d never seen before. We’ve seen a huge surge in improvement on the physical side.”
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