The Messi Problem

[Hans SchneiterParticipant]

So when Messi scored his goal versus Athletic Bilbao on Saturday there was a coach on Twitter posting the following:

“Just seen Messi’s goal v Athletic Bilbao in the #CopaDelReyFinal. And to think stupid, uneducated coaches shout ‘PASS’ at young players…”

“If they want to pass, shoot, dribble etc then let them do that. It shouldn’t come from the coach. If a player does something on the field it has to be their decision, not a coaches.”

“My overall annoyance is when coaches control their players with commands on the pitch.”

To give some context this coach is involved with the 5-11 year old age bracket. He later softened on his “stupid” comment but not on the basic philosophy.

What are your thoughts? How would you respond to this coach? How does it relate to the 3Four3 concepts and Brian’s coaching methods?

 

[Aman GrewalParticipant]

Hans

I think there are two different questions here:

1. Should coaches provide a lot of instruction during matches? My personal sense is that they shouldn’t. There’s a good section on this in Dan Abrahams’ book “Soccer Brain” – young players struggle to absorb instructions on top of all the other stimuli they are dealing with. What they most need are messages to maintain their self-belief. Personally I try to avoid sending messages to a player on the ball but will communicate positional instructions to players not on the ball (usually “lose your man”, “overlap” or “get wide”). We have found it is more powerful to video the match and provide instruction by sharing match highlights/ issues.

2. Should players be encouraged to pass rather than dribble? One of my biggest learnings from 3four3 has been that possession comes from what players do before receiving the ball. If a coach is shouting “pass” at a player it is already way too late – and normally the sign of a bad coach. The player should have already scanned for options and received to the back foot. They should have been trained to understand the pattern on the pitch. If at that point the player sees an opportunity to dribble then that is their call – provided they have scanned and received correctly. But many young players dribble because they haven’t scanned and can’t see the patterns, and that needs to be worked on in training.

That’s my take on it anyway…

Aman

[Hans SchneiterParticipant]

Aman,

Thank you for the thoughtful response and context… reinforces that Twitter is not the format for discussions. Your comments are spot on and will help me in future discussions. I’m finding that many coaches in this country react to the idea of young kids learning rondos because they believe it replaces the individual technique/skill elements (not my experience) and that it is too “tactical”/too young. I like the idea of providing young kids with the foundation positional and possession skills/knowledge and a general structure for how to move the the ball/opponents (what you talked about in your response) and then allowing them to express their creativity and technical skills within that framework. My experience has been that their individual flair and creativity is so much more effective within a “loose” positional/possession framework. Then its just a matter of layering in more as they grow older and tightening up the ideas and execution.

Would Messi be the phenom he is if he had not gone through La Masia and learned the Barca way? I also like this video clip of Pep talking about different types of players: http://news.adidas.com/global/Latest-News/Pep-Guardiola-On-The-Football-Revolution—Gamedayplus-Special—adidas-Football-/s/f53db6ff-2f8e-4987-92a2-48613da20a7a

[Luis LewisParticipant]

Hans, if Messi had started at Barca at age 9 he would not be the player he is now… They couldn’t get him to pass the damn ball until he was 13-14 or so.

Having gone thru a professional academy I can tell you that all coaches in our academy gave instructions freely during games and during training, yes often there was cursing (disclaimer: Argentinians curse a lot!) . I honestly rarely heard them since I was good at concentrating and tuning all noise out except the voice of my nearest teammates, that went for all my teammates as well.  A Player at any age level must be able to handle any noise, that’s what often separates a pro player from those that didn’t make the cut, being able to handle the “pressure”. Should Rec players be treated the same as Academy players? that’s debatable and having coached both, I do not lean on my rec kids as hard as I do my better players. But I do have a standard that everyone must adhere to.

This crazy business of “guided discovery” and “players must be self-guided” has no firm basis anywhere. No Academy that wants to produce quality talent destined for 1st team has proven that they can do it using these types of moonbeam hippie crap methods. That’s a fact

[Luis LewisParticipant]

This is closer to what we went thru in Newell’s academy. Always in small units. 2-3 coaches overseeing us… constant feedback, until we could do it in our sleep

[Hans SchneiterParticipant]

Luis,

Thanks for your comments! Could you provide more clarity? When you say “this is closer” and “we could do it in our sleep” what exactly do you mean? From the Bielsa video I couldn’t really tell what they were doing (looked like a run of the mill SSG). I know you were showing the way the coach interacted with the players but I’m also interested in what kind of training activities you did at Newell’s.

