The Danish coach knows, however, that the theory only works when results arrive.
“You can do both, but you need wins to do it,” Friis told Football Presse.
That sentence has taken on an added significance since the interview was conducted.
At the time, Friis was reflecting on his experiences at FC Midtjylland and Brentford, his time at Sparta Prague and his search for another head-coaching opportunity.
He subsequently took charge of Cercle Brugge in March 2026, inheriting a team involved in a fight for Belgian top-flight survival.
His immediate task was not to spend months patiently developing a project.
It was to win.
And he did.
Cercle went into the relegation play-offs and, under Friis, won three of their six matches to secure their place in the Belgian top flight. The run included a 3-0 victory over La Louvière and a 4-1 win away to Dender.
The experience provided a real-world test of something Friis had explained in detail when discussing his time at Brentford.
“It’s a hard one because it’s not on the coach only,” he said.
“It needs to come from the club. It needs to be a part of the culture, the DNA, the values you have in the club.”
For Friis, the mistake is to view youth development as a licence to sacrifice results.
“In football it sounds like an excuse when coaches are talking about long-term,” he said.
“It sounds like, ‘Ah, I just want more time, give me a little bit more chances,’ and so on and so on.”
His experience at Brentford had convinced him that the strongest clubs can build development into their pursuit of results.
“I think in general, the clubs who are good in looking into long-term solutions, it’s all about recruitment, it’s all about development, it’s all about staff members, it’s all about how to drive the club.”
Brentford, he argued, provided the clearest example.
“You have a really, really good chance. I also 100% sure this is why you see Brentford have success today.”
The principle was straightforward.
The club had to create an environment where young players could actually play.
Friis pointed to Brentford’s decision to operate with a relatively small first-team squad, meaning the next player in line could naturally come from the B team.
“If you miss another player, let’s say a defender, the next natural step will be to take up a B team player,” he explained.
“So you don’t have 34 players, you have maybe 20, 22, and then the next players in the row was actually the B team players.”
It meant development was not an abstract promise made by the club.
The pathway was there.
And Friis believes that distinction matters enormously.
“It was natural. You create circumstances to do these kind of things.”
His philosophy was formed long before Brentford.
At Midtjylland, Friis was among the coaches involved in establishing the club’s academy, which he regards as the foundation of his coaching career.
“We could start over again,” he recalled.
“There was not an old way or we normally do like this or we have to do like this. No, we started with everything.”
The young Danish club was prepared to challenge established thinking.
“It was a game changer in Danish football that Midtjylland started this, and a lot of clubs followed the way they did afterwards.”
That experience shaped Friis’s belief that clubs need to construct systems that make development possible rather than simply instruct coaches to develop players.
But there is another part of his philosophy which became particularly relevant when he moved into senior management.
The player has to be understood before he can be developed.
“Working with the youngsters, I think one of the most important things is to get close to them, to get under their skin, to understand how they think, to understand their background,” Friis said.
“And if you understand them, the human being, you have a really, really good chance to develop the player.”
He was careful to distinguish that from becoming a player’s friend.
“I’m not talking about being best friends,” he said.
“But I’m talking about being totally honest also outside football.”
Friis gave the example of a player arriving at training distracted by problems away from football.
A coach can demand a better first touch, better passing or greater concentration.
But what if the real problem is at home?
“I’m just talking about understanding his situation this morning when he’s not performing,” he said.
That, for Friis, is part of coaching.
The other part is measuring whether the player is actually improving.
At Brentford, he worked with analysts to assess individual development and created a traffic-light system for performance.
Green represented a good action.
Yellow meant it could have gone either way.
Red meant it needed improvement.
The idea was to turn development into something that could be observed, measured and then replicated in training.
Friis used aerial duels as one example.
“You need to look at all the duels in the games and so on and so on and find out every single aerial duel, was it good, was it mm, or was it bad?”
The objective was not to drown football in numbers.
It was to identify what needed to improve and then create more opportunities for the player to succeed.
That remains the key distinction in Friis’s approach.
Data should support the coach rather than replace him.
“Football is feelings,” he said.
“But if you make a lot of decisions based on feelings, it’s not many times you’re right.”
The answer, he believes, is to combine the evidence with the eye.
“You need the data, the facts into football also, together with the eyes, and then you will see what real football is.”
His subsequent experience at Cercle has added another dimension to that philosophy.
When there is a relegation battle, there is no luxury of choosing development over results.
The results are the development environment.
The victories create the breathing space.
And that brings Friis back to his original point.
“You can do both, but you need wins to do it.”
For a coach who began his career helping build an academy from scratch, that may be the most important lesson of all: young players need opportunities, clubs need patience, but neither exists independently of the scoreboard.
At Cercle, Friis has now had to prove that principle under pressure.