Todays Virtual Guest & 4 Questions Series - Millwall FC's Alex Stefanakis
April 17th 2020
Alex is the Head of the Academy's Sports Medicine at Millwall FC in London, England.
Originally from Greece, Alex has also worked as an assistant coach at Colchester United in the EFL as a Sports Scientist and Assistant Manager.
Alex and I first met at FC Barcelona. We were crossing over on courses of Football Development and got to talking about English Football. Alex has deep insight into the English and European game as well as youth Development form the coaching perspective and that of his current roll as Head of Sports Medicine.
Alex is due to be a guest in the summer in person. Hopefully, this still stands once the dust has settled.
1. What are the biggest issues facing youth development across the globe?
The biggest challenge is to find a fine balance between players physical development and their football practice. Most of the times, academies and coaches are focusing on their players’ training practice time and football development, neglecting their long-term physical performance. They push hard to have a lot of football work hours over the week, but it seems they don’t take under consideration that young football players are eventually professional athletes who needs to develop their physical skills too. This has double side effect on footballers career. Firstly this is a potential risk for injuries as the body of the player is not strong enough to adapt the load that the team and coach is asking for. Secondary, when the players are coming to the transition point from the academy to the first team, their physical performance is limited, they lose their confidence, lose their coach’s trust and they can’t progress in high level of football performance. Very important then youth development football to have a coaching syllabus which is focusing on players’ training and physical development skills.
2. What brought you to Millwall FC?
Millwall FC is a very historic club, with over 135 years of history and our academy is one of the well known in UK football. The academy has a philosophy to create players for Millwall FC first team, which proves that the club promotes a lot its own academy and consider its productivity. The staff who works here are very friendly and happy to assist. Millwall FC Academy is one of the most established Category 2 Academies after the audit from EFL, with high standards. It is a club famous for the physical work and performance at the field in every game. When the club offered me the job of Academy Head of Sports Science and Medicine, I found the offer a great opportunity for my career as dealing with young athletes development is very challenging.
3. Obviously, physical health is important, what habits do you encourage young players to undertake?
A young football player must have the mentality of being athlete in any aspect of their life. Their body gives them a career and they should look after it all the time. Here in our academy we are focusing on their nutritional education, as food is the fuel of our bodies. This should be a constant habit for any footballer as through their nutrition, they could improve their physical skills, assist their body to recover faster from the daily heavy workload, and can reduce the risk of injuries. Other aspects that we encourage the young players to undertake are to focus on their healthy sleeping time and their mental health. Sleep helps a lot the body to recover and once they “keep it fresh” they are able to perform better. Also mental health is very important for all people and for young players has an important meaning. A lot of people don’t realise that their job is very stressful as they are challenging for a professional contract, with limited money as a start, far from the glamorous and luxurious lights of current professional football and the chances for a young player to make it are always limited. In our academy we run a psychology program where we educate and develop our athletes in this important aspect too. Overall, I would say that young players should do everything to keep their body healthy in any aspect, and this is a habit that they should learn from a very young age.
4. What are the most common injuries you see and why. More importantly how can they be avoided?
Most common injuries in young players are the growing up injuries and ankle sprains. The most common growing up injuries in football are Osgood’s Schlatter Syndrome (OGS) – Osteochondrosis that occurs at the tibial tuberosity in children , Sinding-Larsen – Johansson Syndrome (SLJ) – Osteochondrosis that occurs at the distal pole of patellar most common in young adolescents and Sever’s Disease (SD) – calcaneal apophysitis (See Photos below) . All have the same mechanism and characteristics but they happened in different body areas. OGS and SLJ are both on the knee and SD on the ankle. SD appears to happen in the young players between 9-11 years old and OGS or SLJ from the ages 12 to 15. This happens as player’s bones are growing slightly faster than their muscles, and in conjunction with their heavy load, muscles and tendons are getting stiffer and less flexible. This creates a lot of stress on the bones that each tendon attaches, it creates a chronic inflammation and most likely the body will develop an extra piece of bone (lump) to anticipate with stress and inflammation. This is a very painful procedure that a young player will experience for a few years, till his body comes near to its final shape. The way to manage conditions like that is most importantly through workload management of the player, flexibility and stretch work and strengthening work of its muscles to offload the tendons, which eventually will offload the stress onto bones. As it is a long procedure, we always evaluate the risk that there is to develop these injuries and we discuss with coaches to ensure their load management to keep our players fit to train. When we talk for injury prevention, we can’t truly eliminate the appearance of injuries, however with the appropriate management we can reduce the risk of a player having an injury.