Alert: Next decades Netherlands will be the new Hungary of Europe. Once great, but slipped into mediocrity.

If you look at such a project by Vitesse:

Video.

What always amazes me is the total lack of innovation in the football department. We see people putting all their money into temperature chambers and whirlpool baths with therapeutic effects, but nothing to evolve the passing game. I could come up with something like that in a matter of seconds, but let's build another football field. Or put a roof over it, so kids are raised being afraid to train under less perfect conditions.

This would be my point. Here is a simple program for reading faster:

ZAP reader.

If you copy paste a text into it and put it on 1000 words a minute, it will go much to fast for most people. Many like to read on 300 worlds a minute. However when you push yourself to read for a while at 1000 words a minute and then go back to 300, it's really slow. You can easily do 400 words a minute.

Same thing with football. If you would build an arena for example the size of a round pool or something that resembles a large skater bowl (already build a lot ... hint) and would fire balls at the player standing in the middle at a fast rate with targets all around him to hit it in one touch that could also take care of the drain of the balls easily, you have as well a system that creates hundreds of ball touches per hour for a child (rather than standing in a line for your wallpass and finishing exercise) and you can increase the rate, you increase the handling speed to a very high level. You can even think of a target hit counter to measure accuracy. A Xavi looks over his shoulder every 3 seconds or so. Kind of a clue I would think, but people don't think about how to train this. Could also be easily trained in the above example and that creates players being much more aware of their surroundings.

My problem nowadays in football is that all innovation is centered around improving physique, stamina, fitness, health and this has given people who love the passing game and the technical creative side of the game a bad association with innovation self. Me included. Fitter people will start to solve problems by running more. Simple as that and not the way forward. Measuring how high you can jump. Sure. Great. But how about putting money in improving real football?

This is also due to the football world being very conservative. In USA with baseball you already have for many years, simple mechanical ways of baseballs fired at you. However with football the value of that could be much higher as handling speed, making fast balls soft and being accurate in your passing are of crucial importance for better position games and overall football.

 

I was talking about the supposed white flight. If people want to exercise another sport for whatever reason, then let them. Sport results of top athletes work very infectious. If NOC-NSF start to support only 10 core sports, it would normally lead to better results and better results draw kids to play those sports. For kids not wanting to play football, there is then other choice as well to reach the world top. I love the Olympics to the level of the WC, so I have no trouble with this and IMO it was all a bit painful for Spain, Argentina, Brazil, Portugal. Netherlands came back with as many gold medals as those 4 country's combined and a 100 meter free in swimming is a kings/queens number. Epke's gold is also a big one. My point would be that I like the sport diversity in this country.

Not sure if I had to react on this one, but the first bold bit made me touch on it. There has been done research in this area and they found out that loving what you do is essential to reach the 10000 hours requirement to become an expert in anything. They also find out that the youth coaches were very important in this process. Huge achievers in many sports have not had all great coaches from the start (if they coaches in the first place). They did had coaches that were able to build very positive associations with the sport. So much so, that the kids wanted to return doing it all the time. They made them love the sport. So i am not sure what that reference to Africa is doing there, but I do agree with the "also" part. People who become really good are often good in more sports and came at a point that they had to choose. For these cases we agree.

True and I have made this point myself often. But again, it is up to people in what sport they want to express themselves and find joy in. What I am saying is that Netherlands is not North Korea. The sport must be something they want to express themselves in.

Oke so my question would be, is there any data on this subject? How do we know that there is a white flight?

Maybe that can also partially be explained due to the "naturals" of that country choosing for football when they come to the "choice moment" we discussed here above. How would Portugal's sport landscape look like? Is there opportunity when going for another sport in that country to fully develop?

 

Somebody from Brazil, is somebody from Brazil. Brama was educated for a big part in Enschede in football matters. How is this an opinion?

We football fans? Who the hell do you think you are with your n=x= all football supporters opinion. You yourself told me you read comments on a site like Voetbalzone. How could you have missed the pride of Feyenoord supporters telling everybody how the players from their team came from their academy. We even have a poster here a week ago claim proud how the Dutch NT is full of Rotterdam players. You need a link? Have you visited the Ajax thread? When I posted a stat about Ajax that of all winners of the national league's in Europe is using their own academy players, I got multiple reps. People care about this and find more pride in these matters that you apparently think. To put it blunt: you are wrong in this matter, even lost.

Emotions? We are not discussing emotions here. We are discussing values here. Originality, for otherwise the world is a boring place. If you play with the players from your own community we can call your club authentic. If you play with mercenary's you follow the cinema model. Education. Passing the football knowledge on to the young kids from the community to reach the level of expertise. FC Twente is not the NT of Twente. The are at most the main cinema of Twente. The only thing I miss is people throwing popcorn at each other in the games I see from the club.

They are wrong and according to you a lot of them have no idea what they are doing there by cheering on the laundry. They might like it, as they might like a movie in the cinema or even like how the cinema is ran, but that does not make FC Twente the NT of Twente. For that Neeskens we have to look at a club like Bilbao, who's fans would frown at you, walk to another table and mention how the weird lady over there has lost the plot.

So this guy is not even speaking your language, he stands for everything the region represents, so I conclude you guys don't value your own language? What is the value hierarchy of Twente and what is the one of N 'Kufo?

 

The reps on my post #102 got me creative and put on my free wheeling hat. If you don't like brainstorming and imperfect ideas that ask for a bit of visualization, skip this post.

So first you need to think about what you want to train.

