http://8by8mag.com/this-could-get-messy/

This Could Get Messy
Posted by Eight by Eight | October 18, 2013 | Issue 01 | No Comments

Unlike Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire, Pep Guardiola didn’t have his audience at “Hello.” But he did have them at “Guten Tag, Grüß Gott.” All it took for the 42-year-old—on his first day running FC Bayern Munich—was to address the more than 250 journalists in the Allianz Arena in very passable German, garnished with a Bavarian idiom. The writers marveled at his command of the notoriously difficult language, they laughed at his self-effacing joke (“All the answers for the most important questions are pre-prepared—if I don’t know the questions, I’m kaput!”), and above all, they appreciated the two key messages Guardiola sought to get across. First, he’s an obsessive worker determined to arm himself with the communication tools every successful manager needs. According to his brother Pere, Guardiola studied German “like a madman” since accepting Bayern’s job offer just before Christmas.

Even more important, however, Guardiola’s sometimes slightly ropey German spoke volumes about his humility. No one would have been too upset if “the world’s greatest coach” (according to Bayern executive-board chairman Karl-Heinz Rummenigge) had conducted his first presser in English or Spanish, but doing it in the local language drove home the point that he is determined to adapt to his new surroundings.

His low-key speech that day was in marked contrast to the rock-star fever that had gripped Munich (and a hefty chunk of the rest of Germany) before his unveiling. “Buenos dias, Messias!” wrote local tabloid Abendzeitung, with a mixture of irony and admiration. Never before had so much hype greeted an incoming Bundes-liga manager, and Bayern’s historic, treble-winning season only amplified expectations. Everyone seemed to be wondering if Guardiola, the man who in just four years made Barcelona the world’s best and most aesthetically pleasing team, could usher in an era of European dominance in Munich.
Guardiola was extremely careful to avoid promising that level of success in the press conference and, in the process, made himself seem to be quite a bit smaller than he really is. “It’s a gift to be here, a gift that Bayern even thought I could be here,” he said with a smile, adding that he had taken the job because of Bayern’s “special history” and “high quality of players.” His modesty is genuine, close friends and confidants insist, and they point to his background by way of explanation. Guardiola is the son of a bricklayer from Santpedor, a small town in the Catalan hinterlands. “The stereotypical attitude of Catalans … [is] pessimism,” writes his biographer, Guillem Balagué, in the excellent Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning. Maybe that’s a little strong as far as Guardiola is concerned, since he won every conceivable trophy as a novice manager at Barça. But there’s no question that he’s prone to self-doubt of the healthy kind. More than that, “his doubt is methodical,“ wrote Süddeutsche Zeitung’s Spanish correspondent Oliver Meiler, “he was never sure. Not even after many titles. And that’s one of the reasons for his success: the perennial, manic, at times unnerving search for ways to make football, the unpredictable game, plannable.”

Guardiola understands that players like the irrepressible maverick Thomas Müller would be ill-served by a slavish reproduction of tiki-taka.

When he finished his playing career in 2006, at age 35, Guardiola went on holiday in Argentina. He wanted to meet César Luis Menotti and Marcelo Bielsa, two coaches he admired. He hoped to learn from them before becoming a manager. This unpretentious inquisitiveness has remained with him. It’s natural for him to imitate, copy, and absorb everything. His art has been to take all his influences and bring them together in his own superior concept.
Xavier Sala-i-Martín, a professor of economics at Columbia University, has an interesting analogy. He got to know Guardiola’s modus operandi while he was working as FC Barcelona’s treasurer from 2004 to 2010. “Look at Zara and H&M, the two big European clothes chains,” he says. Both have similar business plans: fashionable clothes at affordable prices. But H&M produces their stock as cheaply as possible in great volumes. Half a million yellow pairs of trousers, for example. Zara, a Spanish chain, produces smaller quantities—say, 20,000 pairs of yellow trousers. Production is more expensive, but the stock in the shops changes every week. “If Madonna wears a purple pair of trousers in a concert, there will be purple trousers in the Zara shops the next week,” says Sala-i-Martín, “whereas the H&M trousers are still yellow. Guardiola is Zara. He surprises his opponents by making small changes to his tactics each week. An economist would call it flexibility. Pep stands for continuous innovation.”

