Emotional abuse of youth players is more common than we realize

This is a complex topic, and one I believe we as coaches, parents, officials, and players don’t talk enough about. During my many years of officiating, coaching, and observing youth soccer across pretty much all levels of play, age groups, and both genders, I have unfortunately observed too many situations where boys and girls appear to be subjected to persistent negativity and emotional abuse by coaches and also parents.

For example, during a U17 girls game that I was officiating the coach for one of the teams kept putting his key midfielder down throughout the game. She was arguably the best player on the team, battling hard, and a team player, yet the coach kept blaming her. She was clearly emotionally affected by this.

At an opportune moment during the game I spoke some encouraging words to her, but I wish I could have done more, including talking to her parents. The challenge is that these situations are tricky. Accusing someone of abuse, even just speculatively, is quite the charge and I only had this one game to go on and no other context.

Unfortunately, coaches and parents too often don’t appreciate how quickly negative coaching can destroy a player, take away the excitement of playing a sport, and how destructive persistent emotional abuse can be for a child (and any person of any age for that matter). The effects often don’t show themselves immediately (which makes it more difficult to recognize cause and effect), but they can last a lifetime and manifest themselves in the form of mental and physical health issues.

Coaches and parents submitting the boys and girls to emotional abuse aren’t necessarily intentionally doing it or even aware of it – they often don’t realize that they are doing it because they are struggling with their own demons. Unfortunately, kids are an easy and vulnerable escape valve for those demons.

Parents, tolerating a negative coaching environment is equivalent to tolerating an activity that keeps given your son or daughter physical pain. The mental bruising from the former is far more damaging because it persists, deepens, and damages the core of who your son or daughter is and growing up to be.

Imagine your son or daughter returning home from a daily activity that gives them bruises all over their bodies, every single day. You’d never subject your child to this nor would you accept emotional abuse from a teacher at school.

So why should sports be any different? Probably because of some perverted view that this “toughens ’em up so they can cope better with life.” Exactly the opposite!

The Positive Coaching Alliance has been working for twenty years to improve this aspect of youth sports, but it starts with us parents. We need to know what to look for and proactively identify coaching environments that are negative and emotionally abusive and remove our boys and girls from that environment, and possibly call out the coach for his/her behavior. Some parents also need to take a hard look at their own behavior.

On February 14, 2018, a new law went into effect, S.534, the “Protecting Young Victims from Sexual Abuse and SafeSport Authorization Act of 2017”, which established the U.S. Center for Safesport and published a parent toolkit to educate parents about the various forms of abuse in sports. U.S. Soccer also launched its Safe Soccer initiative and a Safe Soccer Framework.

To take a closer look at what emotional abuse in a youth sports context can look like, I’m including here some key passages from the above referenced toolkit:

Child abuse is a complex issue. The term may evoke a strong emotional response and can create confusion as people try to agree on what is and is not abuse. Child abuse includes many forms, including physical, sexual and emotional harm.

The complexity is caused in part because individual families and communities have many different values about how to treat children. Further, child abuse is defined differently by the criminal justice system, the civil court system, and clinicians.

The clinical standard is the one of primary importance to this discussion, and it simply is ‘does a child feel as if they have been abused?’ Many acts rise neither to the level of civil nor criminal charges, but leave a child feeling awful.

Sharp observation by parents and coaches, and open communication between parents and children, can help identify when language or behavior has crossed a painful boundary for a specific child, and swift, compassionate intervention is called for.

Emotional abuse, also known as psychological maltreatment, is considered the most common type of maltreatment, but the least reported.

Psychological maltreatment is defined as “a repeated pattern or incident(s)…that thwart the child’s basic psychological needs…and convey that a child is worthless, defective, or damaged goods [whose value is] primarily…meeting another’s needs.”

Victims of emotional abuse are left to feel expendable, which is the exact opposite of the message a child needs to develop healthy self-esteem.

Forms of emotional abuse may include verbal acts, non-contact physical acts, and acts that deny attention or support. The following list describes major categories of emotional abuse, and examples of how they might play out in youth sports:

Verbal

  • Use of degrading or shaming nicknames
  • Repeatedly telling a child they are not good enough to be on the team
  • Repeatedly mocking a child for poor performance
  • Repeatedly calling out a child for their differences (e.g. race, ethnicity, disability)
  • Threats of frightening and inappropriate repercussions from a coach

Acts That Deny Attention & Support

  • Acts or words that reject and degrade a child
  • Consistently excluding a child from playing time, even in practice
  • Singling out a child to consistently have the least favorable position or assignment
  • Consistently having the same child sit alone
  • Consistently giving a child a job or chore that removes them from the rest of the team

An isolated incident of inappropriate behavior may occur when an adult is under stress and makes a reactive comment. Some parents become uncomfortable reading these definitions for the first time, remembering that they may have behaved or spoken like this to their child on occasion. A healthy adult recognizes their mistakes and offers the child a sincere apology. A key factor in the definition of emotional abuse is the ongoing and repeated exposure to these painful and negative behaviors.

The good news is that the negative effects of emotional abuse can be buffered by the ongoing support from a nurturing loving parent or caretaker, but a parent must become aware of the abuse to help.

Please, parents, take a closer look at the coaching environment your son or daughter is subjected to. There is no place for emotional abuse – ever. Even persistent negativity has a lasting mental health effect.

Pull your child out of that environment immediately and share your concerns with other parents to help them make informed decisions about their children too.

The essence of soccer is the manipulation of…

…time and space. It sounds so simple, yet it’s so very difficult to understand and master. Few players, coaches, and spectators, including at the professional level, truly understand this. And even fewer know how to teach it.

Before we continue, watch this 70-second gem of a clip demonstrating how Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City dominated Manchester United on Nov 11, 2018, through a superior understanding of time and space. Overlaid on this recording are some of Pep’s instructions to his players from a documentary on his work at Manchester City.

 

At the most fundamental level, players have to pass, move, dribble, faint, etc. to manipulate and shape the space and time available to them, their teammates, and opponents, with the objective to score goals and to maintain possession.

Maintaining possession gives teams a tactical advantage because it allows them to shape the game and reduce the time available for the opposition to score. And the reason for immediately pressing the opponents on loss of possession is to quickly restrict the space available to them before they can shift from a defensive stance into an attacking mode. It’s easier to win the ball back in the seconds after a loss of possession while the opponents are still adjusting.

At the individual player level, moving to create a passing option for your teammate or to pull an opponent away from a specific area of the field are examples of shaping and creating space. Passing to ‘break the lines’ is another example of this.

And so is dribbling toward an opponent – the purpose is to either pull the opponent away from their current position (and thus opening up space behind them for teammates to slot into) or to get past an opponent and then occupy the space behind him/her and draw other opponents toward you and thus freeing up space for your teammates.

Players manipulate time through, for example, the timing and pace of decision making, passing and touching the ball. For example, if players aren’t passing at pace to ‘switch the field’ then the opponents have more time to shift across and close the space that the switch is meant to exploit.

Take a look at these four examples from a recent Liverpool v Arsenal game. Note the smart, confident, and synchronized manipulation of time and space using the various approaches described above. There is very clear purpose to everything the players are doing…this isn’t just quick passing of a hot potato to simply retain possession. 

How often do we see youth players ‘safely’ pass backwards to avoid taking risks and losing the advantage that forward movement of the ball and teammates could have given the team? How often do we see one-dimensional youth players that have no confidence to take on players probably because they get chewed out by their coaches if they fail? How often do we see top youth players with no idea how to smartly move off-the-ball to support a teammate with the ball or how to exploit newly created space or when and how to pull opponents into areas of the field to effectively neutralize them?

And just as important are the mental abilities of the player. A split-second, accurate perception of the micro-moment and then quick execution of an appropriate action is essential. Some players are innately better at visual/spatial perception and processing, for example. And the players that have put the work in to learn skills deeply enough to execute actions intuitively and instinctively gain an enormous reaction and accuracy advantage.

Finally, it’s the player’s state of mind that is also crucial. For example, a player who tends to be anxious or distracted will be at a big disadvantage – the former will, for example, take too long to make decisions and won’t commit fast enough to the next move, and the latter’s perception and processing of the situation will be much slower than opponents that are focused.

Modern (European) soccer is now firmly grounded in the principles of learning to control and manipulate time and space. ‘Playing out from the back’ is one example of that and it’s the hallmark of youth teams with coaches that are teaching the kids the right way to play the game.

Unfortunately, too few parents and youngsters have the appreciation and patience and commitment to learn to master the beautiful game at this deeper level, especially since there will be many more losses than wins during the early years.

That said, through my officiating I’ve seen many more youth teams play a possession style of soccer here in NorCal these last 12 months, including building out from the back. I very much hope that this change is permanent.

Are the failures at the U17 and U20 Women’s World Cups a symptom of deeper YNT problems?

The USA was knocked out of the 2018 FIFA U-17 Women’s World Cup this week following a 4-0 loss to Germany, a 3-0 loss to North Korea, and a 3-0 win against Cameroon, placing last in Group C. This follows a similar outcome at the U20 Women’s World Cup this summer.

As food for thought, I’m pasting below the full article published on SBNation after the U20 Women’s World Cup. Keep in mind that our female YNTs typically don’t perform well but our full WNT tends to compete for trophies, at least so far.

So it could be argued that U.S. Soccer might be focusing much more on longer-term player development over ‘winning’ at the youth level, which should be assessable by a trained soccer eye when comparing aspects such as skills, creativity, and soccer IQ displayed by our YNTs with that from other nations.

In other words, underperforming the way we do at the youth level could be acceptable if we’re witnessing our YNTs learning to play, say, a technical and creative possession-oriented style of play pioneered first by Johan Cruyff and further developed and refined most recently by Pep Guardiola, first at FC Barcelona. This is the modern way to play soccer and requires a high level of technical proficiency, a deep understanding of the beautiful game, and lots of soccer IQ, which takes time and patience to learn.

An opposing perspective would argue that there is little true player development nationally and in our youth clubs, and that the gap between us and other nations is shrinking. Here’s an earlier blog post on what I believe explains the relative dominance of our WNT these last couple of decades. It has little to do with modern player development. 

So are other nations catching up and likely to surpass us soon based on what’s on display at the youth level? The following article argues that point:

By mshawhan  Oct 3, 2018

The dust has settled from the elimination of the United States U20 women’s national team in the group stage of the 2018 U20 World Cup. So this seems like an appropriate moment to begin taking stock, to think a bit about what this latest failure says about the state of the YWNT program.

The way we lost

Start here: the U.S. U20s played two peer opponents known for their reliance on possession and quick passing (Japan and Spain), and couldn’t beat either. Against Japan, the U.S. was stifled and then gradually overcome; against Spain, we were played off the park in the first half—and an urgent second-half comeback could only muster a draw when a win was required.

In other words, we were decidedly third-best in our group during this most recent World Cup. And that poor showing is only the latest in a series of YWNT failures over the past three cycles (2014, 2016, 2018), in which both our U17 and U20 sides have consistently played poor-quality, ineffective soccer when it mattered most.

The U17s in the 2014 cycle failed even to qualify for the World Cup, losing to Mexico on penalties in the crucial qualifier. The U20s in 2014, featuring a talented squad playing an abysmal brand of longball soccer, were well beaten in the World Cup quarterfinals. The U17s in 2016 failed even to make the knockout stage because they were deservedly beaten by Ghana and simply swept aside by Japan.

The U20s in 2016 made it to the semifinals—but they did it by playing an embarrassingly conservative style to get out of the group, and then by scraping past a superior Mexico in the quarterfinals through reliance on fitness. We’ve just seen the 2018 U20s. (The U17s’ World Cup this year is yet to come.)

So there is an ongoing, multi-cycle pattern of performance problems in the YNTs. That’s obviously concerning in itself. But what is more worrisome is that these problems may reflect deliberate philosophical and stylistic choices made by those in charge of the program—choices that can be seen in which types of players are, and are not, called up to the YNTs and rostered for World Cups.

The wrong players for the wrong job

Here, it’s worth remembering that it’s not the job of the YNT program to “produce” elite players, per se. That is, of necessity, left to individual youth clubs and coaches. Instead, our YNTs are supposed to sift through the player pool and find the best youth players available at a given age group, then make those players even better through exposure to the highest levels of training and competition, including meaningful matches against international opponents.

But what that means, of course, is that the YNTs’ particular definition of “best” will inevitably affect the selection process. Which is a problem, when that definition seems to be overly narrow.

As others have noted, the YWNT style in recent cycles, including the recent U20 World Cup, heavily emphasizes individualistic flank play. Central midfield, the theory goes, is simply too easy to clog up defensively. Better to skirt around that part of the field altogether, get it wide as early as possible, and create havoc through 1v1 and 2v1 attacks down the wing.

Thus, in the current cycle, WNT technical director April Heinrichs and U20 head coach Jitka Klimkova picked a roster that was heavy on attacking players with an ability and a propensity to attack and take on 1v1 from wider areas—e.g., Sophia Smith, Ashley Sanchez, Abigail Kim, Erin Gilroy, and Alexa Spaanstra. (Midfielder Taryn Torres, who can play in a variety of positions, tended to be deployed by Klimkova as a flank attacker as well.)

B.J. Snow’s U17 rosters in the 2014 and 2016 cycles similarly favored fast, direct attackers, especially 1v1 dribblers out wide. In fact, Snow’s squads for the 2014 World Cup qualifiers and the 2016 U17 World Cup were so loaded up on forwards that they each basically had only three true midfielders. (Oddly enough, these teams also struggled to play through midfield and break down organized defenses.

And the flip side of emphasizing flank play and direct 1v1 attackers is ignoring good players whose strengths lie in other areas. In recent cycles, our YNTs have repeatedly passed over, or outright rejected, talented players who don’t quite fit U.S. Soccer’s preferred mold–all in the service of a style that the YNTs have yet to successfully deploy.

Perhaps the most striking example of this curious approach to player selection is Tierna Davidson—rejected by the YNTs at youth level, but solidly entrenched with the senior national team before her 20th birthday. Despite excelling with Bay Area ECNL side De Anza Force, Davidson was never called into a YNT camp at one of the younger age groups.

Nor did B.J. Snow ever call her into a U17 camp in the 2014 cycle. And in the 2016 cycle, Davidson was cut from the U20s after World Cup qualifiers and sent down to the U19s instead. Apparently April Heinrichs and then-U20-coach Michelle French thought she was not good enough for the U20s. (No, really.) Two years after that, Davidson was starting for the senior WNT.

