Wolves have brought in Mark Piros-Read as the club’s new head of physical performance.
Piros-Read brings a wealth of experience in the physical preparation of players to Molineux, having spent the previous eight-and-a-half years with the current Swedish champions Malmo.
Having worked in both the Champions League and Europa League, Piros-Read tasted domestic success last season, as Malmo lifted their 22nd league title.
At Wolves, he’ll be responsible for delivering the first-team physical performance programme whilst overseeing provision throughout the club to ensure consistency in philosophy and approach across all age groups in both the men’s and women’s programmes.
Head of high performance Phil Hayward said: “Mark’s work will give us some real alignment between first-team and academy, and make sure we’re working in similar ways right the way across the club. He’s leading the philosophy around strength and conditioning and field-based conditioning for the whole club.
“He’ll be working a lot with Stephen [Gilpin] in the academy and the individual sports scientists in each age group in the academy to make sure we’ve got some nice alignment and real golden threads that run right the way down through the club.”
Piros-Read, who worked for Swansea City and West Bromwich Albion before moving to Sweden, spent five years leading academy conditioning, before stepping up to the role of head of physical performance, which he held for three years before linking up with Hayward and Wolves, where he has made an instant impact.
“Mark is helping us to work in the most effective way possible from a performance-based perspective, which is obviously optimal, but also making sure we’ve got one philosophy running across the club, so when players are working through the age groups, they’re used to working in a certain way and we’re not suddenly changing philosophy between the academy and the first-team, which has sometimes been the case previously.
“It’s no individual’s fault, but over the past three or four coaching cycles, each of those coaches have tended to bring their own fitness staff, and because of that they have a way of working which is how the first-team works, but it’s not always great alignment between the first-team, under-21s and under-18s.
“We wanted to try and get away from that, which is why we brought Mark in to oversee that and make sure that becomes a club philosophy and approach as opposed to being driven too much by the head coaches. Gary was completely happy and understanding of that when he first came in and sees it as an effective way of working, so it’s going really well.”