Some would scoff at this description and point out that no team in recent history has been as uncompromising in their approach as Pep’s Barcelona, the grandmasters of tiki-taka. It’s a fallacy to think that Barça was always playing the same way, insists Sala-i-Martín, because small, incremental variations of their tactics made them untouchable. Guardiola pushed the envelope until only two defenders were left behind in their own half. “Suicidal!” screamed the traditionalists. These days, most top teams have copied that strategy, including Jügen Klopp’s Borussia Dortmund and Jupp Heynckes’s Bayern, the two German teams that contested the 2013 Champions League final at Wembley. Pushing players forward enabled Guardiola’s team to win the ball in the final third of the opposition half; they defended in attack. Getting to the opponent’s goal was quicker that way. This “high-pressing” has made football faster, more attractive. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Guardiola has modernized the game.

Many assume Guardiola is out to replicate this winning formula in Bavaria, but he insists he will “adapt 100 percent” to his players and that only “small changes” would be made. Bayern successfully combined elements of Louis van Gaal’s possession game and spells of high-pressing in 2012–13, but at times they were very direct and muscular. Guardiola understands that such players as the irrepressible maverick Thomas Müller, a man who defies categorization, or Arjen Robben, the narcissistic winger, would be ill-served by a slavish reproduction of tiki-taka.
Guardiola was heavily influenced by van Gaal and Johan Cruyff—winning with style and beauty is important for him, but he lacks the two Dutchmen’s dogmatic streak. His most important tactical decision at Barcelona offers a good insight. “Pep Guardiola changed the history of football on May 1, 2009,” says Sala-i-Martín. There was no game that day, but Guardiola was spending hours locked away in his windowless office in the bowels of the Camp Nou stadium, watching videos of Real Madrid, the next evening’s opponent. He stopped the DVD, rewound, played it again. There it was! The best moment in the life of a manager, Guardiola once said, is the moment you find a weakness of your opponent that your team can exploit.

Guardiola called Lionel Messi, his small winger. “Come to the stadium, I have to show you something,” he said. When Guardiola played him the DVD, Messi got it instantly: Whenever Real Madrid attacked the man in possession in midfield, their defenders didn’t push up. There was a gap of 25 meters between defense and midfield.

The next step, in hindsight, seems obvious. Messi started the Clásico against Barça’s archrivals in his customary position on the left but then switched deep inside as a hidden striker, or “false number nine,” as football experts would later call the role. Messi proved unstoppable. Barcelona won 6-2 and celebrated a historic result. Even more important was Messi’s transition into a “secret” striker, which turned a very good Argentine international into the world’s best player. Since that evening, he’s been voted the footballer of the year every season. Guardiola couldn’t have known it would work out like that; he was simply looking for the best strategy for a particular match.

Barcelona’s breathtaking football made Guardiola the most coveted coach in European football, so why did he chose Bayern rather than a club in the English Premier League? Joan Laporta, Barcelona’s former president, thinks that Guardiola mistrusts the setup of nouveau-riche clubs like Chelsea and Manchester City, which are controlled by billionaires. “Bayern is not a club with a rich owner who has made his millions outside football and who might decide from one day to the next to go home again,” says Laporta.
Guardiola is not naive; perhaps he’s not even a romantic. He knows that football is big business these days. But growing up in Barcelona, he was taught that a club should be “mès que un club,” as Barça’s motto has it, greater than the football team it employs. During Franco’s dictatorship, Barça was a stronghold of Catalan resistance. In the stadium, thousands could speak the forbidden Catalan; Real Madrid, the perceived representatives of the state, could be insulted and beaten. “Barça is the Catalan army without weapons,“ wrote Manuel Vázquez Montalbán. To this day, Barcelona aspire to stress the otherness of Catalonia, be that by having many local players for the side or by playing the game in a special way.