How did YNT coaches and scouts so comprehensively get Davidson wrong? It’s hard to say for certain. It’s worth noting, though, that some of Davidson’s particular strengths are her ease and composure on the ball and her passing under pressure. And these traits will be much less valuable in a side that tends to ask its centerbacks only to make very simple passes to a defensive midfielder or an outside back and let the front six take it from there, rather than joining in an effort to build from the back through the middle.

One similarly can’t help but notice that over the past three cycles a number of other players who have performed admirably as composed centerbacks in possession-oriented NCAA sides—Schuyler DeBree and Taylor Mitchell of Duke, Samantha Hiatt of Stanford, Kristen McNabband Phoebe McClernon of Virginia—have also been overlooked before U17 level, passed over by the U17s, marginalized by the U20s, or all of the above.

This devaluing of players whose strengths lie in possession and combination play is not limited to the backline, either. It can also be seen in the midfield, as well.

Take, for example, Savannah McCaskill. She’s smart, has an excellent touch, an eye for the killer pass, and good athleticism. She played before college at an ECNL club (Carolina Elite); led South Carolina last year to their first College Cup berth in program history; had a strong rookie season in NWSL; and has already received half a dozen senior team caps. Yet she was also never called into any YNT camp before U18; and received only a single U20 callup.

Or look at UCLA. Their run last year to the final of the College Cup drew heavily on the burgeoning talents of three freshmen midfielders: Viviana Villacorta, Delanie Sheehan, and Olivia Athens, all of whom had played for well-known California youth clubs before college. None of them were ever called up by the YNTs before U18 level either.

For that matter, star Duke playmaker Ella Stevens—the attacking linchpin of the Duke side that made it to the College Cup last year before losing to UCLA in a beautifully tense semifinal—was considered and cut by both Snow at U17 level (in 2014) and Heinrichs and French at U20 level (in 2016).

And add to the list Meggie Dougherty Howard, Haley Hanson, Rachel Corboz, Luca Deza, and Taylor Kornieck: all excellent midfielders who were passed over, or overlooked altogether, by Heinrichs, Snow, Klimkova, and French.

Why miss out on obvious talent?

A common element of this formidable set of players is that they are more passers and playmakers, rather than 1v1 dribblers. These days, apparently, being an attacking-minded midfielder who looks to combine, to build attacks through passing and off-ball movement rather than only direct take-ons, gets a player marginalized by our YNTs, not celebrated.

None of these players, moreover, were obscure. None of them grew up in locations that don’t attract scouting attention. None of them played for small youth clubs (or small NCAA programs) for financial or other personal reasons. In other words, these players are just the most obvious, high-profile examples of players whose abilities were not properly recognized and cultivated by the powers that be. They are surely not the only ones.

In short, our YNTs have now amassed several consecutive cycles of failure; and they’ve done so playing a style that has proven ineffective, seemingly employing selection criteria that are so limited by that ineffective style that it has led them to repeatedly pass over excellent young players of whom they should have been aware. Are there realistic hopes for change?

True, Snow and French were relieved of their head coaching positions last year. But April Heinrichs, who as WNT technical director has been responsible for the YWNT program over this entire period — who has hired and overseen Snow, French, and every other current YNT coach — remains in her post and shows no sign of going anywhere, assorted fiascos notwithstanding.

French was retained as an assistant to senior team head coach Jill Ellis (before leaving that role to take the head coaching job at the University of Portland). And French’s replacement, Jitka Klimkova, was hired from within the YWNT program and has now presided over a World Cup failure of her own.

As for Snow, well. He’s been made the director of national-team talent identification for the WNT program as a whole.

So consider: April Heinrichs thought that Tierna Davidson, Savannah McCaskill, and Ella Stevens, among others, were not good enough to play for the U20s. And she chose B.J. Snow — who passed over Davidson, cut Stevens, and never met a direct dribbling forward he didn’t like — to run talent ID for the senior WNT, after he failed badly selecting and coaching the U17 WNT.

That means, apparently, that notwithstanding his poor track record, Snow plays a crucial role in setting national-team selection criteria for youth, college, and pro players. He’s the one telling WNT scouts and coaches what to look for and value. And he’s also the one going round to the vaunted Girls’ Development Academy and other youth clubs and telling them what sorts of players fit the national-team profile.

This is disturbing–not merely because it suggests that the YNTs’ ongoing struggles will persist, but also because it underscores that no one at senior levels in USSF is meaningfully overseeing the YWNT program. We’ve had three straight cycles of YNT underachievement and stagnation, and yet at a fundamental level, nothing appears to be changing. How much more failure will it take before those running the program are held accountable for their poor performance? At this point your guess is as good as mine.

MUST WATCH – Documentary on Pep Guardiola @Manchester City

All or Nothing: Manchester City

In this ground-breaking docu-series, follow Manchester City behind the scenes throughout their Premier League winning, record-breaking ’17-18 season. Get an exclusive look into one of the best global sports clubs, including never-before-seen dressing room footage with legendary coach Pep Guardiola, and delve into the players’ lives off and on the pitch.

What makes a country good at soccer?

I’m sharing here the full article that appeared in The Economist on June 9. A fascinating read.

Wealth, size and interest in football explain almost half of countries’ international performance. The rest can be taught.

whatmakesacountrygoodatsoccerimage1

On a sunny Saturday afternoon, within kicking distance of Uruguay’s national football stadium, 14 seven-year-olds walk onto a bumpy pitch. They are cheered by their parents, who are also the coaches, kit-washers and caterers.

The match is one of hundreds played every weekend as part of Baby Football, a national scheme for children aged four to 13. Among the graduates are Luis Suárez and Edinson Cavani, two of the world’s best strikers.

Messrs Suárez and Cavani are Uruguay’s spearheads at the World Cup, which kicks off in Russia on June 14th. Bookmakers reckon La Celeste are ninth-favourites to win, for what would be the third time. Only Brazil, Germany and Italy have won more, even though Uruguay’s population of 3.4m is less than Berlin’s.

Though it is no longer the giant that it was in the early 20th century, Uruguay still punches well above its weight. Messrs Suárez and Cavani reached the semi-finals in 2010 and secured a record 15th South American championship in 2011. Their faces adorn Montevideo’s football museum, along with a century’s worth of tattered shirts and gleaming trophies.

If tiny Uruguay can be so successful, why not much larger or richer countries? That question appears to torment Xi Jinping, China’s president, who wants his country to become a football superpower by 2050. His plan includes 20,000 new training centres, to go with the world’s biggest academy in Guangzhou, which cost $185m.

The United Arab Emirates and Qatar have spent billions of dollars buying top European clubs, hoping to learn from them. Saudi Arabia is paying to send the Spanish league nine players. A former amateur footballer named Viktor Orban, who is now Hungary’s autocratic prime minister, has splurged on stadiums that are rarely filled.

So far these countries have little to show for their spending. China failed to qualify for this year’s World Cup, and even lost 1-0 to Syria—a humiliation that provoked street protests.

Footballer, meet model

The Economist has built a statistical model to identify what makes a country good at football. Our aim is not to predict the winner in Russia, which can be done best by looking at a team’s recent results or the calibre of its squad. Instead we want to discover the underlying sporting and economic factors that determine a country’s footballing potential—and to work out why some countries exceed expectations or improve rapidly. We take the results of all international games since 1990 and see which variables are correlated with the goal difference between teams.

We started with economics. Stefan Szymanski, an economist at the University of Michigan who has built a similar model, has shown that wealthier countries tend to be sportier. Football has plenty of rags-to-riches stars, but those who grow up in poor places face the greatest obstacles. In Senegal, coaches have to deworm and feed some players before they can train them; one official reckons only three places in the country have grass pitches. So we included GDP per head in our model.

Then we tried to gauge football’s popularity. In 2006 FIFA, the sport’s governing body, asked national federations to estimate the number of teams and players of any standard. We added population figures, to show the overall participation rate. We supplemented these guesses with more recent data: how often people searched for football on Google between 2004 and 2018, relative to other team sports such as rugby, cricket, American football, baseball, basketball and ice hockey. Football got 90% of Africa’s attention compared with 20% in America and just 10% in cricket-loving South Asia. To capture national enthusiasm and spending on sports in general, we also included Olympic medals won per person.

Next we accounted for home advantage, which is worth about 0.6 goals per game, and for strength of opposition. Peru gets extra credit for playing so often against overachievers, for example. Finally, to reduce the distorting effect of hapless minnows like the Cayman Islands and Bhutan, we whittled down our results to the 126 countries that have played at least 150 matches since 1990.

Our model explains 40% of the variance in average goal difference for these teams. But that leaves plenty of outliers. Uruguay was among the biggest, managing nearly a goal per game better than expected. Brazil, Argentina, Portugal and Spain were close behind. West Africa and the Balkans overachieved, too.

Sadly for ambitious autocrats, the data suggest that China and the Middle East have already performed above their low potential. Cricket dominates Google searches in the Gulf states (no doubt largely because South Asian migrant workers love it). Just 2% of Chinese played football in 2006, according to FIFA, compared with 7% of Europeans and South Americans. China and Middle Eastern countries have occasionally managed to qualify for the World Cup, but none has won a game at the tournament since 1998.

The model’s most chastening finding is that much of what determines success is beyond the immediate control of football administrators. Those in Africa cannot make their countries less poor. Those in Asia struggle to drum up interest in the sport. Football’s share of Google searches has been rising in China but falling in Saudi Arabia.

Nonetheless, officials with dreams of winning the World Cup can learn four lessons from our model’s outliers and improvers. First, encourage children to develop creatively. Second, stop talented teenagers from falling through the cracks. Third, make the most of football’s vast global network. And fourth, prepare properly for the tournament itself.

Start with the children. The obvious lesson from Uruguay is to get as many nippers kicking balls as possible, to develop their technical skills. Mr Xi wants the game taught in 50,000 Chinese schools by 2025. China might try something like “Project 119”, a round-the-clock training scheme for youngsters, which helped to lift China to the top of the medal table at the Beijing Olympics in 2008. The trouble is that relentless drilling “loses the rough edges that make geniuses”, says Jonathan Wilson, editor of the Blizzard, a journal covering the game around the world. East German players trained much harder than those in West Germany, but only qualified for a major tournament once.

The trick is not just to get lots of children playing, but also to let them develop creatively. In many countries they do so by teaching themselves. George Weah, now the president of Liberia but once his continent’s deadliest striker, perfected his shooting with a rag ball in a swampy slum. Futsal, a five-a-side game with a small ball requiring nifty technique, honed the skills of great Iberian and Latin American players—from Pelé and Diego Maradona to Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, Neymar and Andrés Iniesta. Zinedine Zidane was one of many French prodigies who learned street football, or ballon sur bitume. In an experiment that asked adult players to predict what would happen next in a video clip, the best performers had spent more time mucking around aged six to ten. Another study found that academy prospects who ended up with contracts had put in more hours of informal practice as children.

Such opportunities are disappearing in rich countries. Matt Crocker, the head of player development for England’s Football Association (FA), says parents are now reluctant to let children outside for a kickabout. Many social-housing estates have signs banning ball games. Dele Alli, a mercurial England attacker, is unusual for having learned in what he has called “a concrete cage”. The challenge is “to organise the streets into your club”, say Guus Hiddink, who has managed the Netherlands, South Korea, Australia, Russia and Turkey.

Deutschland über alles

The Deutscher Fußball-Bund (DFB), Germany’s national body, has done so zealously. In the early 2000s it realised that Germany’s burly players were struggling against defter teams. Our model reckons Die Mannschaft, as the national team is known, should surpass everyone else, given Germany’s wealth, vast player pool and lack of competing sports. But between 1990 and 2005 it performed about a third of a goal worse per match than expected.

So the DFB revamped. German clubs have spent about €1bn ($1.2bn) on developing youth academies since 2001, to meet 250 nationwide criteria. Youngsters now have up to twice as much training by the age of 18. Crucially, however, sessions focus on creativity in random environments. One exercise involves a robotic cage that flings balls from various angles for a player to control and pass. The men who won the World Cup in 2014, writes Raphael Honigstein, a German football author, learned through “systematic training to play with the instinct and imagination of those mythical ‘street footballers’ older people in Germany were always fantasising about”. Our model reckons that since 2006 the team has performed almost exactly at the high level expected of it.

England has followed, overhauling its youth programme in 2012. Mr Crocker explains that players are encouraged to take risks and think for themselves. Spanish clubs have long excelled at this, by endlessly practising the rondo: a close-quarters version of piggy-in-the-middle. But the England under-17s that thumped Spain 5-2 in last year’s World Cup final ran rings around their opponents. Mr Crocker says they devised their own tactics, with little managerial help. England’s under-20s won their World Cup, too.

Such self-confidence was lacking in South Korea, Mr Hiddink recalls. When he took over in 2001, the country was already overachieving relative to our model’s low expectations, given its 2% participation rate. But the manager believed that his charges had been held back by a fear of making mistakes. “Deep down I discovered a lot of creative players,” he says. With some help from lucky refereeing decisions, South Korea reached the semi-finals in 2002—making it the only country outside Europe and South America to get that far since 1930.

The second lesson for ambitious officials is to make sure that gifted teenagers do not fall through the cracks. The DFB realised that many had been overlooked by club scouts, so it set up 360 extra regional centres for those who missed the cut. One of them was André Schürrle, who provided the pass that led to the cup-winning goal in 2014. In South Korea Mr Hiddink noticed that some of the best youngsters played for the army or universities, where they were sometimes missed by professional scouts.

When Russia bid to host this year’s tournament in 2010, Mr Hiddink implored his then-bosses to create a nationwide scouting programme, to no avail. The Russian team has declined since then, failing to win a game at the European Championship in 2016. Russia now has one of the World Cup’s oldest squads. Such short-sightedness has harmed America, too, which failed to qualify for this year’s tournament. Our model reckons it should be one of the strongest countries, even accounting for the popularity of other sports such as baseball and basketball. But few players get serious coaching in the amateur college system, and those who are not drafted to Major League Soccer cannot be promoted from lower divisions.

