I love Claudio Reyna, if it wasn't for Claudio and the rest of the crew from 2002 I would probably still be only an occasional soccer fan, instead of the fanatic I am now. However, we all know that Barcelona, Ajax, and other European clubs are the center of soccer development in the world. I am baffled why the USSF hires ex-pros with little to no experience in a top level program (as coaches or administrators, granted some, although not Reyna, went through the programs as players) instead of seeking out someone in Europe with real experience to lead up our youth program. I would love to see someone like that as a technical director or in charge of youth development.
We can afford to pay 2 head coaches for the job of one, maybe a little better allocation of resources is the answer.
Ok you would be wrong. The 4-3-3 requires nearly every player on your team to be able to outplay his direct opponent in some way. That's why so few teams use it. It's just too difficult to put out 11 players that will all find some way to outplay their direct counterpart. So coaches support their players with formations that allow for extra numbers around the ball.
Okay to nip this in the bud, he was making a joke at the typo of the previous poster who called it a 4-4-3
I just don't believe this, isn't Messi's old coach floating around in Albania or something? And Spain has 25% unemployment - can't imagine wages are that high. The difficulty is finding a technical director who wouldn't flip out at the structure.
I think that is the fear, that a foreign coach with no familiarity with the US wouldn't have any idea where to start. I think that was the thinking with Klinsmann, he knows both systems. Still, neither Klinsmann nor Reyna have experience in youth development and I wish we had someone who did to assist and direct us to where we need to be.
I've mentioned this before with youth coaches. 90% of youth coaches are using that as a stepping block on a head coaching job. A coach at a "top team" isn't gonna leave to go to more or less soccer wilderness unless they are going to retire. Hell look at the youth coaches at "power" nations...even those guys are generally ones that flamed out at the professional level or no longer are pursuing that career path.
After the U23 failure, Reyna did something that is a Bruce Arena trademark: specifically blames the players for the failure. He did not mention failure by the coaching staff. I wonder how the coaches of El Salvador and Mexico would do with the American team. Should the coaching staff accept some responsibility for the team not making the Olympics? Only time will tell their ineptness.
I think that this is a perfect identification of the problem, but not a proper identification of the solution. It is easy to say that we need to be teaching players at the youngest levels, but if we have not identified what we should be teaching them and what we should not be teaching them, then all of this work will be useless. Our problem isn't that we need to be coaching kids at the youngest levels - it is that we don't know how to coach them, period. I read that recent article about the under 17 practice sessions run by Richie Williams and I noticed a ton of emphasis on completing passes and making every pass perfect, but at the same time, what you don't see from a Manny Schellscheidt influenced coach is an emphasis on pushing ones self mentally. When a player is always being pushed mentally, they become more skillful and unpredictable. The time to push for physical execution is in front of the goal. Players need to be ultra result oriented in front of the goal, but away from the goal, they should be constantly pushed to expand their thinking and improve it. This can only be done by carefully constructing lead up games that force players to push themselves mentally. Even during warm up exercises, I never let players play 4 vs 2 and definitely not 5 vs 2. Our players don't have the margin for error to get away with the lazy habits that can be formed during those kinds of games with such ridiculous, unrealistic advantages. Whenever they were playing, they never got more than a one man advantage and were always given the option of choosing 3 vs 3 instead of 3 vs 2 if they thought they were good enough. If they wanted to play 3 vs 2, that was fine also. In addition, players need high reward, high penalty games in which making good decisions are heavily rewarded and making bad decisions are heavily penalized. I had one game where, if a team successfully completed a penetration into an attacking area, they got 5 points (in a game to 20), but if they got caught offside, the other team was rewarded 5 points. A goal was only 2 points. 5 consecutive passes 1 point. I can't tell you how much players would grow during this game. It got to the point where I would tell them a day ahead of time that they would be playing this game so they could start planning for it. They took it that seriously. It isn't about always making a perfect pass. Who cares if the pass is perfect, if your players aren't pushing themselves mentally? Good passing will come if your games are properly constructed. What we need is advanced decision making and fast, advanced decision making at that. A lot of times I was will to sacrifice fitness for the sake of pushing players mentally. What I found is that, if your players are better mentally than the other team, that they tend to get stronger as the game goes on and the other team tends to get more tired, regardless of their respective fitness levels because the other team spends a lot of time chasing the ball or their possession doesn't end in anything constructive where as your possession always seems to end in something dangerous. It can get demoralizing to play against a team that just seems to know how to attack against you - just look at Santos vs Seattle. Seattle's players aren't inept. They just aren't pushed mentally the ways that Santos' players are playing in the Mexican league. If we are being honest, we will admit that MLS is not a strong league tactically (although it has gotten better the last few years). For some reason, even though the things that I have described have been around forever, we still focus too heavily on the unimportant with youth players and we leave the most important pieces of training untapped. I see this often at the academy level and I even see it at the youth national team level. It is possible to systematically teach players how to be skillful and unpredictable, if that is your goal. Our problem is that is not how we approach training players nearly often enough and training them from a young age isn't going to help us until that flaw in our focus is corrected. Once this major flaw has been corrected, then we can focus on teaching them properly at the youngest ages. Until we have a clearer focus, all the teaching in the world from any age isn't going to help us.