The ability to identify with your team remains an important part of being a football fan in the 21st century. While Barcelona’s social relevance has a basis in history, marketing and branding experts are busy creating identities elsewhere. Bayern have had a head start in that respect: They have been actively playing on a heightened sense of Bavarian-ness, on a confidence that verges on arrogance, and have described themselves as “a family” to create a us-and-them dynamic for decades. “We cultivate this polarization,” Rummenigge admits, “partly because it means that we have constant media exposure.”

According to various studies, Bayern have approximately 12 million fans in Germany—a number that is dwarfed only by those who dislike the club with equal passion. And the club would not have it any other way.

There are other similarities. Both Bayern and Barcelona pride themselves on developing young players, and both are run as clubs in the pure sense of the word, according to democratic principles. The members—in other words, the supporters—“own” the club and elect their presidents. Among the top clubs in Europe, only Real Madrid operates along such traditional lines; most of the rest are privately owned.

Despite all their relentless sporting and commercial ambition and their wish to be a truly global player, Bayern still recognizes their responsibility to their loyal supporters. Season ticket prices for the most hardcore fans are subsidized. Every Christmas, the members of the playing staff are dispatched to visit a fan club, and most training sessions are open to the public. Guardiola, according to Uli Hoeness, Bayern’s president, was surprised to hear of that arrangement, but quickly agreed to adhere to the culture of his new club.
It’ll be fascinating to see his progress. “It won’t be easy for him in the Bayern family,” said Guardiola’s mentor, Menotti, who won the 1978 World Cup. “But his ideas are good, and he likes the city. I think he’s more nervous than he should be; he’ll find it easy to communicate. German won’t be difficult for him. He is a very ‘German’ Catalan—organized, serious. He works and trains hard. His personality suits Munich; it’s a good town for him.”

As long as he delivers results, that is. Bayern don’t expect him to defend the Champions League trophy this season—no club, not even his Barcelona, have been able to do that—but he needs to win the league. “The league is the most honest title,” said Rummenigge, implying that luck and form are much smaller factors than in the cup competitions—and that there is no excuse not to win it with Bayern’s stellar squad.

Pep’s much more demanding task will be to keep Bayern at the very top of European football. Privately, the bosses at Säbenerstrasse expect him to lift another Champions League trophy before his three-year contract is up. It’s on that stage that Guardiola will really earn his wages of $13.34 million per season. Or to put it in Jerry Maguire terms, that’s where the money must show.

Additional research by Ronald Reng
A feature article from our debut issue. Order Issue 01 from our Shop.

Youth Football Development
A random mixture of postings from coaching sessions and ideas to sharing information on the future of youth football, from The FA perspective, linked to my role in the game.

03 September, 2013
http://youthfootballdevelopment.blogspot.com.au/2013/09/being-perceived-as-talented-is-great.html?spref=tw

Being perceived as talented is great, but it comes with some challenges...

We have a habit of labelling things in modern society and we like to do this; frequently when making comparisons of one against another. They are often subjective by nature, “I think Messi was better than Pele”, and on many occasions, never even something that can be quantified. But this extends from harmless pub chat to labelling in schools and sport – “this young person is talented or gifted” (whatever they mean) and therefore better than others. But what is the impact of being labelled this as a young person? Too often we do not see the impact through their eyes and what it actually may mean to them. Let’s look at this using football as the example but you could replace football with any sport or indeed school subject.

