A couple of weeks ago I was sitting in a nutrition meeting with my team. Our club’s nutritionist was going through some information about Dexa scans and then pre and post game nutrition - when it starts, how many carbs you should eat per kg of body weight. It was a thorough and interesting presentation.

At one point - sort of off-hand - he said of course this is for field players, for goalkeepers it would be less. (He added that we could discuss the specifics of that further individually. This blog is not about him.)

It just struck me in that moment - stronger than in any other moment - that everything in soccer starts from the field players’ "why" and is adapted to fit us (goalkeepers).

In a very real way, this makes sense. Our nutritionist wouldn’t walk in and start giving all the data on what the goalkeepers should be eating and then say obviously this should be modified for field players. Why would you talk to 2 people in a room of 20? Better to center the 18 and modify for the 2.

However, when the why differs from field player to goalkeeper, modification doesn’t really make sense.

For example, there is now a goalkeeper-specific version of the beep test. Someone looked at the beep test and thought, this is clearly not something that replicates what a goalkeeper does in a game. So they changed the movements. It’s the same test, but with more cutting and different actions. Makes sense. Except that it skips over the fact that the whole reason there is a beep test in the first place is to measure field player fitness. Goalkeepers don’t need to be able to do any movements repeatedly until failure, they need to be able to do specific movements quickly, perfectly and when called upon.

If you started from the goalkeeper perspective and position and designed a purely physical test from scratch, you would never in 1 million years come up with the beep test (goalkeeper version or regular). You might end up with a vertical jump test or some sort of agility or reaction speed test.

What exactly you would come up with is unfortunately completely outside of my area of expertise. My point is that goalkeepers are not unfit field players - just like women are not small men (Dr Stacy Sims).

Emma Hayes was quoted recently saying that everything in football has been developed through the male lens - everything in the women’s game has been taken and/or modified from the men’s game. It was not developed from the female point of view.

And I think the same is true of goalkeeping. Everything in goalkeeping is from the field player lens. Even from a purely logistical point of view.

Ask any goalkeeper coach what their biggest headache is and they will tell you that no head coach in the history of the planet has ever accurately estimated the amount of time the goalkeepers will have on their own before they are needed by the team. If a head coach says 30 mins, that could mean anywhere from 10 to 50 minutes.

So we are often off on our own in a holding pattern waiting with baited breath for them to call for us (and of course yell at us if we don’t move sharpish enough to join their training).

We do goalkeeper training while the team does passing patterns and rondos as though we don’t use our feet more than half the time because when else would we do our goalkeeper training? Plus they need to shoot on us next so we need to have caught a ball first.

Our loads are often in direct opposition to the field players. Their high load involves a lot of us standing, their low load involves a lot of us diving.

I can’t tell you how many times in a week I tell myself this drill is not for you. This drill is not about you. Because in a session where I get scored on 50 times, even if I made 50 saves, I feel inadequate. We play a sport where 3 goals is considered a lot over 90 minutes so 50 goals in 90 mins is abject failure. In our defense, we also don’t dive 25 times in 10 minutes in a game, nor would we expect them all to be quality if we did. So we learn to live with it.

And this isn’t meant to be a rant. Most of the things I have just listed I don’t even think about on a daily basis.

I’m not even sure it’s possible to center the goalkeeper in team trainings. I certainly know that a lot of coaches now are more mindful of the goalkeeper just like they are more mindful of individual loads. Personally, I am in a great environment with enough staff to focus on individual needs, so a lot of what I’ve listed is from previous environments I’ve been in or what I’ve noticed in the youth game.

I recognize that there is not enough time or resources or money sometimes to give goalkeepers exactly what they need. When you are spread thin as a coach, you prioritize what will do the most good for the most people. That includes goalkeeper coaches. We pack as much technical work into the short time that we have with them because they might not get any the rest of the week.

I think more than anything I just wonder what would happen if we started from the point of view of the goalkeepers more often. What would their ideal training week look like? What would their ideal body composition and psychology and performance look like? What would you recommend a goalkeeper eat if you weren’t basing it on what a field player should eat? These are not even questions that I have found myself asking until recently...and I'm a goalkeeper!

As a coach, what would you do if the goalkeeper was your only responsibility? Rather than how can you make this field player thing more goalkeeper friendly? (Which I’ll admit is also nice and appreciated)

This brings me to one of the questions that we will discuss during our next Duktig Brand FC Discussion moderated by Ali Hanif on Monday: what would happen if you designed training with the GK as the focus player? I’m incredibly excited about it, and if you are a Duktig Brand FC member please join us! Ali has an incredible breadth of knowledge about the position and passion for developing modern goalkeepers. I can’t wait to hear his perspective on this topic. I have a feeling I might just run out of pages in my notebook during the discussion. (Did you know Duktig Brand sells a GK-specific notebook? ;)