When Kevin McShane visited several European youth programs, he was struck by how "holistic" they were -- their emphasis on the mental and physical aspects of the game, as well as technical & tactical training. In a paper, "Talent Identification in Football," two English scientists attempted to measure the difference between "elite" and "sub-elite" soccer players. They performed a battery of physical, physchological, and soccer-specific skills tests. They found 4 variables to be most important. In no particular order, Speed Agility Motivational orientation (task oriented, not ego oriented) Anticipatory skill Think we would all agree on the first 2 items. The last 2 were a surprise to me, and probably to you.
Aka, an inability to see the play develop and the coaches' preference for the "safe pass". This is a valid point ... except, in this instance, I believe you're talking speed über alles, something a player must have before he can be considered to have the potential to be an Andy Cole (let's go easy with Robben's comparisons as some people are touting him for the EPL Player of the Year and Martin Jol called him the best Dutch player since Cruyiff, which is quite a praise considering that van Basten and Gullit were world/Europe players of the Year) or a Sean Wright-Phillips ... or, for that matter, a Kevin Phillips. The problem with this thinking is that no US player has come out of the youth system with an Andy Cole/SWP speed of thought and a complimentary skill level. What the US did produce were the DaMarcus Beasleys and the Landon Donovans at best and the Jamar Beasleys and the Ali Curtises at the very worst. The latter two weren't just incompetent in a way a Colaship forward may be visavis his brethren in the EPL; they basically didn't even know where to run on the field during a game. It's as if this was a Monty Python soccer match for people with no sense of direction. So, I'd say that one must concentrate on teaching the basics first and hope that the Robbens can emerge from the sheer numbers of quality athletes entering the sports. Meanwhile, a few Andy Coles would be a beautiful beginning.
What I'm saying is that if you don't have the skill and/or the athletic ability (things which are a hell of a lot easier to judge than things like mental toughness which I'd bet has a big error range in evaluating) the mental toughness part has ultimately limited utility. For example, before he was drafted, the 411 on Clint Dempsey was that he was exceptionally skilled, possessed very good size and pretty good wheels. The knock on him was that he could sometimes look disinterested or lackadaisical. He often wouldn't track back and play on both sides, and gave the impression that he didn't have the best attitude in the world. Turns out that neagtive description doesn't resemble the player that showed up for the Revolution (the physical technical parts were on the money). Dempsey threw himself all over the field. Playing whatever position he was assigned to like his life depended upon it. So why the discrepancy there? My guess is that things like "mental toughness" are vague enough to where they become the prototype self-fulfilling prophecy. It may be that the reason mental toughness correlates so well to playing at a high level, is because the ultimate determination of whether a player has the sufficient mental toughness to succeed at a high level is whether he actually succeeds at a high level. If a player who was thought to have all the skills and ability to do so doesn't make it, they may very well conclude he lacked "mental toughness." In otherwords it may be "success" => "mental toughness" rather than mental toughness => "success." It's not just a matter of whether its true, it's a matter of the utility of the concept. If it's difficult to know whether a player has the mental toughness to succeed until he does so, how useful of a litmus test can it be when looking at youth players?
There's a great Gerd Müller quote who read the game better than anyone I've ever seen - "Wenn's denkst, ist eh zu spät." (~ "If you have to think, it's already too late.") Now watch an MLS game, even the last Cup. There's often neither thinking nor anticipation.
My kid's (painful) ODP lesson this weekend. He was chided for attempting (successfully) to play the ball out of back under pressure. After the session he said, "Dad, they kept saying 'Good ball' to the guys who kicked to the other team. It was so annoying out there, nobody was passing to the guys on our team." That's a tough one. I'm tempted to tell him, "Ignore those guys and play the game correctly." But you know the consequences ... I said nothing. He can decide.
Right. And when you start teaching kids incorrect basics, it takes a while to "unteach" them and most US college kids and the MLS youngsters still have that "safe pass" mentality linger inside them as well. It takes a year or two in Europe to see how the game ought to be played. Which brings me back to Bradenton. If it has so many kids with "bad habits", then it must "unteach" them right there. But I am not sure it does that all that well.
We appreciate Cheezi's willingness to be hijacked. Next time (first time) that I see him in action, I promise to post the summary here.
