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.
The FFEG Planning Benchmark helps coaches examine how deliberately their training environment is organised - and delivers a personalised Planning Profile with specific next steps.
The Assessment
The assessment considers your planning across six areas, then benchmarks two core dimensions
How your role, environment and weekly structure shape your planning decisions.
The structures, constraints and realities influencing how you work.
How deliberately training is organised across sessions, weeks and blocks.
How consistently session load and content are shaped around match day.
The demands and recovery patterns affecting player preparation and availability.
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
How deliberately you organise training across sessions, weeks and blocks - and whether that organisation holds its shape when circumstances change.
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:
Planning is reactive and largely session-to-session.
A recognisable structure exists, but consistency varies.
Planning is deliberate and consistently applied across sessions, weeks and blocks.
Planning is fully integrated and applied with precision across all dimensions.
Your Profile identifies your current level and provides specific next steps for developing your planning further.
Your Planning Profile is a personalised report. It arrives by email as soon as you finish, and it includes:
An overall Planning Level, plus separate levels for Planning Structure and Match-Week Alignment, so you can see how the two dimensions compare.
Your environment, age group, sessions per week, match frequency and the constraints you work within, used to shape the interpretation and the recommendations.
What your levels actually mean in your environment, including how your periodisation model and the pressures you named shape your week.
One concrete action for each dimension, specific enough to use in your next training week rather than filed away for later.
A short, structured way to test a change in your own environment and see what it does to your week in the run-up to match day.
What developing your planning further looks like from where you are, and a reflection question to take into your own week.
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
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.
What coaches and players say about Damian Roden's methodology
“Under Damian’s management, I played 37 out of 38 Premier League games, something I have not been able to achieve since. I am a big believer in his methodology and the energy he brings.”
Vincent Kompany
Manchester City, Anderlecht, Bayern Munich and Belgium
“Damian has had a huge impact on the success of Coach Education in Wales over the years and we still draw upon his knowledge and pay reference to his approach to training on all of our courses.”
Osian Roberts
Technical Director, FA Wales & Morocco · Head of Development, Como 1907
“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 ALREADY FOLLOWS A PATTERN.
Find out how deliberate it is.