FFEG Planning Benchmark

YOUR PLANNING HAS A LEVEL

Your planning already follows a pattern.

The question is how deliberate that pattern is.

A professional planning diagnostic for football coaches, from grassroots to high-performance environments.

Planning drives football periodisation — how you sequence sessions, manage load, and recover players across the week shapes how ready they are on match day.

Your planning already follows a pattern. This benchmark shows how deliberate that pattern is.

The FFEG Planning Benchmark helps coaches examine how deliberately their training environment is organised.

The Assessment

The assessment explores six key areas influencing planning performance

Coaching Context

How your role, environment and weekly structure shape your planning decisions.

Organisational Environment

The structures, constraints and realities influencing how you work.

Planning Structure

How deliberately training is organised across sessions, weeks and blocks.

Match-Week Alignment

How consistently session load and content are shaped around match day.

Load & Recovery

The demands and recovery patterns affecting player preparation and availability.

Planning Pressures

The specific pressures and competing priorities shaping your planning decisions.

Your Planning Profile

Your personalised FFEG Planning Profile identifies your current level across two core dimensions

Planning Structure

How deliberately you organise training across sessions, weeks and blocks — and whether that organisation holds its shape when circumstances change.

Match-Week Alignment

How consistently your training week is structured around match day — and whether session load and content follow a deliberate pattern from MD-3 to MD-1.

Both dimensions are assessed against the same four-level planning pathway:

Emergent

Planning is reactive and largely session-to-session.

Developing

A recognisable structure exists, but consistency varies.

Structured

Planning is deliberate and consistently applied across sessions, weeks and blocks.

Systematic

Planning is fully integrated and applied with precision across all dimensions.

Your profile identifies your current level — and includes specific next steps toward the level above.

Who This Is For

The FFEG Planning Benchmark is designed for coaches working across the full range of football environments

Grassroots football
Academy football
Schools and colleges
Semi-professional football
Professional and high-performance environments

Whether you are balancing limited training time, coordinating players across multiple teams, or structuring sessions around demanding match schedules — your environment shapes your planning decisions.

If you are responsible for organising training and preparing players for match day, your planning has a level.

Built on thirty years of applied practice

Methodology Author

Damian
Roden

Performance Director · UEFA Pro Licence Holder & Instructor

The FFEG Planning Benchmark is built on the planning methodology Damian Roden developed and applied across three decades at the highest levels of professional football — formalised into a teachable system through Fit For Every Game.

The profile you receive reflects a core principle of Damian's methodology: planning develops. Every coaching environment exists on a spectrum and every coach can develop along it.

BSc Sports Science & Coaching

MSc Exercise & Nutrition Science

UEFA Pro Licence Holder & Instructor

Director of Performance — 20+ Years

Premier League

International

MLS

Coach Educator

"Damian introduced his 'blueprint' of how we should train that kept every player injury-free and feeling fantastic. Our performances reflected that, particularly at the end of the season. As soon as we moved away from that it started to go wrong."

Ryan Shawcross

Former Stoke City Captain

YOUR PLANNING HAS A LEVEL

The assessment explores six key areas influencing planning performance

Your personalised FFEG Planning Profile identifies your current level across two core dimensions

The FFEG Planning Benchmark is designed for coaches working across the full range of football environments

YOUR PLANNING ALREADY FOLLOWS A PATTERN.