"Captain America" is a professional loser. Nothing good can be expected from anything he is involved in.
Although the technical ability of US players may not rise to the level of the premier soccer countries, the technical ability is far closer than the ability to think out of the box - be truly creative. This is the true area that needs to be addressed. And controlled organized practices - the type all US academy and national teams participate in will not foster change or develope creative abilities. One training session a week should consist of balls and boys. No drills no coaching just spirit and desire.
Unpredictability absolutely can be systematically taught if you value it. Our problem is that coaches at the highest levels of our country say they value it, but often really aren't willing to do the things necessary to develop it themselves. When I talk about Richie Williams and the under 17 national team, I am not just some guy talking off the top of my head. Back in the 80s, when Richie was still in college at UVa, I used to work at UVa soccer camp as a soccer coach and Richie was the counselor assigned to help me. I got a good idea of his "industrious" attitude toward the game back then and I followed his industriousness throughout his career. He had won two national championships as a youth player for Manny Schellscheidt - his primary influence. He won a lot of championships afterward, as long as he played with someone else who could do the creative things on the field. He didn't have much to do with the creative part. At the same time that I worked with Richie at UVa, Bob Bradley was another coach working at UVa soccer camp. Bob, a really nice guy, would go on and on and on during the evenings talking about all of the things that he learned from Manny Schellscheidt. It was a very organized approach to coaching, very industrious, but had very little to do with creativity - similar to the way he coaches today. Personally I found it boring and limited, but I had to admit that he was very good at it and very committed to it. You could tell that he was going to take that approach far and he ended up taking it all the way to the World Cup where he was pretty much the exact same coach, albeit a lot more advanced and sophisticated after 20 years of experience. For me, I coached for about 10 years before I realized that I was fighting against the grain. The things that I thought were important just weren't valued in youth soccer in this country and weren't going to be valued any time soon. I had worked very hard at learning how to teach players how to play the game and I had gotten very good at it, but I learned that, other than the players that played for me, most people, including parents, didn't really care. Most people were like you and assumed that what I was doing wasn't even possible. Parents, once their kids started achieving increased success, just started assuming that was because their kids were going to do that all along - they didn't really think about how it happened, they just started thinking about how to exploit it - in other words, how to get them into a more prestigious college program than they would have gotten into otherwise. That was fine. They are parents and that is what parents do. I just realized that teaching players how soccer works and teaching them to be creative soccer players is not in the DNA of our culture. It is possible to systematically teach kids how to be creative through structured practice. I have done it many times over and I learned it through highly structured, though poorly taught, coaching schools. Let me explain how it works - the key is to create carefully designed lead up games in which players are forced to solve specific types of problems during the run of play. These games should not have restrictions (like limiting players number of touches), but instead have incentives that force players to think and problem solve in a specific area of the game. The better a coach is at creating these games, the more effective he is at teaching how soccer works. I used to have games for teaching players how to support the ball defensively and I would counter that with how to create numerical advantages offensively, I would teach players how to catch players offside and high pressure the ball when they gave it away and I would counter that with games that taught them about the relationship between possession and penetration and how to use possession to set up penetration. All the while, players were never restricted in their solutions. When your goal is that players learn how the game works and you are disciplined enough to teach through incentives and not restrictions, it is possible, it is just hard to learn and people, including coaches at the highest levels, still are not willing to take the risk of adapting this approach and instead stick the cycle of preparing the kids to win the next match tactically or, in the case of Richie Williams, doing a bunch of drills during which he acts like a perfectionist, but really doesn't challenge the players mentally. Honestly, our players are very lazy mentally. Creative players may or may not be lazy physically, but they are working very hard mentally. It is important that we understand what creativity is. It is not just some free flowing thing that nobody can ever understand. It is an understanding of the game and how it works that is deep enough so as to allow a player multiple options and solutions at any given moment. The deeper their understanding, the more options a player has. That can be given to a player from a coach that is committed to providing that player with that understanding. Just because our soccer culture has developed without valuing that understanding, doesn't mean that it is impossible to teach it. Just that we have quite a challenge on our hands getting people at all levels of the game to value teaching players how soccer works above getting results at the Youth Level - no easy task.