1. From an early age being labelled as talented increases expectations and they come to realise that when playing games the pressure is on them entirely; because they are talented and others aren’t. More becomes expected every game and can build and build.
2. The knock-on effect for their own self-perception can become dangerous if others around them are deemed less talented by themselves or adults, bordering on developing an air of arrogance in many as that comparison kicks in.
3. Parents can have inflated expectations, and whilst that child may be happy just playing football with their friends, the parents habitually expect massive things and game winning performances every week.
4. Internal pressure on their own ability creates added weight with the child feeling that if they don’t produce these performances every week that their parents will stop loving them. This can stem from positive feedback only coming from a positive performance. This is produced from within but is a dangerous feeling to have for a young person and is linked to causes of stress and anxiety.
5. Being talented in one sport leads to frequently being talented in others, using athleticism and game skills as the core underpinning of skill application. However, this may not always be the case, it could be domain specific. Expectations from teachers and peers because of a talent in one sport can lead to increased pressure when playing others.
6. Sibling rivalry can have a major effect in a family dynamic. One sibling that gets praised for being mediocre in a sport (“trying their hardest”) leads to even greater pressure for the talented sibling to perform every week. There are no allowances for anything different.
7. The constant need for approval and basing their own self-worth on what other people think of them is a dangerous place to be. It can lead to greater anxiety, because they never fail at anything, and don’t want to let others down. Managing this carefully is vital.
8. In fact, the opportunity to ‘learn to fail’ is sometimes missed because of this pursuit of excellence. Failing is a huge part of learning and feeling like its ok to shoot for the moon and sometimes miss is essential. However, we need to create an environment that makes it ok for this ‘miss’ to happen.
9. A feeling of jealousy from others towards them is something that is often passed by and helping young people deal with the feelings and comments from peers is something we can help them manage.
10. Constantly managing high expectations is incredibly difficult. There are two options; if they perform great, that is expected, and if they don’t that is a failure. It is either neutral or negative.
11. The journey towards becoming an elite footballer is incredibly difficult and can also give a false sense of security. Being labelled as ‘talented’ from a young age just means they are talented today, not necessarily in five or ten years time. Helping them understand the journey and its challenges is important.
12. Equally, young people are often deemed talented within their peer group, but what if that peer group is below average? Compared to their peers they are talented, but put them in the wider world and they become average. Having had a build up of expectations and self-worth about being talented to then see this come shattering down is difficult and tough to manage and internalise as a child.

The role of a teacher or coach is to help the child; help them understand the nature of the dynamics above and what it may mean to be talented (today) compared to your peers. Emphasising the need for hard work, recognising that it is ok not to be amazing every game and developing a growth mindset (see Dweck, 2006) in young people is essential life skills to help them with ongoing challenges.

The journey towards long-term talent is never easy and dealing with disappointment is inevitable. Helping them understand this may come in different forms is important; this could be getting de-selected from a professional football club, not being selected by the manager to play or dealing with a bad injury. But it is going to happen at some stage – we don’t always win.

As a parent, regardless of their performances, achievements or otherwise, they just want to know you still love them.

TJ Whalan, I think this is new from earlier this year!

I don't think we did this in the C Licence.

I wonder if Steelinho, Saftaasi, or anyone else on here who has done a recent C lIcence can remember this?

I know this stuff from teaching, but not football coaching courses.

[The Holistic Approach

Purposeful practice for football is practice that develops the players’ technical and perception/decision-making skills, as well as the required football fitness, in conjunction with each other instead of developing the individual components in isolation.

We call this the Holistic approach of coaching.
The isolated approach is successful, and perhaps necessary, for specific sports, such as golf and gymnastics. Football demands the holistic approach by its very nature; it is an incredibly complex game, with unpredictable situations and the player is regularly required to rapidly select from a wide range of possible options and execute them under pressure.
Daniel Coyle, in his much-acclaimed book ‘The Talent Code’, explains the difference in the brain processes involved in, on the one hand, activities like golf and violin-playing, compared to activities like football.

‘Skills like football are flexible-circuit skills, meaning they require us to grow vast ivy-vine circuits (in the brain) that we can flick through to navigate an ever-changing set of obstacles. Playing violin, golf, gymnastics and figure-skating, on the other hand, are consistent-circuit skills, depending utterly on a solid foundation of technique that enables us to reliably re-create the fundamentals of an ideal performance.’
The point can be made by considering two contrasting ways of teaching a child to solve a jigsaw puzzle.

Method One (Isolated Approach):

Lesson 1: Take one piece out of the box, close the lid, and then take that piece to the child. Ask her to keep looking at the piece until she is totally familiar with it. Then take that piece away and put it back in the box.

Lesson 2: Take another jigsaw piece out, close the lid, and take the second piece to the child. Again, ask her to keep looking at the piece until she is totally familiar with it.

Lessons 3-60: Repeat the process until she is familiar with all the separate jigsaw pieces.

Lesson 61: Finally, empty the whole box of pieces on the child’s desk, and take the box away. Ask the child to arrange all the pieces into a rectangular picture.

