At long last the Football Association does something positive and sensible to try and improve children’s football and the criticism is pouring forth. Having experienced the complete mess that is youth football in Bristol, I learned long ago that the main problem was the emphasis on winning. Boys, some as young as six, being pushed to win at all costs. It did not take long to realise that for most people, the coaches and parents, winning was everything and it took even less time to realise the pernicious effect this was having on young footballers.
The FA wants to avoid publishing the results of games involving children from the ages of 7 to 11 for a number of reasons, one of which is the so called stigma of losing. I have heard the arguments against this ad nauseum over the years. Children should be encouraged to be competitive, the world is competitive, they need to learn quickly and all the rest of it. It is the application, some feel, of Natural Selection to football as it applies in life. You can see the attraction and the words, when left unchallenged, sound reasonable enough. But are they?
The decade and more I followed kids’ football left me very disillusioned. I saw good coaches, I saw far more bad ones. I observed decent, respectful parents but I saw far more who were abusive and living out their own failed sporting lives through their children. The blame culture was everywhere, aimed specifically at young boys and referees. But everywhere, it was about winning.
As my sons started to play football, I accepted the competitive argument. I watched children’s games as if I was watching Bristol Rovers or Liverpool. I celebrated goals, I groaned out loud when a boy made a mistake and nodded sagely when the coach blamed him for the subsequent goal that the team conceded. No one remembers a loser. But later on, I looked more closely. Winning mattered, all right, and it mattered more than anything else. And managers favoured a certain type of player. He would be big, strong, he could run all day, he could tackle and best of all he could be relied upon to launch the ball from one end of the field to another. Every successful team had at least one, some teams had no other types of player. Smaller players were used in short bursts, boys who tried things that went wrong, like dribbling or attempting a difficult pass, were scolded by coaches and parents alike: “Just get rid if it, don’t take chances, do that again and I’m taking you off.” This was not the exception, this was the norm.
I was a fan of continental football long before I discovered children’s football, marvelling at the skill levels of the players in all positions. And in Spain’s La Liga, the three little men – Messi, Xavi and Iniesta – played football the like of which we had never seen. We were brought up with a different role model and his name was Carlton Palmer, the leggy midfielder who could run all day, tackle and give the ball away like no one in Spain could ever do. Every kids’ football team has a Palmer. He was the conduit through which the entire team functioned. He couldn’t dribble, his first touch was generally awful; he couldn’t really play, but he knew how to win. And he still rules the roost today.
It is not about removing the element of competition from football per se. Children get that anyway. They know and understand what winning is about and the passion burns inside. I was a terrible player but I loathed losing. No one needed to teach me to hate losing. So if the passion is there, what do we need to coach?
Someone once said this: “In England, you teach your children to win. In Spain, they teach them to play football.” And that’s true. Once you learn skills and improve, it is much easier to win football matches. Just look at the lumbering midfielder trying to dispossess 5’7″ Andres Iniesta: he can’t do it because the little man can play and he can play because he has been coached to play. More often than not, a team full of Iniestas will win.
On a radio phone in this week, a caller described removing the competitive element from children’s football was “political correctness gone mad”. This means literally nothing, other than to emphasise the caller’s complete lack of understanding about developing footballers. There is only one way to get better at football and that is to practice. Win at all costs breeds losers who lack the technical requirements to succeed in football. The big lad who can run all day usually drifts away from football once reaching adolescence because he does not possess the requisite skills to make it at any level.