Centralised schemes are easier to establish in small countries. Every Uruguayan Baby Football team has its results logged in a national database. Iceland, which has qualified despite having only 330,000 people and 100 full-time professionals, has trained over 600 coaches to work with grassroots clubs. Since 2000 it has built 154 miniature pitches with under-soil heating to give every child a chance to play under supervision. Such programmes are unfeasible in Africa. Abdoulaye Sarr, a former Senegal manager, says that the pool of talent is huge but barely tapped. Money that could be spent on scouting is lavished on officials instead. In a conspicuous waste of scarce resources, Senegal is sending 300 of them to Russia.

Belgium poaches elephants

West Africa has, however, taken our third tip by tapping into sport’s global network. Western Europe is at the centre of this network, since it has the richest clubs, where players get the best coaching. Ivory Coast, which failed to qualify this time but is Africa’s biggest overachiever, exported a generation of young stars to Beveren, a Belgian club. Many of them later thrived in England’s Premier League. When Senegal beat France, the reigning champions, in 2002, all but two of its squad members played for French teams.

Senegal could have used its resources even more effectively. Patrick Vieira, who left Dakar for France aged eight, was playing for the former colonial power. He was one of several immigrant Frenchmen who won Les Bleus the World Cup in 1998. His home country had never contacted him. Today Senegal is more astute about recruiting its diaspora, and has picked nine foreign-born players for the tournament. Our model reckons the country has performed about 0.4 goals per game better since 2002 than it did before.

The 21st Club, a football consultancy, notes that among European countries the Balkans export the highest share of players to stronger domestic leagues. Since 1991, when Croatia’s 4m people gained independence, none of its clubs has advanced far in the Champions League, Europe’s leading club competition. Yet Croatian clubs have sold lots of players to Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Milan, and those émigrés carried Croatia to the semi-finals in 1998. These export pipelines can become self-perpetuating, thinks Mr Wilson: “once a team does well at a World Cup, and some of its players do well, everybody wants to buy them.”

Some countries are less adept. In the past 15 years Mexico’s under-17s have outperformed those from Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. But a third of Mexico’s senior squad plays in its domestic league, compared with just two or three players for the others. Dennis te Kloese, the national director, says that the Mexican diaspora boosts viewing figures and revenues for domestic clubs, who can pay high enough wages to keep talented locals in the country, rather than venturing to unfashionable European leagues. This domestic bias helps explain why Mexico is one of the few Latin American countries to perform as well as expected, rather than better.

Exporting players is not the only way to benefit from foreign expertise. Mr Wilson says that much of South America’s footballing education came from Jewish coaches fleeing Europe in the 1930s. Today there is a well-trodden circuit of international gurus like Mr Hiddink, who was among the first of a dozen former Real Madrid bosses to have worked in Asia. Yet Mr Szymanski of the University of Michigan has shown that few managers can do much to improve mediocre teams. He also finds that teams outside Europe and South America are no closer to catching up than they were 20 years ago. The data suggest that South Korea has fared slightly worse since 2002 than it did before.

Mr Szymanski believes these countries are experiencing a kind of footballing “middle-income trap”, in which developing economies quickly copy technologies from rich ones but fail to implement structural reforms. A clever manager might bring new tactical fads but cannot produce a generation of creative youngsters. China is said to be paying Marcello Lippi, who led Italy to victory in 2006, $28m a year. Unless he is supported by youth coaches and scouts who reward imaginative play, and a generation of youngsters who love the game, the money will be wasted.

Our final lesson is for the World Cup itself: prepare properly. For starters, make sure you can afford it. In 2014 Ghana brought in $3m of unpaid bonuses by courier to avert a players’ strike, while Nigeria’s squad boycotted a training session over wages. Fabio Capello, Russia’s former boss, went without his $11m salary for months after the rouble collapsed. Navigating dressing-room politics is trickier. Winning players from Spain and Germany have described the importance of breaking down club-based cliques and dropping stars who do not fit the team’s tactics.

The hardest decisions fall to the players. England’s results from the penalty spot have been woeful, losing six of seven shoot-outs in tournaments. Video analysis shows that players who rush tend to miss penalties; the English are particularly hasty. So the under-17s, who won a shoot-out in their World Cup, have worked on slowing down and practising a range of premeditated shots.

The bane and the delight of the World Cup is that decades of planning depend on such fine margins. A country could plan meticulously and still be thwarted by an unlucky bounce of the ball or a bad decision by the referee. “If something goes wrong, everybody wants to rip up the book,” says Mr Wilson. For spectators, however, this randomness offers a glimmer of hope. Teams from Asia, Africa and North America remain the underdogs, but ought to have had more fairytale runs like South Korea’s in 2002. The 21st Club reckons there is a one-in-four chance a first-time champion will emerge this year. For one intoxicating month, fans around the world will forget the years of hurt and believe that their history books, like those in Montevideo’s museum, could be about to add a glorious new chapter.

The first English soccer player dies of CTE. Kevin Moore was in his 40s when he showed signs of brain disease.

Mandy Moore still winces as she recalls how it often was for her late husband, Kevin, after so many of his 623 matches as a professional footballer. “He had stitches and scars around his eyes,” she recalls. “There were times when he could not even remember parts of a match after taking a kick or an elbow in the head.”

His friend and former team-mate Iain Dowie says that they would stay behind to practise heading. “Maybe 100 balls a day,” says Dowie.

And then there were the shuddering match incidents. “I don’t know how many times Kev – God bless him – got concussed,” says Dowie. “But I remember an incident as the ball dropped in the box. Kev slipped and the lad was about to smash it in. Kev put his head between the ball and him. The lad kicked his head and [the ball] went for a corner.”

Moore was 39 when he retired in 1996 after a 20-year career. This was not an elderly player struck down with a devastating form of dementia, but a defender from the Premier League era who had been a Southampton team-mate of Alan Shearer and Matthew Le Tissier.

He is the first known Premier League player to have died of dementia and was only in his mid-40s when his family noticed changes.

He unexpectedly lost his job as Fulham’s safety officer and training ground manager. He became forgetful, unsteady on his feet and had minor car accidents. He started making rash decisions.

A diagnosis of Pick’s Disease – a rare form of dementia affecting the front of the brain – was made in 2007 and his decline would be cruelly rapid.

For his daughter, Sophie, a gap of 10 months between visits when she was living in Australia was startling. “I was left shocked,” she says. “I felt like I didn’t recognise him as my dad.”

Moore eventually needed full-time care and died in April 2013 on what was both his wedding anniversary and 55th birthday.

“My abiding memory was him scoring at Wembley in the Zenith Data Systems final in 1992,” says Le Tissier. “It was the only time I’ve seen a guy head the ball downwards into the top corner.”

Although former England striker Jeff Astle died in 2002 from brain disease that both a coroner and neuropathologist attributed to playing football, the link was not then being widely made.

There was a sad irony in that Moore had been sufficiently concerned while he was still playing to have discussed it with Dowie and a doctor. They raised the issue with Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association.

Mandy Moore also wrote to Taylor following Kevin’s diagnosis and received a reply. There were no words of sympathy and, even though she says there had been no request to cover care costs, the letter stated that the organisation would be bankrupt within a year if it paid care home fees for members. Taylor estimated in the letter, written in 2008, that 1,000 of his members required such care and that the annual bill would be about £15 million.

The Moore family were taken aback by the letter’s tone and, while grateful for the wider help Kevin received from the PFA, felt a huge difference in how they were supported by the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, where Moore was also a member.

Dementia caused by head trauma has since been identified as chronic traumatic encephalopathy and, while definitive diagnosis can be made only by examining the brain after death, Moore’s symptoms were consistent with the disease. “This is not about banning football or heading but getting research done so that players know where they stand and risks are mitigated,” says Mandy.

Dowie agrees. “I feel sure football did play a part – there is no doubt in my mind,” he says.

The pitfalls of chasing the elite player dream

 

Soccer success is about skill according to new university research

This comes as no surprise to many of you that already ‘get this’ intuitively from having played and watched this beautiful game your entire life. And you’ll also understand why I used the above image for this blog post.

Without an appreciation of and commitment to the artistry of soccer we won’t be able to credibly compete at the international level and the growth of soccer here will stall.

Some day the majority of coaches, players, and parents in our country will hold this truth to be self-evident. We still have some way to go, unfortunately, but we have to keep chipping away at this folks. Keep the faith!

The peer-reviewed study, conducted by researchers from Australia and the U.S. in collaboration with elite soccer academies in Brazil, was published last week in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London.

This new study used analytic techniques developed in evolutionary biology to determine the impact of a player’s skill, athletic ability, and balance on their success during a game.

The researchers found it was their skill — not speed, strength, or fitness — that was the most important factor.

“Higher skill allows players to have a greater impact on the game”, Professor Wilson said.

“Accurate passing and greater ball control are more important for success than high speed, strength and fitness.

“It may be obvious to soccer fans and coaches that players like Lionel Messi and Neymar are the best due to their skill.

“However, 90 per cent of research on soccer players is based on how to improve their speed, strength, and agility — not their skill.”

Professor Wilson is collaborating with elite soccer academies in Brazil, where he is testing new protocols for skill development in junior players.

“Our research shows that skill is fundamental to player success in soccer,” he said.

“Skill is complex and multidimensional — and we need to measure all aspects of it — with the next step to work out how to improve these aspects in developing players.

“Brazilian football academies understand the importance of developing skill in young players, which gives us a great opportunity to test our ideas and find new ways to improve youth training.

“Professor Wilson hopes to bring his knowledge back to Australia to improve the nation’s international standing and World Cup potential.

“Australia will only become a successful footballing nation if we innovate rather than replicate,” he said.

“There are kids with an incredible amount of skill who aren’t being selected for teams and training programs because they can’t run as fast at nine, 10, or 11 years old.

“These kids need to be given a chance and the science of skill is on their side.”

Brain injury from heading the ball – growing evidence from England

State of U.S. Soccer according to former FC Barcelona Academy Director

Albert Puig wrote the following open letter in English and Spanish on Oct 12, 2017, following the elimination of our MNT from the World Cup:

One year after my arrival to the United States, with your permission, I intend to reflect on the situation of the U.S. Soccer.

I want to do it without criticism. Just stating the facts, since the will of the development of soccer in the United States, it is, and so it must be, of the Americans themselves.

I think it may be interesting to both the American public and to the rest of the world, to understand the situation, of course, always in my humble opinion.

The elimination of the senior national team for the 2018 World Cup in Russia, is no more than a consequence of the current soccer development system in the country.

A development system unable to define which is the objective. In the rest of the world, soccer becomes a factor of maximum social roots. Accordingly, their level is compared with other countries, and in that competition is where the challenge is created.

In the United States, the structure is very different. Without social roots at the base, its objective is transformed from collective to individual.

The formation of the player has a clear objective: get a scholarship for American universities.

Thus, we move from a collective challenge of a society, to a challenge more alien to it: the individual success in a team sport.

The development player becomes a parental investment; not so much, as in the rest of the world, because of the possibility of an economic and social future, but because investing a monetary amount now and multiplying by ‘x’ later, may become money saved for the university.

This leads to an exaggerated individualization of the vision of the parents on the development of the player. Every game has to be the result of my economic investment this week, therefore, it has to be the best, because the individual vision goes over the collective one. I invest, so I would like to see immediate results.

Sports structures are at the service of this idea. Plenty of competitive rules that only seek to follow the marked path: to arrive at the university.

Here a parenthesis. The American university is part of a big business economic development of the country, and acts as the real connector from youth to maturity within both social and jobs industry point if view. This is different in other countries.

In that individual objective, the methodology of the coaches follow the path. Practices where the focus are on the individual technical and physical development of the player, without understanding that soccer is a language, where the most important thing is to understand that language, understand it and speak it.

Two styles very defined. The combinative, usually robotic and without any hint of motivation by the creativity; and the physical, the body size and a direct game with speed to the back of the defenses.

The final goal, that could well be as in other countries, the arrival to the professional soccer, here the MLS, it is a way without any kind of future work.

Business takes over sport. Low salaries, not attractive to the American player, pure marketing, and tickets with the price of European soccer.

Result? Maximum economic benefits for the owners of the clubs, very low level of competitive quality. And those players are the basis of the national team.

Cases like Pulisic, which I personally know well because I was Director of the academy for FCB, are exceptions; in this case it was successful thanks to the strong will of the family, and the risk they took going for the adventure of professional soccer in Europe; as I said, in this case was successful, but unfortunately many more did not achieve their dream.

And what is the way forward? Only the social will of desire. And in these moments, and in the past, the United States, does not want to, as a collective, be a reference for the world of soccer.

US really has all the ingredients; large population, very smart players, with good physical anatomy for the sport, creative, collective….. only one thing is missing….to want, and to know, how to do it well.

SPANISH VERSION:

Un año después de mi llegada a Estados Unidos , con vuestro permiso, me dispongo a reflexionar sobre la situación del futbol estadounidense, aquí llamado soccer. Quiero hacerlo sin critica. Solo exponiendo los hechos, ya que la voluntad del desarrollo del futbol en Estados Unidos, es , y asi debe ser, de los propios americanos.

Creo interesante para que tanto el publico americano , como el del resto del mundo, entiendan la situación, evidentemente, siempre desde mi humilde opinión.

La eliminación de la selección absoluta del mundial 2018 de Rusia, no es mas que una consecuencia del desarrollo actual del futbol de formación del país. Una formación donde no esta definido cual es el objetivo que persigue, o si. En el resto del mundo ,el futbol, pasa a ser un factor de máximo arraigo social . En consecuencia , su valor es comparado con otros países, y en esa competición esta el objetivo de superación.

En Estados Unidos, la estructura es bien distinta. Sin arraigo social en la base, su objetivo se transforma de colectivo a individual. La formación del jugador tiene un objetivo claro. Conseguir una beca económica para las caras universidades americanas. Asi pues, pasamos de un reto colectivo de sociedad, a un reto mas ajeno a ella. El éxito individual en un deporte colectivo.

El jugador de formación se convierte en una inversión paterna, ya no tanto, como en el resto de países del mundo por un porvenir económico y social de futuro, sino por invertir una cantidad monetaria para multiplicar por x después, en el ahorro de la tasa universitaria.
Eso conlleva a una individualización exagerada de la visión de los padres sobre el desarrollo del jugador. Cada partido tiene que ser la consecuencia de mi inversión económica de esta semana, por ello, tiene que ser el mejor , ya que la vision individual prima sobre el colectivo. Invierto, pues quiero ver resultados inmediatos.