I 've always been fascinated by the Ajax T.I.P.S. (technique, insight , personality, speed ) method of player identification. I don't think the letters were selected simply to complete a snappy acronym. I think that this was the intended order, i.e., although all four requirements are necessary to produce a good player, technique, then insight (tactical sense) are the first two, and everything builds from there. I do agree that success on the field will help to reinforce mental toughness. However, there is still a personality/character core that still must be present.
It's the old saying John " When in doubt smash it out " Many coaches apply this label to at the back when under pressure. Enjoy american soccer..be all you can't be
Which could happen. It'll be fun over the next few years, as players who I have seen at the youth level hit the college and professional scene. Odds are, I either have already watched or will shortly watch a future World Cup player, since I've seen many of the top teams across the country at various age groups. Pretty cool to speculate about who that might be, although of course I don't have the faintest of clues. Freddy Adu aside, I have no idea how one could predict greatness for one 14 year old vs. another. All you can know is, who has the possibility by belong to the .0001 pool. Obviously, Cheezi is there.
I go away for a weekend and discover this thread has moved three pages. voros, I think you've been polluted by baseball I'll claim what you're doing is valid there but not for soccer. In baseball you aways want a player with a rare ability even if he has nothing else going for him. For instance, a player with tremendous power can always come off the bench exactly when power is needed. But of course that doesn't work in soccer; not only are substitutions very limited but the flow of the game will force players to do tasks which aren't part of their planned responsibilities. Of course a player who only has a good work rate is worthless. But so is a player who has nothing but speed or nothing but technique. Now, I admit that speed only and technique only guys are much rarer than work rate only guys, but since all three are (for the national team) worthless, who cares? In baseball you would care, since you could find useful roles for the single talent guys. Can you teach work rate? You can teach anything to some extent but I bet the gains here are minor. Changing a person's personality is darn near impossible. There are too many talented but lazy players (in all sports) for me to believe it's something anybody can pick up. I view speed, work rate and fitness as a trinity. If you lack one it undermines the other two.
FYI on Dempsey ... I have it on pretty good authority that, at Furman, he was SOOO much better than anyone else there that often what was seen was a disinterestedness that derived from a kind of boredom... Obvoiusly, a player's development, and/or the flowering of his abilities, is a function of the environment they are in... The problem with assessment, of course, is projecting whether the "disinterestedness" prevalent in a less challenging environment goes away when the challenge is greater... The analogy of course is the very bright kid who gets bad grades in school because he is underwhelmed by the whole experience. The correlation between ability and performance is way below 50% in such instances. Some kids, I would say, carryover these attitudes into the new environment, some change those attitudes. I bet there isn't a test for this, and even if the kid says, "Sure, I'll give it 1000%," you never know until you see, as you correctly point out.
Which goes back to my original observation/question, why do we not teach this with game films? It works in football and basketball.
That's fine, but that still leaves the issue of identifying it. It's easy for anybody to figure out that Marvell Wynne can run like all holy hell. As such that aspect of his game is essentially impossible to get wrong. 100 out of 100 people agree, he's fast. My argument is that logically from there, the decisions you make about "insight" and "personality" are subject to a far greater range of error. Dempsey is such an example. Why not use as a base state from which to draw your decisions those things which are both easy and obvious to spot, and which have a significant correlation to future success. Even if I grant that insight and personality are more important than speed, it seems to me to be much easier and reliable task to gather up the best guys in terms of speed then it is with insight and personality. Also, almost as important, even if you can reliably identify insight and personality, to do so must take significantly more time than identifying speed and to an extent, technique. In the current player identification setup, that is not an unimportant distinction. I'm not talking about gathering up the 40 fastest 15 year old soccer players every two years, I am saying that it would be best if the decision makers consciously adjusted their mindset to forgetting about developing anything except top level National Teamers. Every cycle I see a group of players in Bradenton whom I'm unsure of what the plan is in terms of what they think these guys can eventually be. Good pros? Sure, but from a National Team perspective, who cares?
