Our Story
Our Story
Many years ago, before the industrialization of Football Academies, we learnt to play football either from the ‘greatest’ footballer you knew, that was your dad, or by going to the park and by learning from older players. I was lucky, my father, born near Parma, Italy, was a great player who focused on the traditional Italian Fantasista role. As a young boy I was taught how to strike a ball and when doing so repeatedly told: ‘Don’t look at the ball, look at the target. Your foot will always be at the end of your leg and you know where the ball is by the time you have set yourself, use your eyes to guide the ball.’
Many years later it still frustrated him that kids and even experienced players were coached to focus on the ball and yet shouted at to, ‘get your head up.’
This started my journey to understand whether natural coordination and spatial awareness are instinctively within all of us and whether it can be coached and improved upon. What enables one player to be ‘skillful’ and another not so.
Upon loosing my job at Ferrari due to the financial crash of 2008, I returned to England and set about my task by designing a tool to remove the ability to see the ball at the point of striking it. It was very crude and didn’t reveal much. This tool then sat in a drawer until Covid lockdowns when my daughter and her ex-premiership footballer partner moved in with me. Being locked at home with little to do we grabbed this tool and proceeded to have a look what Michael could do. He was striking the ball in the air cleanly and assured my he couldn’t see the ball as he was striking it. During this period of lockdown I developed and engineered the tool to remove a precise quotient of focal vision which meant the ball was out of vision for roughly 200 milliseconds, the time it takes to raise vision, access the target in real time and finesse the strike.
As Lockdown opened up we went to the local pitch with this engineered product and pushed Michael’s natural coordination and decision making to new boundaries, all captured on video by me daughter. Then for some reason we asked my daughter, twenty three years old at the time who had never kicked a ball before to see what effect this training aid had on her. This was the ‘Eureka moment’, she was immediately coordinating her foot, side foot and through ‘laces’ to strike the ball accurately and sweetly back to the server. Then the jaw dropping moment: Not having any preconceived idea of which was her stronger or weaker foot, she achieved and equal performance with either foot in the simple exercises we tried and recorded.
Seyetz was born. We finessed the design, gained patent approval, and registered the design. We made further trial with young players starting on their footballing journey and every time the results were breathtaking. The old Italian methodology of focusing on the target and trusting your natural coordination is now available to all in a controlled repeatable process that achieves quick technical results and boosts confidence.