Method Two (Holistic Approach):

Lesson 1: Put the jigsaw pieces together according to the picture on the front of the box. Take the complete jigsaw to the child’s desk and ask her to familiarize herself with the whole picture.

Lesson 2: Take the complete jigsaw to the child’s desk and ask her to familiarize herself with the whole picture, focusing mainly on one quarter of it.

Lesson 3: Take the complete jigsaw to the child’s desk and ask her to familiarize herself with the whole picture, focusing mainly on a second quarter of it.

Lesson 4: Take the complete jigsaw to the child’s desk and ask her to familiarize herself with the whole picture, focusing mainly on a third quarter of it.

Lesson 5: Take the complete jigsaw to the child’s desk and ask her to familiarize herself with the whole picture, focusing mainly on the final quarter of it.

Lesson 6: Take the jigsaw apart, put the pieces on the child’s desk and ask her to put it back together.

Which child do you think would finish the jigsaw quickest? It is feasible that the 6 lessons of the ‘holistic’ approach would be more successful than 60 lessons of ‘isolated’ because the child has always been presented with the ‘big picture’, and can therefore see the links and make the connections between the pieces much more quickly and efficiently.
Here lies another problem with the ‘isolated’ approach: there are so many elements to the game of football, that the coach can end up with a list of, say, 60 separate elements to work on. If the coach then proceeds to address them all individually in an isolated way, the whole training program becomes totally removed from the real context of football. To compound the problem, by the time you work on the 60th ‘jigsaw piece’.

A BELGIAN BLUEPRINT: The story of how one man, armed with a brochure and tactical nous, changed a nation from championship no-hopers to global superstars

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2411916/A-BELGIAN-BLUEPRINT-Story-Michel-Sablon-changed-Belgium-team-today.html#ixzz2e7JSrSrP
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
No one can say for certain when the tipping point was reached. When Belgian football looked deep into its soul and discovered an empty hollow.
Some say the European Championship of 2000 was the watershed. Co-hosts of the tournament with Holland, Belgian aspirations were high.
They would go on to reach a sixth successive World Cup in 2002, they were a nation to be reckoned with.

But the days of Enzo Scifo and Franky Vercauteren had gone. When Turkey pipped the co-hosts as qualifiers from their first-round group at Euro 2000, there was humiliation. But no real surprise.
Their best young players were heading elsewhere. To France and the Netherlands. The Jupiler pro league was no longer seen as a place for young players to blossom and grow.
At the glass-fronted offices of the Belgian Football Association on the outskirts of Brussels, the technical director, Michel Sablon, saw football moving on and Belgium failing to move with it.
‘Our professional clubs were failing,’ he tells Sportsmail. ‘And the level of football from the national teams was not good enough.
‘We could not compete with the major countries like Spain and France.
‘So, in 2002 we started to look closely at France and had meetings with them twice a year. We did the same with Holland. Sometimes we met with Germany as well and tried to improve what we were doing.
‘At that time we were nowhere. Our Under-17 and Under-19 teams were ranked between 23 and 28 in the world. We really were nowhere. Now? We are top 10.’
It was hardly an overnight journey.


Sablon, a member of the Belgian coaching team at the World Cup finals in Mexico, Italy and the United States, sat down with a blank notepad. What he wrote down was hardly reinventing the wheel.
But the blueprint produced was enough to create stirrings of unrest and dissent amongst clubs for years to come. Relationships built up over many years in the Belgian game were tested.
‘We made a brochure,’ Sablon recalls. It was more of a book, in fact.
‘We had a whole group of people around a table in the technical department and we decided to make a plan for three target groups.
‘First of all was the clubs, secondly the national team and third the coaches of the schools.
‘So we adopted the same vision for all three groups. We went to the clubs and asked them to play a certain way below Under-18 levels.
‘We asked them to play 4-3-3 with wingers and three midfielders and a flat back four. In the old days, it was always a flat back three, so this was brand new to them.
‘It took more than five or six years before everyone could bring themselves to accept it. Because for most of the coaches and the clubs, all they cared about was winning the game. Nothing else.
‘But that was absolutely wrong for the development of all the players. Totally wrong.
‘It wasn’t easy. In the beginning it was terrible. But eventually they began to see it. They went with us because they saw that what we told them worked. It made players better.
‘I knew the coaches over many years. I convinced them that we were serious people.
‘That this was no b*******. We knew what we were doing.’