Las estructuras deportivas están al servicio de esta idea. Infinidad de reglas competitivas que solo buscan seguir el camino marcado. Llegar a la universidad. Aquí un paréntesis. La universidad americana es parte de un gran negocio económico de país, y actua como eje real vertebrador del paso de juventud a la madurez dentro del ámbito laboral y social. Diferente en otros países.

En ese individual objetivo, la metodología de los entrenadores siguen la estela. Practicas donde se busca el desarrollo individua técnico y físico del jugador, sin entender que el futbol es un lenguaje , donde lo mas importante es entenderlo , comprenderlo y hablarlo.

Dos estilos muy marcados. El combinativo, mas bien robotizado y sin ningún atisbo de motivación por la creatividad. Y el fisico, imperando la talla corporal y un juego directo con velocidad a la espalda de los defensas.
El objetivo final, que podría bien ser como en otros países, la llegada al futbol profesional, aquí la MLS, es un camino sin ningún tipo de futuro laboral. Impera la ley del negocio. Bajos salarios, no atractivos para el jugador americano, marqueting en estado puro , y entradas a precio de futbol europeo.

Resultado? Máximos beneficios económicos del los propietarios del los clubes, nivel muy bajo de calidad competitiva. Sus jugadores son la base de la selección americana.

Casos como Pulisic, que bien conozco personalmente por mi antigua dirección de la academia del FCB, son excepciones, mas por voluntad firme de la familia, y del riesgo de la aventura del mundo profesional europeo, que en este caso si ha tenido exito, pero por desgracia muchos mas no consiguieron su sueño.

Y cual es el camino? Solo la voluntad social de querer. Y en estos momentos, y en el pasado, Estados Unidos, no quiere como colectivo ser referente el el mundo del futbol. Lo tiene todo. Poblacion, jugadores muy inteligentes, con buena anatomía física para el deporte, creativos, colectivos….. solo fatal eso….querer y saber hacerlo bien.

THIS!

Last Saturday’s Atletico Madrid vs FC Barcelona game was a perfect example of modern top-level soccer.

It had everything – skills, technique, creativity, excellent off-the-ball movement, great defending and goalkeeping, playing out from the back, spacing, pressing, shooting, passion, pace, team work….the list goes on.

This is how huge the gap is in our country. This is where we need to be if we want to compete internationally.

And to reach this level of soccer sophistication requires a fundamental revamp of how we teach, play, and organize soccer. It starts with our coaching quality, and includes finding a way for our best/better players to avoid college soccer.

I’m including here a 12-minute highlights clip, but it doesn’t do the game justice. I strongly encourage you to find a recording of the full game and watch it with your soccer-playing kids. It’s very entertaining and a great learning opportunity.

“There is nothing about soccer we don’t know.”

When Bruce Arena was appointed US MNT coach last November I had serious doubts. We were taking a big step back in my view, but I suspect that this probably was the ‘safe’ option for Sunil Gulati. At a minimum it lacked leadership.

Bruce has now left the arena (pardon the pun) but the coaching quality issue goes much deeper and broader than this. It’s one of the fundamental weaknesses of player development in our country, across all age groups and levels, including all the way up to our elite academies.

I’m going to share below parts of an article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal in March about Bruce Arena that explains much of what is comically deficient about the breadth and depth of coaching quality in our country. Bruce’s views are shared by too many soccer coaches in our country.

And during the news conference immediately after the elimination Bruce Arena had this to say: “There’s nothing wrong with what we’re doing. Certainly, as our league grows, it advances the national team program. We have some good young players come up. Nothing has to change. To make any kind of crazy changes I think would be foolish.”

It is frankly unbelievable that our soccer leadership would even remotely consider a coach with these kinds of views to lead our national team to compete in today’s soccer world. If we want to move forward we can’t have any coaches like this at any of our youth academies.

In fact, this should disqualify any coach from being involved in ANY player development environment. There might be a place for them at high schools or college soccer programs.

In other words, if the coach of your competitive/travel youth team has this kind of background and/or has shared this kind of views on soccer coaching then you should be very wary.

Sit down before you read this. And your jaw might hit the floor by the time you’re done – place some padding just in case.

Here goes:

“I could learn as much or more from Bill Belichick as I could from the manager of Manchester City,” Arena, 65 years old, said in a recent interview. “I think it’s critical to understand what coaching is and how to manage a team, and the sport is immaterial.”

By the standards of international soccer, Arena has zero pedigree. He had barely heard of the sport until his first years in high school, when he saw one of his teachers, a Ukrainian, juggling a ball effortlessly in a business suit on a steamy June day.

He didn’t join his high school team until his final years. He played goalkeeper at Nassau Community College and Cornell, then peaked at the semi-professional level. At Cornell and the University of Virginia, he was hired to coach both the soccer and lacrosse teams.

To believe that he is now the best person to lead the U.S. men is to believe that soccer knowledge and coaching can be learned, rather than lived. But Arena believes that coaching is mostly about molding and motivating a team rather than exploiting technical superiority.

“Sports is sports,” Arena said.

Arena has had some interesting chats with Chelsea’s Antonio Conte​ and follows Manchester United ’s Jose Mourinho and Bayern Munich’s Carlo Ancelotti. But he says nothing he learns from them can compare with his time at Virginia in the early 1980s, when his office was cut in half to make way for a new visiting locker room for basketball.

That enabled him to eavesdrop on locker room talks by the likes of North Carolina’s Dean Smith, Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski and Maryland’s Lefty Driesell. He also spent hours trading coaching ideas with a young women’s basketball assistant named Geno Auriemma, now a legend at the University of Connecticut.

Even today, Arena can’t name a soccer book that influenced him. Instead, he studies other sports hunting strategies for soccer. He sees a full-court press in basketball as not-so-different from blitzing in football or pressing in soccer; the pressure at the front of the defense usually leaves someone unmarked in the back, creating a coverage problem.

The folks in Europe can obsess about their biggest sport all day and night if they want, Arena says. The U.S. is just as good a place to learn to coach, he said, because of the diversity of sports.

“There is nothing about soccer we don’t know,” Arena said. “A lot of coaching is just about having an eye for players, and knowing what they do well and don’t do well, and communicating with them.”

[The article also quotes Kasey Keller who shares Bruce’s views:] “It’s about getting the right combination of players on the field with the right attitude and mental approach who can execute better than the other team. The game isn’t that complicated. Mark the unmarked man. Fill space. Work harder that the opponent. And hope a deflection goes your way in a key moment.”

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with taking ideas from other sports and comparing notes with coaches in other sports. And learning how to motivate players is very important too, of course. But that is elementary school stuff.

You cannot coach soccer at any meaningful level unless you have a deep understanding of the game. And you need to study it year in, year out. You need to stay current. You need to breathe it. You need to understand the deeper fabric of the beautiful game, and be able to teach it to players.

It takes decades of watching, playing, studying, and coaching to achieve mastery and even then only very few ever reach the elite level.

It’s time to wake up and demand more of your coaches, across all levels and age groups. Don’t be fooled anymore!

U.S. Men’s Soccer: What Happened?

I’m sharing the full text of an excellent Oct 11 Wall Street Journal article on the state of U.S. Soccer following elimination from the Word Cup. Here goes:

“A failure of imagination and player development ultimately cost the Americans a spot in next summer’s World Cup.”

And now comes the reckoning for U.S. men’s soccer.

A day after a decade’s worth of mistakes came home to roost, the U.S. federation now needs to clean up a program that for too long clung to aging talent and false hopes.

Or at least that’s what is supposed to happen after the debacle of Tuesday night, when in the space of 90 minutes, on a soggy field in a sleepy stadium in Trinidad, the Americans lost to a last-place team with nothing to play for and were denied a spot in the 2018 World Cup.

Whether the U.S. has the resolve to confront its problems, however, remains unclear. Tuesday’s defeat illuminated all of the deeply entrenched issues that close-watchers of the team have long complained about.

There was the failure of player development that left the team relying on a core of 30-somethings left over from two World Cup cycles ago.

There was the failure of imagination that caused the team to return, in the middle of qualifying, to a manager, Bruce Arena, it had fired a decade before.

And finally, there was the tactical naiveté that caused that manager to misjudge bottom-of-the-group Trinidad and Tobago and send Team USA out with an unsuitable plan and vulnerable in the most obvious places on the field.

“It was all there for us. We have nobody to blame but ourselves,’ said captain Michael Bradley, who, at 30 years old, is unlikely to get another chance in the world’s most popular sporting event.

In any other soccer country, the protocol now would be clear. The first order of business is firing the manager. The president of the federation occasionally resigns too, just as the Italian coach and federation president did in a wild news conference after the Azzurri’s exit from the 2014 World Cup.

Then, the federation orders a review of its development practices from the ground up. England, for instance, likes to call this “root and branch reform.” A parliamentary inquiry might even be in order.

It has yet to work for England, but versions of that thinking have paid off elsewhere. After the twin disasters of the 1998 World Cup (knocked out by Croatia) and Euro 2000 (eliminated in the group stage), Germany redrew its entire youth soccer structure, invested massively in facilities, and realized that a primary failure was in educating youth coaches. This wasn’t a quick fix. But in 2014, with a generation of talent grown in the new model, it won the World Cup.

How U.S. Soccer got here is a long tale of a broken system.

At the grass-roots, good young players are treated vastly differently in this country than virtually anywhere else in the developed world.

Everywhere else, a young player with promise joins a local club and is trained and cultivated throughout childhood by the club itself. In the U.S. a good young player joins a travel team and his parents are told to foot the bill for coaching, travel, uniforms, equipment and any additional training.

“We have to get to point in the U.S. where, when you are a good young player interested in the game, the first thing you get handed isn’t an invoice for several thousand dollars,” U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati said two years ago.

The U.S. Soccer Federation invests millions of dollars each year to increase participation and train coaches, and Major League Soccer’s franchises have in recent years begun to open youth academies. But those efforts are a pittance compared with what happens in so many countries, where local athletic clubs view raising the next generation of players as both a civic responsibility and an investment, because one of them just might turn out to be the next Lionel Messi.

The U.S. has failed to cultivate even a couple of true international stars over the years—something that probably should have happened almost by accident given the size and wealth of the U.S. It’s been 40 years since Pele landed in New York and jump-started the soccer boom.

When Jurgen Klinsmann took over the national team in 2011, his scouts began combing rosters, especially in Europe, for players who might be eligible for an American passport and a spot on the U.S. national team.

Klinsmann’s teams relied heavily on German-Americans, players who were often the children of former American servicemen who had spent time in Germany. One third of his starting lineups were reliably German, with players like Jermaine Jones, Fabian Johnson, Danny Williams and John Brooks, none of whom were in the lineup Tuesday. He left Landon Donovan, arguably the best player the U.S. has ever produced, off the U.S. roster for the 2014 World Cup in favor of the unproven 18-year-old Julian Green.

Klinsmann urged every player to flee the U.S. and try to break into the top or even second-tier leagues in Europe, where the quality of play is far more challenging than in MLS. U.S. players, many of whom had spent their late teens and early 20s playing collegiate soccer, would only improve if they faced better competition, he preached.

Just as Klinsmann was pushing for U.S. players to fight for roster spots in Europe, however, MLS teams generated enough money to sign the top U.S. players to lucrative contracts.

Clint Dempsey returned to play for Seattle. Michael Bradley and Jozy Altidore returned to play for Toronto. Alejandro Bedoya left France for Philadelphia. Matt Besler eschewed opportunities in Europe for a rich deal in Kansas City. Striker Jordan Morris blew off Germany for Seattle.

Few of these players have improved since 2014. And they don’t face the weekly challenges that 19-year-old Christian Pulisic and striker Bobby Wood face in Germany, and defenders Geoff Cameron and DeAndre Yedlin confront in England.

After five years, Klinsmann’s criticism of the U.S. players wore thin, and the bulk of the team began to tune him out, leading to a series of poor results that culminated in several losses to open the final qualifying tournament.

“I had no problem with Jurgen challenging Americans to be better,” said Alexi Lalas, the former U.S. international who is now an analyst for Fox Sports. “But it began to feel more personal. Combine that with his results and that is where the problems came.”

When Arena was brought back in November, he seemed like the perfect antidote—a prideful veteran of U.S. soccer, who believed strongly in the value of MLS, having won its championship five times. But Arena’s conservative approach made the Americans vulnerable, especially on the road when Concacaf opponents felt emboldened to attack.

Goalkeeper Tim Howard, 38, looked every bit his age, getting beat from the flank 40 yards out on Tuesday’s winning goal.

Now, there are no quick fixes, and the U.S. will likely spend the next year and a half completely turning over its roster. They have to hope their next generation that is trying to break through in Europe continues to improve. These are players like 21-year-old Emerson Hyndman of Bournemouth, 22-year-old Matt Miazga of Vitesse in the Netherlands (on loan from Chelsea), and 19-year-old Cameron Carter-Vickers of Sheffield (on loan from Tottenham).

“It’s not going away anytime soon,” Bradley said of the disappointment of this year’s failure. “It’s not something you just forget.”

Thank you Matthew Futterman (matthew.futterman@wsj.com) and Joshua Robinson (joshua.robinson@wsj.com) for the research and writing.

Disgraceful – time to cut the BS!

This is my first post in many months – I’ve simply been too busy at work and with family. But Tuesday night’s US MNT elimination from the World Cup jolted me into posting again.

I have not felt this angry in a while. This is a national disgrace, an international embarrassment.

Let me be very blunt: what a joke of a team and coaches. USSF lacks leadership that understands this beautiful game deeply enough. The quality of soccer in the MLS is poor and the incentives in that league are not aligned with developing players to compete internationally. And don’t get me started on college soccer.

Time to stop the BS and start with a complete and deep revamp of how we teach, play, and organize the beautiful game here.

We need to hold our coaches more accountable and support only those that truly understand the game and how to teach it. This also means that we as parents and the leaders of our youth clubs educate ourselves about what it means to learn and play futbol properly.

In contrast to pretty much all soccer powerhouses such as Brazil and Germany and Spain, we’re paying our coaches and clubs a lot of money, right? So if we have a pay-to-play model here let’s at least demand a service that can justify these cost.

This applies to all levels of coaching – national, pro, college, and youth. And it applies to US Soccer leadership as well as us parents.

If you’ve been following my blog for a while then you know that this doesn’t come as too big a surprise to me, but I still feel angry about it.

We have inmates running the asylum and it needs to stop.

In contrast, tiny Iceland (pop 335,000) qualified for the World Cup yesterday in first place (!) in its European (!) qualifying group. And remember their recent remarkable European Championship performance?

