ch1 - The JFA Physical Fitness Project

The project's remit — what kind of organisation is this?

An organisation that splits football performance into four parts and then declares responsibility for only one of them. That narrow boundary sets the character of everything that follows.

Four aspects, one of them

The JFA reads player performance across four aspects: psycho-social, tactical, technical and physical. The Physical Fitness Project is the body that specialises in the physical aspect alone. This is not a refusal to acknowledge the other three; it is a declaration of where the organisation's responsibility begins and ends.

The narrow boundary matters because at junior level the word 'physical' tends to blur into training volume, mental toughness and sheer grit. Pin the remit to the physical aspect and 'let's make them run more' stops being self-justifying. Each time, you have to say which fitness quality you are targeting, on what evidence, and at which maturity stage.

Fitness split four ways again

The physical aspect is then divided into four performance qualities.

These four categories line up exactly with the testing set in chapter 6. The sprint items read sprint performance, the jump items read force output, and the change-of-direction run reads part of high-intensity performance. The principle that you do not prescribe what you cannot measure is built into the organisational design itself.

Two goals held side by side

The project states two goals: building physical qualities capable of competing with the world, and improving the physical qualities that suit each individual.

Chapters 3 to 5 spell out how a junior coach is meant to hold both. In short: publish the benchmarks, then adjust their application by maturity. Much of the gap between a 12-year-old running 30 m in 4.63 seconds and one running 4.20 is maturity rather than training, so applying the benchmark straight to the individual will flatter the early developer and discard the late one.

Where it sits inside the association

The JFA frames its plan for the national game as a trinity — national-team strengthening, youth development and coach education — plus grassroots promotion. The Physical Fitness Project touches only two of the four: youth development and coach education. National-team strengthening is not its direct business; it is treated as something that follows from intervening in the other two.

That implies a long horizon for measuring success. The organisation's primary outputs are accumulated development-age data and the number of qualified coaches, not senior results. The association goals sitting above the project are the JFA Declaration 2050 and the JFA Goals 2030 — decades-long frames by construction.