SIMON CLIFFORD AND INTEGER

Founded in 2016 by Simon Clifford - one of the most experienced and highly regarded one-to-one coaches and innovative thinkers in modern English football -  Integer Football is regarded as a forward thinking training programme, striving to develop today’s youth football players. 

Simon’s journey in football started over 30 years ago, as a primary school teacher with an extraordinary vision and ambition to change the way football is played and coached in the UK, and to model this on the great side who inspired him in the 1994 USA World Cup – Brazil. Having secured funding from a teachers union, armed with a video camera and a notepad, Simon travelled to Brazil. Once there, he worked with the football governing body of Brazil, top flight clubs, futebol de salao clubs and high-profile former players with the aim of understanding the philosophy and methods behind their training. With this new-found knowledge, he was able to create an inspired and new way of coaching and training in English football – creating a syllabus that had never been seen or heard of before. It was this very syllabus that allowed Simon to create the first youth soccer schools of their kind, focusing on various technical aspects of football such as close control and improved skill levels whilst also placing greater emphasis on fitness and strength, all inspired by the Brazilian way and futebol de salao. The soccer schools were very soon on all corners of the globe, and were seeing unbelievable success particularly in England, producing elite football players, such as Micah Richards, Ryan Fraser, Oli McBurnie, John Bostock and more, with coaching alumni including Michael Beale and John Herdman.

Given the unbelievable influence Simon had on youth football and the extraordinary work that was being done, Simon began to work in top levels of football in the UK. His experience in elite football spans across the past two decades, in which time Simon has worked with some of the world’s greatest players and held senior positions at Premier League level, including Head of Sports Science at Southampton FC in the mid-2000s, whilst also working with the English FA and England national team. In working with stars such as Gareth Bale, Wayne Rooney and Michael Owen, all the way down to training and educating youth players, Simon has developed a unique and forward thinking approach to the development and training of players, with the extraordinary ability to create bespoke individual training plans for players of different ages and of varying ability, allowing for them to develop in all aspects of the game and to go on to achieve unbelievable success.