That’s a country only about one-third the population of the City of San Jose here in NorCal.

Let’s do that again: 335 thousand people with limited resources on an icy island in the Atlantic ocean near Europe perform better than 335 million people living in the wealthiest country in the world with unbelievable facilities and resources and brainpower and a deep and pervasive tradition of sports.

When will there be enough evidence to finally trigger deep changes in how we train and play this beautiful game in our country? Have we finally reached a tipping point?

I’ll leave you with these three clips to reflect on:

#ussoccer #soccer #futbol #usmnt #mls #ussf

Playing to win felt great! And that’s the problem.

I coached my youngest daughter’s U11 futsal team this winter, which ended with the U.S. Futsal Northwest Regionals in San Jose a couple of weeks ago. They ended up second.

During the season we emphasized learning to play the game ‘right’, which includes ball control, skills, and playing out from the back. The emphasis was on ‘player development’, which doesn’t pay off until years later.

We played the same way during the tournament, including playing out from the back and using dribbling and/or passing to work the ball into the final third.

We won against all teams this winter (partly because their players were relatively weak) apart from one aggressive team with stronger players that didn’t give my girls any time on the ball, including when we were trying to work the ball out from the back.

These opposing girls were clearly the best opponents we had faced all winter – their futsal club had ‘recruited’ very good players from various outdoor clubs in places like Santa Rosa and the Greater Sacramento area.

So we lost the ball a lot near our goal and then all the opponents had to do was take lots of shots on goal.

They had a couple of skillful players that did some nice things, but overall this was aggression and intensity overcoming players that are still learning to control the ball at age 10/11.

The score during our group game was 5:13 against us, and it could have been worse.

Turns out both teams ended up in the Final so we played them again.

To give my team a chance to win I decided to change our tactics.

Instead of playing out from the back I told the girls to kick that ball up the field and then pressure the other team in their half.

I also kept one girl deep in the other team’s half. I instructed my girls to kick that ball up the field in the general direction of our lone forward and then run after it to pressure the other team in their own half.

This worked wonders. The other team lead 3:2 with five minutes to go, but the score should have been 3:2 in our favor if it wasn’t for two refereeing mistakes. And we had a couple more great chances but couldn’t finish.

To be clear, I’m not complaining about the referees and neither I nor the players or parents protested during or after the game.

The only reason I’m bringing this up is to point out how evenly matched the teams suddenly were.

We went from a completely one-sided 5:13 to a de-facto 3:2 by changing our tactics dramatically.

The game was very exciting and everyone was happy despite the loss. The overall feeling was that the girls battled hard and could have won the Final. And also nice to avoid a repeat of the earlier drubbing.

It felt great!

Now here’s the key issue:

My only objective was to win that Final. The tactical changes and the player instructions had only one goal in mind: to win. There was zero player development.

The quality of soccer was poor. No team controlled the ball for more than a few seconds and it was mostly hustle and long balls to avoid pressure.

Now imagine you’re a coach of one of our outdoor club teams. You’re playing in leagues and tourneys with relatively evenly matched opponents and often stronger teams.

In contrast, recall that our futsal opponents this winter were significantly weaker than us. So it was easy to play the ‘right’ way….even if we lost the ball playing out from the back the odds of the opponent scoring a goal was relatively low.

For the mathematically inclined: the probability weighted ‘cost’ of playing the ‘right’ way (in terms of losing games) was low compared to the gains.

The vast majority of coaches feel the pressure to win games, leagues and tournaments to keep players and their paying parents happy.

The coach needs to pay his/her bills and put food on the table, and the amount they earn is directly related to how satisfied families and the club’s Director of Coaching are.

And it just feels great to win more often than not. One can get addicted to the euphoria of winning, the happy faces, and the write-up on the club’s website…

It becomes very difficult to truly develop players because you will lose a lot of games for many years.

For example, playing out from the back and encouraging players to develop and apply dribbling skills will backfire for many years.

However, players that develop the right way will eventually dominate the same opponents that beat them up when they were younger.

My oldest daughter’s U15 team learned to play the right way. The skills, the dribbling, the off-the-ball movement, the accurate passing, the shooting technique….are nice to watch.

They demolished the opponents 13:0 in the Final of a major tournament, won Regionals and Nationals last year, and are undefeated in all futsal competitions.

And they always (!) play out from the back, they always (!) use skills and ball control and beautiful passing combinations.

They easily beat opponents that try to use physical aggression and/or kick the ball up the field. In fact, we like this because we regain possession and simply work the ball back into the other team’s final third.

It’s a simple law of nature that the other team can’t score without possession. The only team that can score is the team that possesses the ball.

“For me ball possession is the most important thing. It’s the first step and then the second, third and fourth steps can come after. With the ball, you have more possibilities to create something and to concede fewer chances. Soccer is about having the ball, playing and dealing with the ball. Because when we have the ball we score a lot of goals and we don’t concede a lot.”

Pep Guardiola 2015

Here are two brief clips from that U15 Final to give you a taste for their technical skills and ball possession abilities:

To get to this point of soccer skills and IQ you need to have learned all those more sophisticated soccer skills.

It is an absolute guarantee that these girls would not even be close to their soccer proficiency if they hadn’t put in the hard work and patience and been coached to develop as players from a young age.

We were fortunate to have had coaches that for the most part focused on player development and not ‘winning’ and the parents supported that development ‘project’.

So which route do you take? Have some fun and focus on winning these next couple of years or be patient and focus on learning to become better soccer players despite many painful losses and no trophies?

It takes a very strong coach and DOC to truly focus on player development. And patient players and parents.

Everything is stacked against it, but it’s the only way to elevate soccer in our country.

And it’s the only way if you want your son or daughter to become the best they can be at soccer.

And if a club and/or coach prefers to mostly ‘play to win’ then that is fine too. Many players and parents might well prefer this.

But please don’t pretend you’re doing otherwise. Be honest and transparent about it, and let players and families decide which route they want to take.

That futsal Final felt great and I would do it the same way again. But I’m glad we only had to play that way once this winter.

However, outdoor coaches playing most games against evenly matched or stronger teams will have a strong incentive to ‘play to win’ most of the time. Keep this in mind.

Comparing Girls’ Development Academy with ECNL and High School Soccer

The launch of U.S. Soccer’s Girls’ Development Academy (GDA) this August is probably the single most discussed topic in girls’ soccer currently.

The GDA is supposed to mirror the successful Boys’ Development Academy, which was launched in 2007, and is expected to become the new home for our elite female soccer players, effectively replacing the Elite Clubs National League (ECNL), which will now become a league for the second tier teams.

Many clubs, coaches, and parents are wondering why there’s a need for a GDA when ECNL has been providing a regional and national league system for our best girls since 2009.

What makes this more contentious is the ‘no high school soccer’ rule for girls in the GDA. This rule states that GDA players cannot play high school soccer while also training and playing with the GDA primarily because of overuse health concerns and poor quality of coaching. They can, however, opt to take a three-month break from the GDA to play high school soccer and then return once the high school soccer season is over.

To help explain the reasons for the GDA, April Heinrichs, U.S. Soccer’s Women’s Technical Director, gave an interview to SoccerAmerica last November. I strongly encourage you to read it. April’s comments resonate strongly with me.

First, we haven’t emphasized technical skills enough in our country. Raw athleticism, speed, size, and aggression have dominated player selection for too long. This works well especially at younger ages if ‘winning’ and ‘rankings’ are important.

For example, U12 or U14 girls that are physically more mature and have the basics down will typically beat girls that are technically more proficient but are physically less developed at the same age. The club’s and coach’s win-percentage and team ranking will be higher, which in turn attracts more paying families.

But those same ‘winning’ girls will struggle eventually as their technically superior smaller peers mature physically too over time. And many of those ‘winning’ physically mature U12 or U14 girls overshoot as they fully mature into young women. I have seen many ‘winning’ 12, 13, and 14 year old girls turn into slow and ineffective players at age 15 and 16.

At the international level a focus on physical attributes won’t be sufficient going forward given the big improvements in the development of female soccer players in countries like Japan, France, Spain, and England.

For societal reasons and because of the deeply embedded male soccer culture in leading soccer nations, female players only recently started playing soccer in larger numbers there. And those countries are now bringing their deep expertise in player development from the men’s side to their female players.

This is very apparent when watching the most recent U17 and U20 Women’s World Cups. Japan and France in particular played the most sophisticated and complete soccer, and the gap between them and us in those age groups was significant.

“When people say the gap is closing, I would say the gap has closed and we’re falling behind in these areas.”  – April Heinrichs in NYT interview, June 2015

Going forward, the ideal female player combines soccer-specific athletic attributes with excellent technical skills and superior soccer IQ. And developing these kinds of players starts when they are very young and needs to continue throughout their youth soccer years.

This will also increase the quality of play domestically and the entertainment value, which in turn should lead to a larger viewership and, over time, more financial resources for women’s soccer.

So with this background in mind, here’s how April described the key differences for each of the girls’ soccer models:

GDA = Primarily Player Development – no financial incentives, just longer-term player development owned and organized by our national soccer federation. Strong centralized control over all aspects, including coaching standards, curriculum, training and game schedule.

ECNL = Primarily Business – a league for our pay-to-play clubs to compete against each other. Need to ‘win’ to keep and attract paying parents with talented girls. Clubs and coaches retain, for all practical intents and purposes, full independence.

High School Soccer = Primarily Social – girls enjoy playing with school friends for their school and get local peer group recognition. Focus is on ‘winning’ with the available pool of players at the school, not player development. Risk of injury is high.

I tried to capture the differences between three models at the national level in the following chart:

gdaecnlhighschoolnationwide

I support the introduction of the GDA because it promises to be the best *player development* environment for our elite girls, assuming the coaching quality and player development curriculum is truly world-class. And there will still be the ECNL for girls that either don’t make it into the GDA or prefer to play on ECNL teams.

There will be some regional differences initially – for example, here in NorCal of the big girls’ clubs only De Anza Force has committed to the GDA. Other clubs like Mustang and San Juan have decided to stay with ECNL for now, but that is likely to change if their best girls start to try out at GDA clubs once the dust has settled. In other regions, such as SoCal, ~80% of the top clubs have committed to the GDA as of February 2017.

So the chart for NorCal looks something like this:

gdaecnlhighschoolnorcal

In NorCal the best players and coaches will initially still be in the ECNL simply because all of the ECNL clubs and their players aren’t expected to switch to the GDA. However, as the GDA becomes established nationwide and much of the college recruiting and national team scouting aligns with that, more top female players in NorCal will switch to GDA clubs, which will force the ECNL clubs to apply for GDA membership too.

There are probably going to be more changes as we get closer to the summer and there are probably going to be some teething problems, but odds are high that the GDA will be successful. U.S. Soccer will put its full weight behind it. And the GDA will serve our most elite girls well because the focus promises to be primarily on ‘development’ not ‘winning’.

girls-da-map

One pro player’s traumatic experiences with head injuries

My teammate and I were standing outside RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C. It was April 2003, our first home game of the season against the Chicago Fire. It was my first official appearance as a professional soccer player. It was a dream come true.

“Let’s take a picture,” he said. “I feel like this is a day we definitely want to remember.” He handed someone his digital camera, we posed together and smiled.

[Click here for the original article @ThePlayers’Tribune]

I was a 20-year-old rookie — picked No. 1 by D.C. United in the MLS SuperDraft just a few months prior. I hadn’t played against Kansas City in our season opener, so I had made sure to bust my ass in practice that week.

A few days before the game, Coach had even pulled me aside to let me know that he was going to try to get me some minutes. So I put the word out to family and friends.

My parents drove down from New Jersey, my cousin flew in from L.A., some friends came up from the University of Virginia.

But I don’t remember seeing anyone at the match. I don’t remember my name being announced over the loudspeaker. I don’t remember the roar of the crowd and the bright lights.

I don’t even remember stepping onto the field.

Shortly after I came off the bench in the 65th minute, I found myself on the wrong end of a major collision while jumping for a header. I got undercut, flipped over and landed on my head.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the first game of my rookie season was the beginning of the end of my professional soccer career.

The photo we took two hours before the match would be the last thing I remembered until I ended up at the hospital later that night.

I was told that after the game, my mom and dad were waiting outside the locker room for me, but I walked right by them. I didn’t even acknowledge their presence. My team doctor had to explain that I had suffered a head injury and would be heading to the hospital to make sure my brain was not bleeding.

You know when someone claps their hands in front of your face to snap you back into reality? Well, an hour or so later, out of the blue, that’s what I felt happen as I suddenly became aware of where I was. I looked around and noticed my family and friends beside me in the hospital waiting room.

“What are we doing here?” I asked.

“He is still pretty out of it,” I heard my mother tell my father in Armenian. Her voice, and then seeing my family and friends gathered around me, are the first things I can really remember since taking the photograph.

But I still had no idea what had happened.

“Alecko, you hit your head,” the doctors told me.

After a few hours of tests, all the scans on my brain had come back negative for any major brain injury. The only outward sign that anything had happened was the cast on my hand for the three fingers I had broken in the collision.

As for my head, I was told to go home and get some rest, and if there were any problems, to call my team doctor immediately.

I didn’t have any idea how bad the fall was until I got to practice two days later and my coach pulled me into his office.

“Have you seen the video?” he asked me, his voice cracking and eyes welling up with tears. “You’re lucky to be walking, son.”

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He showed me the tape. The slow-motion replay of my entire body weight crashing on top of my head and neck made me nauseous. It wasn’t until then that I also realized I had actually stayed in the game.

I didn’t remember any of it. I just thought, I never want to see that again. And I wouldn’t for the next 12 years.

The crazy thing is, I still didn’t really understand the damage it had done to my brain.

Besides the doctors in the hospital, nobody ever mentioned the word concussion. And after a week of rest, I was back out playing and training with the team. Bullet dodged.

That is how my nightmare began.

Soccer brought my family to this country. My dad, Andranik, grew up an Armenian Christian in Tehran and became one of the best defenders in the history of the Iranian national team.

After playing for Iran at the 1978 World Cup, he was selected to the World All-Star team that played an exhibition game at Giants Stadium against the New York Cosmos.

Immediately after the match, the Cosmos offered him a contract. Despite interest from other top European clubs, my dad decided moving to the U.S. would be the best thing for our family.

So my parents moved with my older brother to New York, and a few years later I was born, more or less with a soccer ball at my feet.

