Our Philosophy

Our philosophy in relation to youth football is that it is a program of activities designed to enable the young players that go through our nursery to reach the maximum of their potential as human beings, athletes and footballers within an atmosphere that safeguards the enjoyment factor that is inherent in the sport of football.

Some use instrumental reasoning to justify football. Clubs sometimes try to promote youth football with parents as something which is useful for keeping fit, the training ground as a place where children can make new friends and avoid bad company, stay away from drugs, and so on. These are admirable motives but they are all external to the activity of football itself and are at best an unstable basis for its existence (for example, players can keep fit in many ways other than playing football). At their worst external motives can undermine the sport of football itself (for example, some people’s involvement with the sport is motivated by the money they can make from bribes, a reason that is external to football).

Our philosophy is based on a view of football as an activity that is worthwhile for its own sake, where success is measured not merely by results but by good play (skilful and fair play), and where the desire to win, an integral component of the sport, is distinguished from a desire to win at all costs, a mentality that is evidenced in the antithesis of good play—negative football and unsporting behaviour. By paying attention to the inherent nature of football it becomes natural for our coaches at all levels to keep the activity fun, to strive towards perfection of the technical and tactical aspects of the sport, to respect the letter and the spirit of the laws of the game and to pursue victory sportingly.

Our philosophy is based on respect for the dignity of young players, on the notion that you always treat human beings never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end. In youth football this respect is reflected in simple things such as the rotation of young players in different roles within the team, the participation of all players in every match, the free movement of players between clubs as they go up the age levels, a multidisciplinary approach in training and so on. The danger is that as coaches (just as much as parents) we try to live vicariously through our young players, to achieve the glory that perhaps eluded us as players. When we force these young players to become a footballer or to play as a number 10 or to play for a given club or, reprehensibly, to sit out game after game, they become the means to our ends, they are made to live our dreams and not their dreams.

Through our capacity to acquire knowledge (for example, with respect to the physical and psychological development phases of young players) and our ability to calculate the most effective and efficient means to achieve our ends (for example, the importance of continuity, the value of a properly integrated youth program, the importance of communication including the communication of the vision itself) we can achieve great things in youth football and football in general.

The ends, of course, we determine through the use of the faculty of reason. Reason is what determines our ends, our vision, what we call our philosophy in relation to youth football. When we see coaches shouting abuse at young players, directing the players minutely from the sidelines, pursuing youth team glory at the expense of the long-term welfare of their players, focusing on outcome over effort or performance, losing their composure after a series of defeats or victories, reason leads us to ask why. When reason tries to make sense of things, it strives to close the gap between the way things are and the way they ought to be.

So we formulate a vision that strives to close this gap, to change things towards an ideal. The emphasis on good play helps us “treat those two impostors”, triumph and disaster, just the same. We try to empower our players to decide for themselves and thus prepare them for the situations that a dynamic sport like football will continuously throw at them.

At some point, however, we are bound to encounter the main problem. An inner voice or perhaps a member of the club tells us that “such an approach will never work here! No one does it like that around these parts…” Reality is introduced as a limit to our ideals. What is going on here is a process where reality judges our ideals and the conclusion is that our ideals do not measure up to reality. The ideals are deemed visionary and consequently are rejected out of hand.

Instead we should be examining reality, what others have done or are doing (for example, playing long ball to a tall striker to beat smaller sized defenders), against our ideals (for example, playing the ball with passing from the back, even in the knowledge that such a strategy is likely to lead to a defeat now, because that way the players will learn how to play football with skill) and determine whether that reality measures up to our ideals. This is in fact an ongoing struggle between reality and our ideals, and there is no guarantee that we will not succumb to the lure of reality’s arguments.

Those who dare to “think differently” and “act differently”, those who “are not entrapped in the answers of the past” win, those who behave according to the reality determined by those around them or those that came before them, lose. It takes courage to persevere with this philosophy and those who do are heroes, models for others to emulate.