[Luis LewisParticipant]

Hans, apologies for missing this post. here is a video representative of what we experienced:

btw, El Loco was one of our academy coaches and he was the one that explained to me about the way “playmakers” think and operate.

I explained my experience in another forum within the context of Guided Discovery and the responses were overwhelming what I would consider very American… meaning not based on reality but on wishful thinking…. below is my post from that site:

“<span id=”post_message_1287954107”>  How we were trained: We spent about 45 hrs a week playing. We had 3-4 training sessions per week, usually about 90 mins long, its what we would call tactical training as well as team routines. So we spent about 40 hrs playing Small-sided games, they nearly always had constraints….
The training sessions with the trainers and coaches were under heavy instruction and supervision. The pressure put on us was intense. there was no cuddling or false “great job!”. We were not allowed to talk back or ask questions. The few times they dignified to respond to our questions we got the same pat answer: “we will explain when you are older”. Everything was automated and orchestrated, technique had to be flawless. We as players did spent a lot of time talking amongst ourselves and helping each other out. We also communicated constantly on the pitch during a match, in fact, we rarely ever heard what the coach was telling us as we focused on our teammates. This dispels the myth that kids coached this way are automatons, we also elected our own captains.
The competition for spots on the academy was ferocious. When their scout found me, they had me play against their 3 best players, I was bare-foot and they had everything a poor kid could only dream of. The club would bring kids from northern towns every weekend to try out, we all knew what that meant, there was always a possibility we would lose a buddy we have been bunking with for years. last time I cried I was 16 when I lost my last remaining friend, we had been roommates since 9 years old.
During school year we attended school between 8am-3pm. We played soccer 6am-8am, then 4pm-9pm. We had 9pm-11pm for goofing off with our teammates then lights out. Weekends was even more soccer including games and scrimmages.
As we got into the U15s they begun to explain concepts to us, they also answered our questions. I  wondered why they chose the 3 smallest players to play the role of playmaker (enganche) on the team. That was just coincidence; they explained to me that not everyone has the “intelligence” for the role, some kids have an aptitude for it and their job was to develop it and refine it.

Until Americans understand the path to achieve quality they will never produce quality players. The hours must be there, the relentless competition must be there. Right now the people in charge of youth soccer have a rec mentality, yes there is a place for rec, but it shouldn’t control the way the pro track is managed and taught. Americans play down to the weakest player on the team, as opposed to strongest players on the team. I separate my teams in training into 3 groups of skill-level, which some parents and kids question… again, the mentality that “I paid for my kid, therefore he deserves to be treated like a star”. That “every kid is special and must be indulged” mentality. The painful truth is that not all kids have the physical or mental talents to make it to pro level, even a level as low as the standard set in the USA.

Getting back to what Biology and evolution tells us: there is only so much limited information a mind can process (working memory), so the more a player can automate (meaning long-term memory) which is memorize and remember, aka ‘instinct’, the better off he is. He doesn’t have to ‘think’ on the pitch, he doesn’t have <span style=”text-decoration: underline;”>time</span> to think! So the reason the world’s most successful academies automate so much is that they want kids to memorize and internalize (store in long-term memory) so they can recall it and apply it successfully in a split second during a match. Bottom line: the more correct information a player can internalize (store in long-term memory and recall) the better he will be.
This obsession of applying academic wishful thinking and fads (Guided Discovery, discovery learning, etc) such as kids must be engaged, having fun, leads to chaos and wasted valuable time. All constructs which scientific studies (quantifiable data) have shown again and again to be baseless. They constantly misunderstand ‘creativity’ and think it only comes from spontaneous thought (like a gift from the gods), creativity is nothing more than applying the correct solution to an problem encountered before using the correct technique. Those problems and solutions are developed in training, not out of thin air…

Whats is the number one problem of youth coaches? they spent their entire sessions doing block training, which should be relegated to soccer homework and and dedicate very little on SSGs with constraints as well as automation and orchestrating of team play.
A coach is not there to entertain kids (‘let them play’), he’s there to make them better players and teammates. How many clubs honestly devote time to creating winter or  summer soccer programs to encourage free play and individual skill, without charging an arm and a leg?

I love this country dearly but watching the USSF and the various youth orgs apply groundless fads to ‘better soccer’ in this country is painful. As I’m fond of saying “When it comes to football, America never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity”.
The proof is in the faulty product they have been putting out for decades: Teams that can barely string 3 passes together, that are obsessed with size and speed, that make news when 1 or 2 players are exported to another country’s div1 league. Yet countries like Brazil and Argentina  have led in exported players to the world’s top leagues for decades now”</span>

 

 

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