It’s not often that one of the world’s best footballers allow a camera crew to access his inner sanctum and follow him as he embarks on a secret project.
That’s exactly what Trent Alexander-Arnold has done as part of Trent’s Vision, a Red Bull TV documentary that details the visual skills training programme he hopes will take his game to the next level.
The documentary begins with him explaining his motivation behind the project.
“From day one you’re taught technique, but really the foundation is your vision, what you can and can’t see,” he says.
At the start of the year, Alexander-Arnold and Red Bull agreed that visual skills training could help him to read the game quicker, improve his passing and even fine tune his defending.
But the training was far from easy. The 22-year-old linked up with sports vision expert Dr Daniel Laby, who has helped athletes all over the world to improve their vision since the early 1990s. Laby says the training had to be tough enough to challenge the defender and create change.
“One of the things I noticed with Trent is his keen interest in performance and performing at his personal best,” he says. “We had to fully challenge him and we did that by creating a task that was exceedingly difficult."
The documentary shows Laby putting Alexander-Arnold through a series of visual tests using cutting edge technology at Liverpool’s M&S Bank Arena. The aim was to find out his strengths and weaknesses before designing him a bespoke programme.
One of the tests requires him to thread a pass through three large hoops, but the task is made more difficult by the middle hoop moving from left to right. It’s a challenge that sparked a lightbulb moment for the right-back.
“That was the moment the penny dropped and I realised ‘I do need to work on this,’” he admits.
And work at it he does. From there, the cameras follow Alexander-Arnold at his home, where he can be seen undergoing his visual skills training sessions. One involves the use of a virtual reality headset, along with various other video games that push him to his limits.
He can be seen letting out a cry of frustration after failing to conquer one of the games but displays self-awareness in realising the benefits of overcoming struggle.
“In a game you’re not going to find them one per cents, it’s in training,” he says.
In another revealing clip, Alexander-Arnold reveals his determination to maximise his talent.
“The measuring stick for me is myself. I need to be better,” he adds. “Good is never enough, great is never enough.”
But will his efforts during training be enough on reassessment day? At the end of the documentary he returns to the M&S Bank Arena to undergo more testing to measure his improvement seven weeks on from his first batch of tests.
The mood is tense. “You get out what you put in and I think I’ve put a lot in,” he says. “It’d be a waste of time and effort and everything if this has all gone to waste.”
Watch the full documentary and find out if Alexander-Arnold is successful by visiting Red Bull TV now.