Even so, telling Anderlecht and Standard Liege how they should raise their young players and what formation they should play was a thorny, complex issue. Calling in university boffins, Sablon asked the academics to film 1,500 youth games and analyse them.
The conclusion? That winning at all costs was over-rated. In response, the Belgian FA urged five against five games at youth levels, seven against seven for older kids and a delayed introduction to full-size pitches.
At youth international level, promising young players were moved up to the next level as quickly as possible, even when it meant weakening the chances of qualification for European championships.
Yet, in 2007, a youth team featuring Eden Hazard and Christian Benteke made the last four of the European Under-17 championships for the first time in Belgium’s history. The next year, a slightly older group featuring Marouane Fellaini and Vincent Kompany had a good Olympics.

‘It was working,’ adds Sablon. ‘Players like Fellaini, Hazard, (Jan) Vertonghen and (Thomas) Vermaelen were good at 17 or 18.
‘But I have no doubt. What we did with our development system made them better. It made them the players they are now.
‘The clubs looked at the FIFA rankings and saw us moving up. Finally they said: “This works”.’
Unsurprisingly, Sablon’s blueprint has been adopted wholesale by SFA performance director Mark Wotte.
The Dutchman offers no apology for looking at a golden generation of Belgian players containing Kompany, Hazard, Fellaini, Benteke, Vertonghen, Moussa Dembele, Nacer Chadli, Vermaelen and Romelu Lukaku and saying: “This is the way to go”.’
Mark McGhee, Gordon Strachan’s assistant, believes it’s less simple than that. The Belgians have a population of 11 million. They have also benefited from a huge wave of multicultural immigration.

In Brussels, Europe’s business and political heartland, footballers of African descent were born. Benteke and Kompany are of Congolese parentage, while Fellaini’s background is Moroccan. Yet almost all of the team are born in Belgium.
Sixteen now play for the biggest clubs in the English Premiership. Kompany is Manchester City captain, Fellaini has completed a £27million move to Manchester United, while big-spending Spurs have Vertonghen, Chadli and Dembele in their ranks.
To try to ape this, the SFA have invested £20m in seven performance schools and indoor training centres. Yet the bricks and mortar is the easy part.


Sablon tried to change the psychology of a nation. To change the entire footballing culture from a win-at-all-costs mentality.
‘Scotland is in the shadow of England. But you know what? That makes England a target.
‘We compare ourselves in Belgium to the best in the world now. That started with Spain and France.
‘We are not the best in the world — but we are working hard to be there.
‘We didn’t want to be condemned to the role of also-rans any longer. But we didn’t sit around feeling sorry for ourselves.
‘We did what Scotland is trying to do — we went out and we did something about it.’


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2411916/A-BELGIAN-BLUEPRINT-Story-Michel-Sablon-changed-Belgium-team-today.html#ixzz2e7KsGwMl
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

Johan Cruyff on Youth Development
Posted on January 16, 2013 by Todd Beane

http://www.cruyfffootball.com/blog/

Why do you place so much importance on youth development?
It all starts with the youth. It has to be fun for them or it makes no sense. Young players are eager to learn and they will dream of playing on the 1st team, so motivation is already in place. If you have proper training and coaching in place, then these youngsters will learn to dominate the ball and also learn about position play.

Who was responsible for making you a champion?
I had a youth coach, Van Veen. He was hard, very straight, but he was always helping, even if you did not think it was help at the time. I never new I was successful because he would take me out of success and put me into the next challenge, always adding something. Looking back now I realize how good he was. He had great vision. He could see the qualities of each player. He knew I failed physically so he devised an individual and functional training for me. We did not have modern gyms so I would have to carry a teammate – first someone of 50 kilos, then 60 and so on. Little by little I got stronger, and with special sprints he made my first meter quicker. He knew that I could never be a physical player like some others, but he still made me work on my weaknesses.