Not a single day went by in my childhood where I didn’t play soccer. Whether in our backyard, or in our basement, or at the park down the street from our house, or with my dad and his teammates — Giorgio Chinaglia, Carlos Alberto, Hubert Birkenmeier, even Pelé. To me, they were just friends who were always ready to kick the ball around with me.

Soccer was life for my family. In my elementary school yearbooks, my classmates and I had to write what we wanted to be when we grew up. Other kids wrote the usual: doctor, astronaut, police officer, and so on. Next to my name were three words, “Professional soccer player.”

Even off the pitch, soccer was an integral part of our lives. In 1982, Hubert had opened up Birkenmeier Sport Shop, one of the first and only soccer shops in the U.S. But in 1985, as the Cosmos roster went through a major upheaval, Hubert and my dad both got traded and had to relocate to continue their careers.

My father had a different idea – he would instead choose to retire from pro soccer, buy the shop from Hubert, and plant our family roots in New Jersey.

The shop became my second home — and the place where everyone came to talk soccer. Almost every serious soccer player from northern New Jersey — including men’s national team stars Tony Meola, Tab Ramos, John Harkes, Gregg Berhalter, and Giuseppe Rossi — grew up coming to the shop.

Sure, Dad’s store sold the newest cleats or kits, but mostly people would come by to talk soccer with my dad and Hubert, who had returned after finishing his playing career.

Meanwhile, I was busy following in my dad’s footsteps as a player. I was New Jersey’s high school player of the year in 2000 and won the Hermann Trophy as the top player in college soccer in ’02.

By that time, I had already represented the U.S. in the FIFA U-20 World Cup. In ’04, I led the U.S. in scoring during Olympic qualifying. Despite getting my own trials with several European clubs, I knew that I wanted to be close to my family. After my junior season at UVA, I decided to enter the MLS draft.

My first game in MLS was supposed to be one I would never forget. Instead it was one that I cannot remember.

I was fortunate that Carlos Bocanegra, a defender for the Fire in that game, was looking out for my well-being. After I stayed on the field following my injury, he and other players actually alerted the referee and medical staff to get me out of the game.

I’ve since been told that I was saying things that did not make any sense after the collision, cursing at guys, saying we were in San Francisco even as I was standing on the pitch in Washington, D.C.

Most people don’t really think of soccer as a contact sport, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. As the game has gotten more physical, and players have gotten faster and stronger, collisions have become more violent. The number of head injuries has been growing rapidly.

Still, most don’t realize the seriousness of head injuries, how to identify them and most importantly, how to treat them.

 

EARTHQUAKE DC UNTEDPHOTO BY GERALD HERBERT/AP IMAGES

After getting knocked unconscious in my first game, I was back on the field in a week. All I needed to hear was that I had been cleared to play and that was enough for me.

It was the same story the following season when I was hit in the back of my head after a scuffle broke out during a match. “Just take a week off to get some rest,” our trainers told me.

Once again I thought, As long as I’m cleared then I should be fine, right? That certainly seemed to be the way it worked out. I scored 14 goals that season, made the All-Star team and was named MLS Cup MVP as we won the championship. I was called in to represent the U.S. Men’s National Team.

Everything was going according to plan. Or at least it seemed to be.

What I didn’t know, however, was that those two hits had done lasting damage to my brain. So when I suffered my third concussion less than a year later in 2005, it had an immediate and devastating effect.

With no more than a couple minutes left in a match against the New England Revolution, the knee of their goalkeeper slammed into the side of my head.

It felt like getting hit with a baseball bat.

And then everything went silent, except for the throbbing and pounding inside my head. It was as if my heart had replaced my brain and all I could feel was it beating inside my skull.

“Esky, are you alright?” I heard the referee ask as he stood over me.

“No,” I muttered. “This isn’t good.”

My trainer took me straight into the locker room and for the next few hours, it felt like I was drunk. Time seemed to slow down and my balance was unstable.

As I did after the first two concussions, I took some cognitive tests, and just like the first two times, I passed every one.

But something was different. This time, I felt a pressure in my skull that I had never felt before. Our team doctor noticed my concern and made sure a friend drove me home.

I thought that — again, just like with my first two head injuries — if I just laid low and got some sleep I would feel better in the morning.

But this time I didn’t.

When I woke up on Sunday morning, it felt like there was a cinder block in the back of my head, like blood had just pooled there overnight. The throbbing was still there, too.

I met with a neurologist on Monday. More tests, more passing, more reassurances that everything would be O.K. More instructions to just take it easy and to take some Tylenol if the headaches persisted.

And a week or so later? Cleared to play.

Alecko EskandarianPHOTO BY TED S. WARREN/AP IMAGES

But I still felt that something wasn’t right. The pain, the pressure, the weight in the back of my head — they just wouldn’t go away.

I returned to training, where all my coaches and trainers and teammates knew that doctors had cleared me to play. So the mental warfare began. Do I just suck it up? If I’ve been cleared I must be fine, right? No athlete ever wants to be “that guy” sitting out. Ever. Especially for “headaches.”

I felt like I had no choice. I began playing again. I had never before depended on painkillers, but suddenly I needed them badly. After training, my symptoms would get even worse. How many Tylenol am I supposed to take before the pain goes away?

The locker room was not a good place for me to vent my frustration. Every guy in there was playing through some sort of injury. Any mention of my discomfort and the ribbing would start.

Man, you’re sitting out for that?

Oh, trying to get another vacation day?

I wish I could get a day off every time I had a headache.

Nobody understood what I was going through. But I was determined to beat this thing. I focused all my energy on sucking it up, getting back on the field — for my livelihood, for my career. After missing games for three straight weeks, I was back training and finally set to return to the starting lineup.

But a few days before the game, as I was driving home to my Georgetown apartment after practice, I suddenly experienced a headache so sharp that I could actually hear it. You know that sound when a microphone screeches? That terrible, piercing ring that keeps rising?

I had to close my eyes. I swerved across three lanes of traffic. How I didn’t end up in a car accident I’ll never know.

I immediately called my trainer and asked to meet with a new neurologist in order to get a second opinion. The next day at the doctor’s office, I told him everything I had been through, starting with the collision in the first game of my rookie year. He just looked at me in disbelief.

“If you play soccer and you get hit in the head again, you might die,” he said.

He told me that I would have to be shut down for a minimum of two months, until I was completely symptom free. No physical activity — nothing that would raise my heart rate until the headaches went away.

For the next 10 months, I was a ghost.

20161031_sm_alecko_232b

I stopped answering the phone. I stopped going out with my friends. I used to be the happiest guy in the locker room, always ready to share a story or play a practical joke.

Now, I would sit in my apartment and watch the hours go by. I struggled to eat more than one meal a day. It was torture to go to games at the stadium to support my teammates. The atmosphere at RFK — which I had once thrived on — now triggered headaches.

The thing I loved most in this world had been taken away from me and I didn’t know what to do.

I just felt isolated and helpless. And honestly, I was terrified about not knowing what was going to happen. If I was going to recover, or if the depression was going to consume me.

The worst part about my recovery was that no one was able to see what I was going through. To the naked eye, you would have thought I was fine.

I wasn’t. I didn’t know if the headaches would ever go away. If I’d ever feel like myself again. I didn’t know if I’d ever return to the field.

Most people thought I was done. About a week before one of the last games of the season, I got Facebook messages from members of the Screaming Eagles and Barra Brava, two D.C. United supporters groups.

“At the next match just make sure you have a good view of our supporters’ section in the 11th minute.”

That weekend, I went to the match and looked to where the Screaming Eagles sit. At the 11th minute, they held up a huge banner.

 

918086_rapids_v_unitedPHOTO BY ANDY MEAD/ICON SMI

I got pretty emotional about it. I mean, of course it was an incredible gesture from the fans to let me know that they hadn’t forgotten about me —but it was also like, Holy shit, it’s as if I’ve died.

At that point, it actually felt like I already had. I was pretty much ready to risk my life for the game. I was only 22, and I might have been romanticizing things a bit, but more than once I had thought to myself, I’d rather die on the field than never play again.

It all sort of reached a boiling point when I went back home to New Jersey for the off-season. I’d always been close with my parents, but because of everything I’d been going through, I was not a pleasant person to be around. When I was living in D.C., I had grown increasingly frustrated any time they would call to ask if I was feeling any better.

“No, I still have headaches. Every day is the same. Please stop asking.”

Being back home, I had family support to lean on, but I rejected it. I started to feel sorry for myself, and with the holidays around the corner, I became annoyed about how cheery everyone was.

I thought, My life’s work is being taken away from me. I have no idea if I’ll ever get better, and you want me to buy presents, put up Christmas decorations and sing carols?

I knew that I had to start digging myself out the hole I was in — not just to play soccer again, but to have any sort of life period. I set up a treadmill that my brother and I had gotten for my parents and started running.

Two minutes without a headache. Next day, five minutes. The next, 10 minutes. I started doing crossword puzzles to keep my brain active. I made sure my brain was at full rest for a certain number of hours a day — no TV, no reading, no straining whatsoever. I basically re-calibrated my entire life.

Soon, the weight and the pressure in my head started to subside, and life felt more … normal. And when preseason rolled around in February, I had been symptom-free long enough to rejoin the team.

We took things easy at first, but eventually, I found myself back on the pitch at RFK Stadium for our season-opener — and scoring off a left-footed volley.

I knew there were still uncertainties with my head, but I made the All-Star team again that season, and was one of the league’s top goal scorers. I even scored in an exhibition game against Real Madrid in front of 70,000 fans. I was back. My teammate Josh Gros started calling me “the Truman Show.”

“Your life couldn’t be any more scripted,” he said.

I have to admit, everything felt so surreal. I thought, Am I still concussed and dreaming all of this? I played every game and celebrated every goal like it was my last, because I knew it could have been.

LA Galaxy v New York Red BullsPHOTO BY CHRIS TROTMAN/GETTY IMAGES

And four years later, on July 19, 2009, I did play my last game. Call it piss-poor luck or a heartbreaking twist, but I suffered my fourth concussion while playing for the L.A. Galaxy when an opposing defender inadvertently cleared the ball into my face.

Once again, everything went black. I couldn’t breathe. It felt like I was swallowing my tongue. I had broken my nose and started spitting out blood. My old symptoms had returned. This time, worse than before.

I tried to convince myself that I could pull off another comeback. But this time, my doctors and coaches weren’t willing to take the risk. I wasn’t cleared to play.

“If you were my son, I’d tell you to stop,” my coach at the time told me.

I went from living in paradise in Hermosa Beach to once again being consumed by depression — steps away from the sand and the ocean, but confined to the darkness of my apartment.

I tried to fight it as best as I could. I kept myself busy and started doing some TV broadcasting work. I started taking business courses. I was making new friends. But none of it helped me escape my reality.

I could feel myself spiraling downward and I knew I needed change. So I moved back to Charlottesville, to finish up my degree at UVA and find an escape from soccer.

At school, new challenges awaited. The damage to my brain was worse than before. I struggled to focus and began experiencing vertigo.

One day in Charlottesville, after finishing a light workout my body suddenly went into shock. My head began pounding. I started shaking. I felt nauseous. I was fading.

Sitting in the passenger seat of my friend’s car while he rushed me to the hospital, I quickly ruled out any thought of a comeback.

“It’s over,” I said as we drove up Route 29. “I’ll never play again.”

“Dude, what?” my buddy said.

“I’ll never play soccer again.”

“Uh, yeah? I’m taking you to the hospital to make sure you don’t die and you’re worried about whether you’ll kick a ball again?”

The next day, I wrote it down. I’m never going to be a professional soccer player again.

When I look back on my career, I think about dribbling a ball around my dad’s soccer shop and dreaming about playing in front of thousands of people.

I think about the great teams and teammates I played with. I think about how I got to share the field with some of soccer’s biggest stars — Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Pirlo, David Beckham.

Yet something else also happened on those fields that changed my life. And it’s still happening.

It wasn’t until I went through head injuries myself that I realized how many people are struggling with the aftereffects of concussions.

Even over the course of my own recovery, I haven’t wanted to open up about what I have gone through. I didn’t want to talk about the dark places my concussions took me, the depression, the isolation, the helplessness. How could I help others if I couldn’t help myself?

It wasn’t until I went through head injuries myself that I realized how many people are struggling.

But, I’m finally at a point where I have learned to manage my brain injury, and it’s time I start sharing my story about concussions in soccer. It’s time that all soccer players do.

As I’ve started to be more open about my own struggles, dozens and dozens of players of all ages have reached out to me asking for guidance or advice.

I remember when I was recovering from my third concussion, I got a call from my agent. He told me that former MLS midfielder Ross Paule wanted to talk to me. A few days later, my phone rang.

“This isn’t the life you want,” Ross told me, and warned me not to rush to come back. He’d suffered concussions while playing for the Columbus Crew and had tried to play through them — until they eventually forced him to retire.

“I can’t drive after dark,” he said. “I can’t play with my little girl. You don’t want this.”

I remember I was sitting in the Galaxy dressing room after my fourth concussion when David Beckham approached me.

“Mate, I’m so sorry you’re going through this. Same thing happened to one of my teammates at Manchester United. He sat in a dark room for a month.”

As an assistant coach now for the NASL’s New York Cosmos, I sat down recently with one of our players who had suffered a concussion. I told him about my experiences and how he needed to be careful.

He just stared back at me. In his face, I saw the same 20-year-old I had been. I knew how much he wanted to be on the field and how all he wanted to hear was that he was cleared to play.

It hurt me that he couldn’t see what I had gone through. If only there was a scar to show….

For all the progress we’ve made in the last few years, education about head injuries still needs to be emphasized more by leagues, coaches and trainers. There is still no clear-cut diagnosis process or treatment method.

I still can’t sit in the back of a car without feeling nauseous. I can’t yell throughout practices or games. I can’t raise my heart rate too high without getting headaches.

But I decided a few years ago to focus on what I can do. And much of that is not taking things for granted anymore — like being able to go outside and run, which led to running in my first marathon this past month.

And another thing I can do is talk about a serious problem — one that is growing —in our sport. We all need to keep talking about it — so that no one has to experience what I did.

ALECKO ESKANDARIAN

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Player development – a legend’s views.

Gabriel Jesus Documentary – Made in Brazil

“I used to head 100 balls a day and I don’t remember good times so well.”