I co-sign that. Someone in his area needs to give him a call asap. Either that or run coaching clinics.
Great Post Mr. Bonetti. It seems we're ok with losing the ball because we're taught to use hustle and strength to win it back instead of being held accountable at a high level to not lose the ball in the first place. This emphasizes possession, skill and tactics over hustle, intensity, and strength. Not saying you don't need hustle, intensity and strength just at times far fewer than we're teaching now.
There is a simple fact about the foundation in this country USA. How can you teach creativity if you never played creatively or was schooled on creativity. Creativity is not doing fancy stepovers etc. its "how am i going to effectively get out of this tight situation and create a positive play". Creativity depends on the individual ability of 11 players creatively moving with and without the ball to go forward. That speed of interplay is the key to success. From the national team down we don't have it. However, it coming. I can only speak of my local but there are youth teams 10-12 playing creatively in Southern Cal. It beautiful football thats why i say the first true great generation for the US will be the 2000 age group. I predict this group will get to the finals of WC and possibly win. Remember this post.
One of the many good things about Peter's commentary is that he immediately swapped out the word "creativity" for "unpredictability." Creativity is what we want, but it can also mean a million different things, so it's hard to think about. Unpredictability is easy to think about, and it's clear that there are ways to be unpredictable that don't require much technical ability at all (like when you dummy the ball). However, it's equally clear that the more tools you have at your disposal, the harder it will be for your opponent to figure out your next move.
Yes I do agree that creativity is what we want and one can be creative without fully developed technique. I also think that most coaches do not spend enough time on teaching proper technique to the U-8s or under - @ least not in white, suburban America anyway. It's different with the ethnic inter city kids however (most likely because most of them touch the ball daily IMO). I'm just hoping we don't sacrifice the minimum amount of training time most already allot to technique development @ the expense of developing creativity. BOTH are of equal importance IMO.
No he can't. Because it would be a waste of his time, and probably detrimental to the future of the players he taught. I can tell the EXACT same story of myself and a small number of coaches we trained here in Chicago area. I too learned the same lessons about teaching players that P. Bonetti speaks of. And after you teach these players, they end up sitting on a bench on whatever the next team is they play for after yours because the next coach has no idea what they are doing on the field. In this country, any coach who truly teaches players dooms that player's career. I've experienced and watched it over the last 20+ years. And by the way, the youth "scouts" and new USSF youth staff will not take us any farther than we have been. I know a number of them well. They are the same guys as before. Just younger, and they have more athletic and technical players available to them than the Bruce Arena generation.
While i agree a gifted coach can teach unpredictability or creativity the truth is it is not being developed properly. Most of the creative drills used today involves one touch two touch rules and where I understand they are trying to teach speed of game and forward thinking they miss the mark of unpredictable. That is why I suggested more unorganized free flow time be utilized in training. Todays elite players come from all walks of life but none live in close proximately to each other. Even the DA kids mostly drive an hour to practice. If they play a pick up game with friends (which almost never happens) they are not challenged and rely on their established skill set. If it's not going to be taught, they need to develop it somehow but how?