• Handling speed
• Making hard passed balls soft
• First touch
• Passing accuracy
• Hitting targets better
• More ball contacts per minute
• Maybe even pressing and chasing?

So rondo's are great, but need many people and if you train at amateur level your fellow players can suck, keep kicking the ball out. Also you can not go to very high levels of speed that you can measure for example and determine a certain level somebody has reached. Meten is weten. So I would build something like a reverse rondo. Not players in a circle, but a player in center.

Start with bigger arena than this one (got it after a quick Google search):



Think away the 4 goals. I would maybe even make it 2 times as big so you have to pass over 10 meters or so.

Material I do not like. At and RJO I would use this kind of setup maybe:



Side by side, to create a level up idea. The long shape gets the above mentioned Arena shape or on top of each other if the price of the ground is very expensive.

I would use these kind of targets all around:



If you level up in Arena's you can make them even smaller, to force the players to pass and kick with greater accuracy. I would also leave a space between them all around of maybe even 50 cm. I will explain in a bit why. I guess you can place 20 or 25 of these things all around.
Above all these targets I would attach these kind of indication lamps:

Something like it. A second before the ball is released by the machine one of the 20 or 25 lamps would start to burn to indicate that is the selected target for you to hit. The computer does this at random to give the player never any clue. This forces you to look 360 all the time like Xavi. The ball will reach you bloody fast and you can differentiate in exercises. Make the ball soft and hit the target or everything with in one time. However you train looking around you before receiving the pass.

Let's say I would give the player 5 seconds between every ball. If he hits his target that's a lot of time. If he misses, he needs to repair his mistake, run to the bounced ball and hit the target nevertheless and get back to the circle in the middle in time. This will learn crazy chasing and pressing. Excellent as well. To secure proper "punishment" of the wrong pass, I would use material that would absorb almost all speed of the ball. The video ahead shows something like that.

Here I found a football school already using some kind of mechanical equipment, a circulation system and the absorbing material:



I don't think this set up adds big value. The balls are easily controllable, they almost stand in front of goal when the finishing, but some ideas are good. Also for lower age groups the speed is fine.

Japan would not be Japan if they started a contest with robots and machines:



This ball speed is already closer to what I had in mind. However it gives an idea that harder passed balls are no problem. Think away the drama, wheels and you can make it probably half the size as you also don't have to carry a battery in this vehicle, but work with simple electricity from the wall.

If you put something like this at one point on the edge of the arena to pump the balls in every 5 seconds you have a nice ongoing system at your hand. When the player in center hits it's target a drain system will bring it nicely back to a collecting point to feed the hitting machine pumping the balls into the arena, just like the circulatory system from the first video does more or less. I don't think you need more than 5 balls or so. Also to keep it cheep for amateur clubs to have their own Arena. It should be open at all times and public ones should only cost 1 euro per 30 minutes. Something like that.

With 5 seconds interval you get 12 balls every minute, 720 an hour and you would train most of the things I have described in the bullets as important for proper football. I think that something simple as this, would cost less than a high pressure chamber or a Whirlpool with with all kinds of underwater treatments and gadgets that they are building at Vitesse to become the best club in the Netherlands and provides more value for players to improve.

My point is, that there is 0 innovation in the football department and huge amounts go into making a player 1% more fit. At Ajax you have a whole field with hills and stuff. Also every analyses after a game on TV these days ends in: Look at this player. Can run box to box. Such a modern footballer. Then I start shaking my head.

Netherlands invented the "klapschaats" and should also look at innovation. Only setting up rules by the KNVB like "minimum of 6 academy players per Eredivisie team" is not the only way forward. TNO should also be consulted to throw in some of their magic as there are much more creative people than me who can come up with things we never thought of.

Cheers

 

Yeah but with the beta study's there is a need behind it that is practical or sometimes even vital. Besides, the fact that it is done in those area's in the way they do it, does not make it the right thing per se. Maybe we also violate a more beautiful principal there out of need or under pressure. If you start to organize the sport landscape of a country around how to maximize gold or even "the big gold" medals, there is a risk that the motivation starts to lay with "how to be perceived", rather then the starting point of sports being a way of self expression. A way to develop for somebody. Every sport is another way to challenge the human capacity's and show what it is also capable of. It is also there to show something beautiful you have not seen before. That goes for new landmarks within a certain sport, as for small sports not much seen by the general public, but challenge people in different ways.

If there is a white flight (which is not backed up by numbers until now), then maybe there will be new things to see in the near future. I am somebody capable watching many football games a week and still wanting more. I also would be sad if Dutch football would become second class. However I do feel resistance in myself to tell somebody who is on a point to choose for this sport or another, what to do, or trying to push him choosing for football. It's his or her choice. I mean all of the sudden we had a crazy Barneveld (not sure he was capable in another sport , but let's say he was also a great footballer) throwing darts and many Dutch people were introduced to a new sport and started to play it. I like to be surprised in the future and I like sport diversity. For me the big gold medal thinking, runs the risk of cutting away all kinds of beautiful but smaller flowers.

 

Talking about gold medals, this is site offering people to look at the achievements per capita, GDP and a few other ways as well:

Website.

This is maybe an interesting little sound bite about a research that was done to predict who would win how many medals:

Short interview

This is interesting for the data they are using in their formula that I think are relevant for football results on the Euro and WC as well:

• Capita
• GDP per capita (resources per person)
• Previous Olympics
• Host effect

Often in discussion on Bigsoccer you get either/or discussions. However to answer the poll these general things must be taken into consideration as well.