When you made the transition to coaching, what did you look for in a player?
Maybe the most important thing is what you see in somebody. You need to pay attention to where he comes from; you need to see his character. You also need to see his habits ‐ how does he behave and what can he handle?

Why do you place so much emphasis on the habits of players in addition to skills?
There are a lot of players who can kick a ball or do tricks and still never make it. That is because their habits are poor. They do not take care of all the other things that matter – like their behavior, preparation and mindset. You have to take care of these things and the youth coaches have to help mentor young players. Those who make it need to be intelligent, and those that do not play professionally need to be able to care for themselves and their family. We have a responsibility to educate these young players in the right way.

So in football today how does a club or federation create the next champions?
Winning and losing is a matter of being competitive. You cannot expect to win every match, but you can control your ability to compete. And if you have a path for young players to follow then you will always have players who can compete. I have been in football for a long time and in the end we can only set the stage for the players to win and then they must enjoy going out to become champions. We develop them and they perform when it matters most.

Encouraging Weakness
Posted on June 2, 2013 by Todd Beane

http://www.cruyfffootball.com/blog/

As coaches, we must encourage weakness by applauding players when they fail for the right reasons.

Coaches are trained to stop trainings to correct performance. These are called “coaching moments”. It works like this. A drill is being executed, a player makes a mistake, the coach steps in to correct the action, and the drill is resumed. Sound familiar?

But here is the problem. Players hide weaknesses. That is, a player called upon to use his weak foot will rearrange the options in the drill to use his strong foot. They will play an entire match with an orientation and movement pattern designed to play their best foot. This is normal. Why expose your own weakness when you can avoid them? Very logical. Very human.

Over time, the players perfect this avoidance and it is the rare coach who sees the orientation pattern. As coaches only stop training for mistakes and no “mistake” has been made, the drill goes on and the weakness hidden.

Solution?

Isolate skills, force the weaknesses to come forth and encourage the error in a positive way. As coaches we can either punish or we can encourage. When we see a child fail for the right reasons, like using the weak foot but failing to execute it properly, then we can use that as a positive coaching moment. “I like what I am seeing, the situation demands the weak foot”, “well done lad, keep at it” are far different comments than the negative outcry of many coaches.

With confidence in both feet, the player will rewire his brain to a new orientation. Options will open up and the execution will improve. When we applaud players when they fail for the right reasons, we create a positive learning environment in which athletes improve their skills.

Wanting vs. Working
Posted on August 30, 2013 by Todd Beane

http://www.cruyfffootball.com/blog/

While in California, I have been approached by many players asking what they can do to get to Europe. They want to try out at FC Barcelona. They want to go to Ajax Amsterdam to train. They want to know what it will take to make it to the pros.

Let me say that every footballer wants to be as phenomenal as Messi, as Ronaldo, as the great players of the past. The “wanting” is easy. Kids see the glamour and they get the “look” – the clothes, the tattoos, the trendy haircut. They want the fame and fortune.

In each case, I ask them whether they “want” to work on their game. And they ask me what that means. I respond by asking them to hit 5 or 6 passes of several distances with each foot. 10 meters, 20 meters, 30 meters – left and right. Pretty quickly it becomes abundantly clear that they cannot typically do this task with precision. Then I say, if you want to play the game at a higher level, don’t just “want” it, work at it. Just you, a ball, and a wall is all you need to take your game to the next level. No coach, no fancy fields, no specific shoes. Just your desire to be better, one skill at a time.

Johan Cruyff mentions that tactics are useless without technique. If a player cannot dominate the ball, it matters little if his teammates are well positioned tactically. The errant pass is a useless pass. Poor technique in a 4-3-3, 4-4-2, or 4-2-3-1 is still poor technique.

So, if you want to take your game to Europe, do so with an arsenal of skills – passing and receiving among the most important. There is a wall waiting for you to get to work. Then, if there is time after hitting a hundred balls, swing by the salon and cut your hair like Cristiano. Why not?

good commentary on english football
http://whitehouseaddress.blogspot.co.uk/

and the book
The Way Forward: Solutions to England's Football Failings

[youtube]x4k6QAvyLSM[/youtube]