Ewens: In a complex skills sport such as Football, there is a wide variety of athletic talents. When players join West Ham it could be anything from a young player with a young training age and huge athletic potential, to a senior professional with a 10 year career behind them and years of athletic development, and everything in between!
For this reason, the foundation for each player is to objectively measure their physical qualities (ability to sprint, stop, jump, change direction etc.), and to qualitatively find out how they’ve been training, what they’ve been doing, and what their physical goals have been. Once we have a good idea of what each player’s strengths & weaknesses are, this must be reconciled with the physical demands of the Premier League. Aside from this, the foundation for each player must be a mentality, an attitude to work hard consistently in order to realise their physical potential.