Looking back on his career, former German national team captain Philipp Lahm cites talent, discipline and repetition as the reasons for his success. The last of the three factors mentioned, in particular, contributed to his consistently strong performances on the field, he says. “I almost never had stress on the pitch because I always had a solution, and that came from repetition,” the full-back once said. A sentence that can now be read on a wall in the entrance area of the FC Bayern Campus.
The daily program at skills.lab Wundschuh is to promote talent in a targeted manner and to improve it step by step. These efforts are combined in the skills.lab Academy, which will enter its third season in 2023. For footballers born between 2012 and 2014, skills.lab Academy is a unique development program in which selected talents can raise their skills to a new level over a period of ten months in regular individual training sessions and performance tests.
The 10- to 12-year-old players have access to a wide range of training technology from skills.lab. The program ranges from sessions in the skills.lab Arena, the world’s most advanced training and assessment system, to exercises in the skills.lab Cube, where technique is trained in a small space, to the in-house speed court, where cognitive and motor skills are developed. All this under the individual guidance of certified coaches.
Interactive scouting assessment decides on admission
Those who make it into the skills.lab Academy are decided through a scouting process in which each applicant completes a 30-minute interactive assessment at skills.lab Wundschuh. Passing, shooting, dribbling and perception are tested. Skills that cannot be tested as objectively and thus fairly in any other training system as in the skills.lab Arena. This year, scouting for the skills.lab Academy runs from July 3 to August 27. The best girl and the best boy from each year of scouting will ultimately make it to the Academy.
Starting in the fall, Academy players can expect extensive individual training sessions every 14 days, as well as quarterly assessments in which their own performance development is reviewed. All participants will be equipped with an exclusive skills.lab training outfit. To top it all off, the entire Academy cohort will visit the FC Bayern Campus in Munich, where the talented players of the German record champion also improve their skills in a skills.lab Arena on a daily basis.
In addition to Philipp Lahm’s quote, the young players will also find one from Austrian national team captain David Alaba in the campus grounds, in which he sums up how he wouldn’t have gotten far on talent alone: “Wanting to develop further, wanting to keep learning and just letting my life on the field. That was maybe the difference to the other players.”