You are probably aware of ongoing discussions regarding head injuries in soccer (it’s much much worse for (American) football, of course, but it’s an issue for soccer too).

Full-blown concussions typically take center-stage, but medical professionals are now also worried about the many smaller sub-concussive blows to the head.

And there is increasing evidence that even just rapid head movements can cause long-term damage.

In response, U.S. Soccer recently introduced a powerful educational concussion video and the no-heading rule for players up to and including twelve years of age.

This caused some frustration, including concerns about our youngsters not being able to head the ball well when they are older. 

Some also felt that this was an overreaction and that heading the ball safely (with the front of the head instead of the top or sides) can be taught from a young age.

The risks associated with heading balls is not yet properly understood. Scientists and medical professionals are working to understand this much better, but it will take some time.

In the meantime, I would like to share the experiences of a family friend with you.

Chris Nicholl was a professional soccer player and manager in the English Premier League. He played as a central defender for Aston Villa (1972–1977) (210 league appearances) and then Southampton (1977-1983) (228 league appearances).

Chris also played internationally for Northern Ireland (51 caps). After he retired from his playing career, Chris managed Southampton amongst other clubs.

I’ve added a vintage clip at the end of this article showing Chris’ most famous goal, scored during the League Cup Final against Everton.

But arguably his most memorable feat was scoring all four goals in a 2:2 draw between Aston Villa and Leicester City. 😁
Chris was interviewed by the Daily Mail a couple of weeks ago and I’m pasting a key passage below. Click here for the full article.

“I know I’m brain damaged from heading footballs. I used to head 100 balls almost every day. When I was at Aston Villa I would watch all my team-mates going home in their cars and I would still be there on the training pitch with Ray Grayden who used to send them long. It’s definitely affected my memory. The balls were a lot heavier then.” Nicholl points to his nose which is unnaturally curved and crooked. “Maybe you can tell, I used to head more with my nose,” he adds. “It’s not recommended.”

To be clear, Chris’ example doesn’t prove that heading the ball causes brain damage nor how many headers per day/week/month are safe. His memory loss might simply be age related (he is 70).

However, the medical research community in England and now also the English FA is looking into pre-mature deaths and behavioral changes of former players.

Early evidence is showing that some died of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the same condition as American football players.

And three members of England’s 1966 World Cup winning squad suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, believed to be caused by heading.

According to one health advocate in England, 75% to 80% of the players that contact her are centre-halves and centre-forwards.

“Obviously not all of them are, but the vast majority are. Although any player on the pitch can head the ball, centre halves and strikers head the ball more, especially in those days.”

Researchers at the University of Stirling, UK, found heading the ball just 20 times could make “small but significant changes in brain function” for the next 24 hours, when memory performance was reduced between 41 and 67 per cent.

I hope this serves as a cautionary tale. 

Unfortunately, as a referee I still see too many coaches who ignore or down-play players’ head injuries during games and practices.

Let’s err on the side of caution for our youngsters, folks. The brain is precious and damage to it often doesn’t become apparent until later in life.

That damage is irreversible and fundamentally changes who you are as a person well before your pre-mature death.

Play with happiness. Play free. Be creative. Just play with the ball.

Read the below letter from Ronaldinho and then watch the clip at the end. Enjoy!

Dear eight-year-old Ronaldinho,

Tomorrow, when you come home from playing football, there will be a lot of people in your house. Your uncles, friends of your family and some other people you won’t recognize will be in the kitchen. At first, you’ll think you’re just late for the party. Everybody’s there to celebrate the 18th birthday of your brother, Roberto.

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Ronaldinho the boy with brother Roberto

Usually when you come home from football, mom is always laughing or joking around.

But this time, she’ll be crying.

And then you will see Roberto. He will put his arm around you and bring you inside the bathroom so you can be alone. Then he will tell you something you won’t understand.

“There was an accident. Dad is gone. He died.”

It won’t make sense to you. What does that mean? When is he coming back? How could dad be gone?

Dad was the one who told you play creatively on the football pitch, the one who told you to play with a free style — to just play with the ball. He believed in you more than anyone. When Roberto started playing professional football for Grêmio last year, Dad told everyone, “Roberto is good, but watch his younger brother coming up.”

Dad was a superhero. He loved football so much that even after working at the shipyard during the week, he would work security at Grêmio’s stadium on the weekend. How could you never see him again? You won’t understand what Roberto is telling you.

You’re not going to feel sadness right away. That will come later. A few years from now, you will accept that Dad is never coming back on earth. But what I want you to understand is that every time you have a ball at your feet, Dad will be with you.

When you have a football at your feet, you are free. You are happy. It’s almost like you are hearing music. That feeling will make you want to spread joy to others.

You are lucky because you have Roberto. Even though he’s 10 years older and already playing for Grêmio, Roberto will be there for you always. He won’t just be a brother, he will become like a father to you. And more than anything, he’ll be your hero.

You’ll want to play like him, you’ll want to be like him. Every morning, when you head to Grêmio — you will play for the youth side, while Roberto plays for the senior team — you’ll get to walk into the locker room with your big brother, the football star. And every night, when you go to bed, you’ll think, I get to share a room with my idol.

There are no posters on the walls in the bedroom you share, there’s only a small TV. It won’t matter anyway, because you won’t have time to watch any matches together. When he’s not traveling for matches, Roberto is taking you outside to play more football.

Where you live in Porto Alegre, there are drugs and gangs and that kind of stuff around. It’s going to be tough, but as long as you are playing football — on the street, at the park, with your dog — you will feel safe.

Yes, I said your dog, by the way. He’s a tireless defender.

You’ll play with Roberto. You’ll play with other kids and older guys at the park. But eventually everyone will get tired — and you will want to keep playing. So make sure you always take your dog, Bombom, out with you. Bombom is a mutt. A real Brazilian dog. And even Brazilian dogs love football. He’ll be great practice for dribbling and skills … and maybe the first casualty of the “Elastico.”

Years from now, when you are playing in Europe, a few defenders will remind you of Bombom.

Childhood is going to be very different for you. By the time you’re 13, people will have started talking about you. They’ll talk about your skills and what you’re able to do with a ball. At this time, football is still just a game to you. But in 1994, when you are 14, the World Cup will show you that football is more than just a simple game.

July 17, 1994, is a day every Brazilian remembers. On that day, you’ll be traveling with the Grêmio youth team for a match in Belo Horizonte. The World Cup final is on TV, and it’ll be Brazil against Italy. Yes, that’s right, the Canarinho will be in a World Cup final for the first time in 24 years. The whole country will seem to stop.

Everywhere in Belo Horizonte, there will be Brazilian flags. There will be no colors except green and yellow that day. Every single spot in the city will have the match turned on and be filled with people.

You’ll be watching with your teammates. The final whistle will blow with the score tied 0–0. The game will go to a penalty shootout.

Italy misses their first PK, and so does Brazil. Then Italy scores. And then … Romario steps up. His shot curves to the left … hits the post … and flies in the goal. The guys on the team are screaming and yelling.

Italy scores and there’s silence again.

Branco scores for Brazil … Taffarel makes a save for Brazil … Dunga scores for Brazil.…

Then, the moment that will not just change your life, but the lives of millions of Brazilians.…

Baggio steps up to the spot for Italy and misses.

Brazil are World Cup champions.

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During the crazy celebration, it’s going to become clear to you what you want to do for the rest of your life. You’re going to finally realize what football means to Brazilians. You’re going to feel the power of this sport. Most importantly, you will see the happiness that football can bring to regular people.

“I’m going to play for Brazil,” you’ll tell yourself that day.

Not everyone is going to believe in you, especially with the way you play.

There will be some coaches — alright, one in particular — who will tell you not to play the way you do. He will think you need to be more serious, that you need to stop dribbling so much. “You’ll never in your life make it as a footballer,” he’ll say.

Use those words as motivation. Use them to keep you focused. And then think about the players who did play the game beautifully — Dener, Maradona, Ronaldo.

Think about what Dad said, to play free and to just play with the ball. Play with joy. This is something that many coaches will not understand, but when you are on the pitch, you will never calculate. Everything will come naturally. Before you have time to think, your feet have already made a decision.

Creativity will take you further than calculation.

One day, just a few months after you watch Romario lift the ’94 World Cup, your coach at Grêmio is going to pull you into his office after training. He’ll tell you that you’ve been called up to the Brazilian under-17 national team.

When you get to the training camp in Teresópolis, you will see something that you will never forget: When you walk into the cafeteria, you’ll notice the framed photos hanging on the walls — Pelé, Zico, Bebeto.

You’ll be walking the same halls as those legends. You’ll sit at the same cafeteria tables that Romario, Ronaldo and Rivaldo sat in. You’ll eat the same food they ate. You’ll sleep in the same dorms they slept in. When you put your head down to sleep, your last thought will be, I wonder which of my heroes slept on this pillow, too.

For the next four years, you will do nothing but play football. You will spend your life on buses and training pitches. In fact, from 1995 to 2003, you will never take a vacation. It will be very intense.

But when you turn 18, you will achieve something your father would have been very proud of. You will make your debut for Grêmio’s senior team. The only sad part is that Roberto won’t be there. A knee injury will cut his time at Grêmio short and he’ll go to Switzerland to play. You won’t get to share the pitch with your hero, but you’ve spent so many years watching Roberto that you’ll know what to do and how to act.

On match days, you’ll walk through the car park where your father used to work security on the weekends. You’ll enter the dressing room where your brother used to take you as a kid. You’ll pull on the blue and black Grêmio shirt. You’ll think: Life can’t get any better than this. You’ll think you have finally made it, playing for your hometown club.

But this is not where your story ends.

The next year, you will play your first senior match with the Brazilian national team. A funny thing will happen. You will actually show up to your first training camp a day later than your teammates. Why? You’ll be delayed by a match with Grêmio in the final of the Campeonato Gaúcho tournament against Internacional.

Playing for Internacional will be the captain of the ’94 World Cup team, Dunga.

You will play very well in this match. So when you arrive to the pitch for your first day of training with Brazil, your new teammates — the guys you watched win the ’94 World Cup — will be talking about one player: the small kid wearing number 10.

They’ll be talking about you.

They’ll be talking about how you dribbled past Dunga. They’ll be talking about your title-winning goal. But don’t get too confident, because they’re not going to go easy on you. This will be the most important moment of your life. When you get to this level, people will expect many things of you.

Will you keep playing your way?

Or will you start to calculate? Will you play it safe?

The only advice I have to give you is this: Do it your way. Be free. Hear the music. This is the only way for you to live your life.

Playing for Brazil will change your life. All of a sudden, doors you never even knew were available to you will start to open.

You’ll start to think about playing in Europe, where a lot of your heroes went to prove themselves. Ronaldo will tell you about life in Barcelona. You’ll see his awards, his Ballon d’Or, his club trophies. Suddenly, you’ll want to make history too. You will start to dream beyond Grêmio. In 2001, you will sign with Paris Saint-Germain.

How can I tell a kid who was born in a wooden house in a favela what life will be like in Europe? It’s impossible. You will not understand, even if I tell you. From the time you leave for Paris, then Barcelona, then Milan, everything will go by very, very fast. Some of the media in Europe will not understand your style of play. They will not understand why you are always smiling.

Well, you are smiling because football is fun. Why would you be serious? Your goal is to spread joy. I’ll say it again — creativity over calculation.

Stay free, and you’ll win a World Cup for Brazil.

Stay free, and you’ll win the Champions League, La Liga and Serie A.

Stay free, and you’ll win a Ballon d’Or.

What you’ll be most proud of, though, is helping to change football in Barcelona through your style of play. When you arrive there, Real Madrid will be the power of Spanish football. By the time you leave the club, kids will be dreaming of playing “the Barcelona way.”

Listen to me, though. Your role in this will be about much more than what you do on the pitch.

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Ronaldinho as World Cup Champion

At Barcelona, you’ll hear about this kid on the youth team. He wears number 10 like you. He’s small like you. He plays with the ball like you. You and your teammates will go watch him play for Barcelona’s youth squad, and at that moment you’ll know he’s going to be more than a great footballer. The kid is different. His name is Leo Messi.

You’ll tell the coaches to bring him up to play with you on the senior side. When he arrives, the Barcelona players will be talking about him like the Brazilian players were talking about you.

I want you to give him one piece of advice.

Tell him, “Play with happiness. Play free. Just play with the ball.”

Even when you are gone, the free style will live on in Barcelona through Messi.

ronaldinho and messi

A lot will happen in your life, good and bad. But everything that happens, you will owe to football. When people question your style, or why you smile after you lose a match, I want you to think of one memory.

When your father leaves this earth, you won’t have any movies of him. Your family doesn’t have much money, so your parents don’t own a video camera. You won’t be able to hear your father’s voice, or hear him laughing again.

But among his possessions, there is one thing you’ll always have to remember him by. It’s a photo of you and him playing football together. You are smiling, happy — with the ball at your feet. He is happy watching you.

When the money comes — and the pressure, and the critics — stay free.

Play as he told you to play.

Play with the ball.

[Click here for a clip showing Ronaldinho play with the ball and his opponents.]

—Ronaldinho

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The original was published by The Players’ Tribune. Click here for the original article in English, here for the Spanish version, and here for the Portuguese version.

Limitations of referee offside calls

This post introduces one of the most difficult decisions a referee has to make. But before we get into the details, I strongly suggest you test yourself using the below video.

It will show you 25 very brief clips that ask you to decide if the player is offside or not. Then at around 4:20 you will be given the answers for each of the 25 clips. How did you do?

What makes it so difficult to correctly decide if the player is indeed offside is the limitation of the human eye and brain. It’s called the Flash-Lag Effect, which makes a moving object appear to be ahead of its actual position.

Click here for a great webpage if you want to dig deeper. I’m quoting:

Top referees are aware of the Flash Lag Effect and practice hard to factor it into their thought process when considering whether a player is in an offside position. They also know that the faster the players are moving, the more tolerance they have to factor in to their decision making.

This is why close offsides are the most difficult calls in the game. The AR has to override what his own eyes and brain are telling him and, if they make a correct call, when it appears to every person in the stadium including himself that he is incorrect, then that call is of genius proportions. 

Here is probably one of the most ‘genius’ decisions in World Cup history. Look very closely at the final still image showing the heal of the defender keeping Chicharito onside.

However, as Offside Explained says, “this decision could have gone either way – at this speed had the pass come 0,02 seconds later we would see a clear offside in the still-image. There is no way for a (human) referee to know if it’s offside or not.