From what I remember of his answer as to why he came out early, his response seemed to support that sort of hypothesis. His response was basically that his training with the U20s alerted him to the level of soccer that was out there and he said he wanted to challenge himself with it. And as you state, it's often difficult to figure out who has just been in bad situations and would do a 180 with a good situation, and which players there are actual problems with. The National team program is an exercise in maximizing odds and I think to that end, the player evaluators need to make distinctions between the things they know and the things they merely suspect and alter the decisions accordingly. This could be remedied by a system with multiple independent groups evaluating the same pool of players as the differening opinions would present opportunities to a group of players with a wider range of traits. From there the cream could simply rise to the top. We do not have such a program, however.
I think soccer film culture is of a close-up, Mr. DeMille, whereas football has to be watched from the endzone in a "master" shot.
I think kids today do lead structured lives but it's coddled structure where everyone gets a medal, everyone's special, it's not who won or lost it's how you played the game. Well that leads to apathy, maybe Bill Maher is right about the feminization of America. It's also all about building up a resume to get into college. Parents don't care whether their kids become great players only if they can get a college scholarship. Now with MLS the first generation of kids who have grown up watching the league are entering it. Maybe that will help soccer? Oh wait, the fed spending 5 million dollars to build fields in a suburb of Dallas is how soccer will grow. The NFL has a personality test, the Wonderlic, and while I don't think the results have ever been made public you can sometimes tell when a player doesn't do well on it, Randy Moss. Insight can be seen but it can take some time. What seperates Lebron from Carmelo is Lebron's insight, or what keeps Jason Kidd in the league as a below average shooter and athlete is his insight. Landon, JOB, Gaven, Szetela, and sometimes Freddy have insight, a few others might also. PSV will do wonders to develop DMB's insight and if all he can learn to do is read Landon's and similar players' I'll be happy. I don't think our program needs to do much better at developing speed, just refining the technique to use it. I've come to believe that technique is developed at the bottom of the youth level and until there is demand and rewards in our system for youth coaches to do this it won't get much better. Voros is right in that Bradenton needs to develop stars not pros. I like to call these players playmakers. GAM is a playmaker, DMB is a playmaker, Dempsey is a playmaker, Mapp can be a playmaker, Gooch is a playmaker. These are players who can be tought to be productive throughout a game but are able to, through a superior natural ability in some part of the game, Speed, dribbling, insight, physicality, change a game in one instance. Gaven and DMB are great at getting fouled in dangerous places, Landon can hit a pinpoint accurate pass/shot, Gooch and Dempsey can get to balls that their markers just can't. But these players aren't just good for one play in a game. Every elite country has to have a mix of utility and brilliance, the goal is to find that mix in eleven players. Utility can be tought, brilliance must be groomed. Ronaldinho can consistently provide brilliance and that's makes him usefull, Memo can sometimes produce brilliance and that's what makes him a liability.
Great reading everybody. (but Adam, if you are reading this - run away and work on technique and speed). 1. voros - if you or someone shows me that statistical method that really tells us something about soccer teams and players, I'm open to it. I think you agreed before that it hasn't been developed yet. 2. I think the Bradenton bit is almost moot, in that our player pool is so far past a 40-player limit. Also, so long as it is tied in with the U17 National TEAM - it cannot simply focus on developing stars (which apparently can only be in a certain few positions). 3. i'm almost done with those alternative to our current developmental system articles. Rest assured many of you give food for thought.
No, it's an intelligence test. But they set it up in such a way that it really tests intelligence, and not just book larnin'. SI had an article about it a long, long time ago. Pretty interesting stuff, designing a test like that. Another thing about it is that they set it up where the hardest question is much, much, much harder than the easiest question, like the SAT but moreso. So there's a very big spread between the best and worst scores.
Not so. The best defensive prospect Bradenton's come up with is a very technical converted forward. Gooch's athleticism is off the charts. Big, strong, fast with leaping ability pretty much sums that up. You need exceptional abilities to be stars at every position (except maybe keeper). The reality is that most of the top talents are going to be played close to goal for their club teams and as they move up the ladder, more and more of those top players should be slid back toward the defense. You may find a couple that were played in the defense for some reason, and that's fine, but most clubs put their best players on offense. Bradenton should be free to adjust player's positions accordingly. Wide midfielders can become fullbacks. Target forwards can become central defenders and defensive midfielders. Speed forwards can become wide midfielders. I think if you find the 40 best prospects, finding positions for them won't be that much of a problem.