Also, according to the laws we have to evaluate head, body and feet. When players are running fast it is very hard to recognize the position of the feet vs body.

This is why we have to accept marginal mistakes when the player is offside and there is fast movement. But the players and the fans do not accept nor understand this, but there is no other way for the referees.”

The only solution to this is technology – either video replays (as is currently being tested successfully at the top level in select leagues) or somehow tagging and then sensing in real-time the position of every part of each player’s body and the ball, which is much more complicated than video replays.

In the above World Cup example a video replay would have been an obvious decision. The game was halted anyway because a (suspected) goal was scored. The referee would run to the sideline to watch a replay in super slow motion and then determine if the restart is a kick-off for blue (if Chicharito was indeed onside and scored a valid goal) or a free kick for blue (if Chicharito was offside after all).

Unfortunately, at the youth level coaches, players, and spectators will have to accept the errors that the Flash-Lag Effect introduces into the game.

 

Probably goal of the season in the EPL – enjoy!

One more time: the critical importance of small-sided games

I was watching the European La Liga Promises youth tournament a couple of weeks ago and, apart from the quality soccer these U13 kids from around Europe (and especially Spain) are already displaying, what struck me the most was that these 12 and 13 year old boys were playing 7v7 (!) on small fields with small goals.

Note also the additional line running vertically across the field about five yards in front of each penalty box. Opponents are not allowed to cross this line during goal kicks to encourage playing from the back instead of punting the ball up the field.

I’ve known that youth soccer in Europe, and especially in Spain, is played on smaller fields with fewer players for longer, but seeing it in action at this elite youth tournament reminded me of how important this is for player development.

Take a look at the Spanish age chart below. The third row, Alevin, is U12, the fourth row is U13 (aka Infantil B) and the fifth/last row is U14 (aka Infantil A). U12 plays 7v7, U13 9v9, and then U14 plays 11v11. (But note that the U13s still played 7v7 at the above La Liga Promises tourney).

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Click here for an excellent presentation on the importance of small-sided games. I’m pasting a couple of quotes and key slides from that presentation here:

“Over the years, we (the U.S.) have relied on athleticism and fitness. But times are changing, and we can’t rely on that any more. In small-sided games, you can’t take plays off. The girls we saw training were all totally engaged. You can’t start to do that at age 25.”

Carli Lloyd (World Cup Champion 2015, World Female Player of the Year 2015 & 2016)

“When you play on big fields (as a young player), there is not much demand for clean technique. I developed technique later. When I went to college, I still had a very weak left foot.”

Heather O’Reilly (World Cup Champion 2015)

In 2016 U.S. Soccer introduced very important changes along these lines (click here for the full U.S. Soccer presentation on the value of small-sided games) and I very much hope that all leagues, clubs, and coaches in our country fully implement these changes.

As the below chart shows, U.S. Soccer hasn’t gone as far as Spain, unfortunately, but this is a big improvement already.

Our U12s are now supposed to continue playing 9v9 on smaller fields (this ended at U11 Spring before), and the U13s then start with 11v11 on full-sized fields. In Spain the U13s still play 9v9 for another year though and the U11s and U12s play 7v7.

small-sided-games-chart

If longer-term player development and teaching quality soccer is the goal of a club and coach then there is no question that small-sided games and focus on skills and technique is essential. Click here for a very good webpage listing the benefits of small-sided games.

We need to do much more of that in our country and I personally hope that U.S. Soccer will fully adopt the Spanish approach to even smaller-sided games for longer in the near future.

Taking this one (small) step further, I would love to see futsal as a regular year-round part of the youth soccer experience, at least until age 12, but ideally 14. For example, instead of, say, three outdoor practices per week, let’s do two outdoor sessions and one futsal session focusing on skills, technique, and ball control – all in tight spaces.

If you’re unfamiliar with futsal simply search my blog using keyword ‘futsal’. And if you’re interested in where to play futsal in NorCal click here.

Probably the biggest hurdle are the economics given that youth soccer in our country is a private market with clubs operating as businesses (which is not the case in Europe). Click here for a blog post on how much youth soccer can cost and click here for a blog post on our ‘pay-to-play’ system if you want to learn more.

The economics become more difficult as rosters are reduced for smaller-sided games. Coaching, say, 16 or 18 kids at the same time is much more profitable than, say, 10 or 12.

And there will also be resistance from parents who’s son or daughter doesn’t have the skills and ball control needed to be successful in smaller-sided games, nor the interest to work hard on skills development.

These parents will push for larger games because the lack of soccer ability is much easier masked on a big field playing 11v11, especially if he/she is good at running and physically on the larger end of the spectrum in his/her age group.

This youngster will be able to stay with a top team for longer, but will end up being a worse player over the medium- to long-term.

And coaches will have to do the hard work of teaching skills and technique in more detail for longer. Many don’t have those skills themselves, unfortunately, and it’s easier to focus on ‘bigger picture’ 11v11 coaching.

That said, we’re heading in the right direction and we are going to see the fruits of the changes U.S. Soccer has implemented in the coming years.

We won’t compete internationally until we develop players like Coutinho. Period.

 

Excellent documentary on the German soccer youth development approach

Example of elite talent with excellent technical skills: Martin Ødegaard (age 17) @Real Madrid

A 3,000 mile journey in search of real football: a coach’s education

These Football Times published a must-read article a couple of weeks ago on the big gap in coaching quality here compared to countries like Spain.

It describes one US coach’s experience with three Spanish guest coaches during a summer camp on the East Coast and then his three years of learning about soccer in Spain.

Here are key sections from that article (edited slightly for brevity and clarity):

The three Spanish coaches each taught me more about football than I had previously learned in my 15 year playing career through a variety of different settings including travel teams, premier clubs, summer camps, high school soccer, college soccer and ultimately men’s league.

My coaching career, which included US Soccer national courses, club and collegiate experience, and working summer camps, had been as educationally disappointing as my time as a player.

Between playing and coaching, I had been a part of the US Soccer Federation for 16 years, yet what had I really learned?

In the two weeks I had been working with the three football wise men, I discovered football had a game cycle, it had four phases, each technical ability had a specific tactical intention, it could be simplified in 2v1s and 3v2s, training finishing didn’t mean you’d score goals, defending was more than your stance.

They were showing me through their actions that coaches facilitate learning not with their instructions, but their well-crafted sessions.

Coaches don’t teach creativity but nurture it.

I witnessed how they played chess with their players whilst empowering them to be more than pawns. They demonstrated that coaches are in the spotlight for the losses and in the shadows for the wins. This was merely the tip of the iceberg and I wanted more.

These three Spanish coaches did something US Soccer never had: they inspired me.

At that point, I came to the conclusion that I knew nothing about football. US Soccer had failed me. I had dedicated the majority of my life to it and it had let me down.

Throughout the years, on countless teams with a myriad of experiences and numerous coaches, I was betrayed with a lack information, inspiration and motivation.

Footballistic unfulfillment fed my yearning to learn everything there was to know about my childhood passion, and the only place to achieve this was 6,000 kilometres away.

So I went to Spain three years ago to study football and I finally understand it.

There is an exorbitant amount of mental and physical elements that concern a player’s development over the course of a year, and more so, their integral career. To assign an unqualified and untrained individual to be responsible for a team of young football players would be detrimental to the sport and the integrity of the children.

In order to train any team at any age, the Spanish Football Federation requires coaches to have completed at least the UEFA B license (465 hours over at least nine months of theoretical and practical learning and evaluation). A coach in possession of a US Soccer National ‘D’ license (36-40 hours) is allowed to train any team at any level younger than 15.

How do we expect an individual who’s been prepared for a mere 40 hours to be capable of growing young players into exceptional footballers?

To read the full article click here. It’s worth it!

Thank you, David, for sharing your experiences. It helps push us along here!

Soccer players are artists not athletes – encourage freedom and creativity

GoalNation published an interview with soccer legend Paul Breitner about youth player development in our country. Below is an excerpt with some edits for brevity, and please note that Paul’s command of English isn’t perfect.

Considered one of the greatest living footballers, Paul Breitner won the 1974 World Cup with Germany and is one of the few players in the world — like Pele and Zidane – who have scored in two World Cup finals. He won seven German National Championships with Bayern Munich (1972, 1973, 1974, 1980, 1981) and two with Real Madrid (1975, 1976) in Spain.

Q: If you were a player who had been developed in America, would you have gone on to be a professional player who scored in two World Cup finals?

Paul Breitner: Never.

Q: So you don’t believe you would have grown into the player you became if you had been developed in our current youth soccer world?

Paul Breitner: No, I would have developed to become the same as 100 (other) players in the US. You have the same types of players and everyone has to learn the same moves.

Q: What is important for a soccer player to be successful?

Paul Breitner: A soccer player has to do his job feeling free, and not being commanded and demanded. A soccer player needs to have the freedom to create ideas. He has to defend and attack in his own way – with his own intuition.

Q: What do you believe is wrong in American youth soccer?

Paul Breitner: The problem is that Americans think soccer players are athletes. No way – a soccer player is an artist not an athlete. Coaches have to realize that they are working with artists, not robots.

Q: How are youth soccer players developed in Germany?

Paul Breitner: In Germany, every player is guided according to his own possibilities, his own skills and is not treated the same way as the ten or fifteen other guys on his team. Players are encouraged to discover all kinds of freedom, creativity and responsibility. Respect, partnership, fairness; we teach these values from the age of four.

 

What’s troubling with this?

The above image is from the France vs USA game at the U20 Women’s World Cup on Sunday. It shows our team during a goal kick. Every goal kick was like this.

What do you see?

I was watching the game with my 14 year old daughter. We glanced over the first goal kick. During the second goal kick my daughter said that it looks funny how bunched up they are. Twenty adult-sized players in roughly 10% of the field!

And then during the third goal kick it hit us – our national team can’t play out from the back!!!

This stunned us. My daughter’s U15 ECNL team plays out from the back – 90% of the time. It has been part of their player development for years, but it’s rare unfortunately.

[Post-publication update: my daughter watched the Stanford vs Santa Clara Women’s Soccer College game last night at Stanford. Guess what – these teams did the same bunching up on goal kicks as the U20 national team!]

Playing out from the back is fundamental to modern high-quality, possession oriented soccer. It’s been the standard for quality soccer for a decade at least.

I’ve included a great educational video at the very end of this post – it shows playing out from the back all the way down to the U10 level.

And click here for a good article on this topic. To quote a key passage:

“Football is besieged with coaches and players lacking technical ability and tactical awareness to start with the basics before implementing this methodology and the results can be catastrophic.

A team with players lacking the technical ability or composure will require these players to take risks that cannot be overcome if the ball is lost so deep in the defensive third.

Without a midfield comprised of players willing and able to receive the ball under pressure, playing out of the back is a fool’s game.

From a developmental standpoint, teams excelling at playing out of the back are comprised of players whose footballing education focused on technical ability and proficiency at a young age.”

It was obvious to my 14 year old daughter (and even my 10 year old daughter) that the French players had better touch, skill, composure, movement, and soccer IQ than our players.

Yet, this U.S. Soccer press release referred to the game as being “a physical match” and head coach Michelle French commented “what an absolutely incredibly athletic team France is”.

Were we watching the same game? Hopefully Michelle had to say this for the press release and is having very different conversations behind the scenes.

And can it really be true that our most elite players don’t have the technical ability, soccer IQ, and confidence to play possession soccer?

Don’t our elite goalkeepers have the foot skills needed to support teams playing out from the back?

Global soccer powerhouses such as Germany, Spain, England, and France are applying their world-class coaching and deep understanding of the game to a growing number of girls now playing soccer in those countries. France in particular stands out for me at U20 and below – this bodes well for the future.

And there is one country doing an even better job than the Europeans: Japan.

The Japanese U20 team is playing beautiful soccer. They are playing with technical ability, tactical understanding, creativity, teamwork, and discipline far above anyone else. It’s a treat to watch. And this ability exists across all age groups, not just this U20 team.

[By the way, you can watch these games at http://www.foxsoccer2go.com. Live and recorded.]

Girls have traditionally been marginalized in those countries because soccer was a “man’s sport”, like (American) football here in our country. That started to change about a decade ago and will continue to change going forward.

So world-class player development plus a rapidly expanding pool of raw talent = trouble for us unless we improve our own player development.

Might this be one of the reasons why U.S. Soccer is taking control of elite player development with the launch of the U.S. Development Academy for girls this coming summer?

I strongly suspect that U.S. Soccer will relatively quickly extend the USGDA down to U12/U13 (from the initial U14/15) and then eventually U10/11. Developing world-class technical ability – the foundation for everything else – can’t start early enough.

This begs another question: what have our top clubs and coaches been teaching our girls these last ten years?

Mostly how to win games using the most athletic and physically mature girls possible plus a low-risk ‘kick the ball up the field’ approach.

This reminds me of the coach of the U14 ECNL team that beat my daughter’s U14 ECNL team in the semifinals of the most recent Surf Cup.

He kept shouting “get corner kicks” during the second half because his girls were physically superior to our girls (but technically inferior).

They scored two goals from corner kicks and advanced to the final, but we played much better soccer.

Frankly, from my many years watching and officiating ECNL (and EGSL) games across all age groups, it’s primarily about ‘winning’ and rankings and trophies and player recruiting. There are exceptions, of course, but I believe that the overall picture holds true.

The rivalries between ECNL clubs in each geographic sub-region is intense and often politically charged as clubs compete for local talent. It can get nasty at times.

This dynamic is a disgrace for (elite) player development, and a massive disservice to our girls and our country.

What doesn’t help is that the vast majority of parents even of top girls (and boys) only understand the game at a superficial level and have little patience for true longer-term player development.

Parents shop around for winning teams/clubs without looking closely at how the team is winning and what the youngsters are being taught.

And let’s not forget that coaches need to earn a living in our pay-to-play system. Much of their earnings (and the club’s health and growth) depend, unfortunately, on winning games to attract more talent.

So we need to be careful who to blame. This isn’t necessarily the coaches’ fault – they have to put food on the table after all.

Let’s compete, of course, but the elite level in particular has to be about longer-term player development, not simply ‘winning’.

It has to be about risk taking, not risk avoidance. About creativity and artistry and smarts, not primarily athleticism.

Time to do the hard work of true world-class player development, folks!

And teaching our youngsters the technical ability and tactical understanding to confidently play out from the back is integral to that.

 

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