A few weeks ago, the soccer team that occupies rather more of my thoughts than is healthy had a problem. Well, strictly speaking, it had several. One was that all of the players, including my son, were under the age of 7, which it turns out is something of a tactical limitation. Another was that I had been roped into being one of the coaches.
More urgently, though, we kept conceding goals. Avoidable goals. Silly goals. Goals wrapped up in gift paper and presented to the opposition, accompanied by a heartfelt card.
Technically, when children start playing formal soccer in England — at the age of 6 — the games are not competitive. There is no league table. The results are not even recorded. That arrangement is not quite the same, though, as nobody knowing what the results are. And it was apparent, to anyone who could count, that our results were not good.
It was at this point that I hatched a plan to limit the damage. It seemed to me quite a good plan. We had spent two years encouraging the children to play soccer the way it is meant to be played. They pass out from the back. They take a touch. They rely on their technique to avert danger. They express themselves.
But it had become very clear, very quickly that this approach had not survived contact with reality. We were conceding goals in great bucket loads because we kept creating problems for ourselves: dribbling across our own box, passing aimlessly into the middle of a congested field, turning not into space but into trouble. We kept losing games. And while winning or losing was not supposed to matter, we worried that, sooner or later, the children would start losing enthusiasm.
What we needed, I thought, was just a dash of the ancient wisdom that had been passed down to me,when I was taking my first tentative steps in soccer. Geoff — my first and only youth coach, whose son took all the free kicks and corners — had given us two instructions, and only two: Play the way you are facing and, if in doubt, boot it out.
And so, I took my son aside and suggested, gently, that it would be perfectly fine — if he felt under pressure, if the opposition was swarming him, if there was no other option — just to put the ball somewhere nice and safe. Play it into a channel, upfield, if you can. If that is not an option, then slip it out for a throw in.
This guidance was, in truth, something of a sacrifice for him. My son is a decent player, I think. Quick, tall, hard-working, surprisingly strong for someone I see, quite often, being pinned to the ground by his 2-year-old sister and informed that he is now her “baby.” But he is also more easily instructed than his peers, who do not rely on me for food and shelter, and so it fell to him to act as our troubleshooter.
That was the theory. This was the practice: For a three-week spell, directly after that little parental intervention, there was not a sphere in existence that my son did not efficiently, deliberately and occasionally quite artfully put out of play.
Often, that involved his chasing down an opponent, winning the ball and immediately thrashing it off the field. And sometimes it meant taking possession, with time and space, deftly bringing the ball under control, looking up at his teammates and then coolly slotting it out for a throw, like that time Renato Sanches passed to an advertising board.
The problem, I suppose, is that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. There are some soccer journalists out there who have taken the time, and made the effort, to earn actual coaching qualifications. I am not one of them. Coaching, until I had children, was not something that I ever particularly yearned to do.
But I have spent 20 years or so talking to those people whose job it is to develop young soccer players, the ones who go on to grace the world’s most famous fields, the ones who take a game and make it an art. Unfortunately, when I was asked to help out my son’s age group — under the auspices of an actual qualified coach, thankfully — I did so with Ideas.
These were, I think, broadly quite healthy. I knew, for example, that such a tiny proportion of players become professional that there is absolutely no point putting any pressure on your charges whatsoever.
They are not there to win. They are not there to fulfill your dreams. They are there to feel the joy of playing, to love the game, to learn all it can teach about teamwork and endeavor and exercise. In Norway, which produces a lot of soccer players, there is no actual competition until the children hit their teens.
I knew that abusive language and behavior, even violence, is a mounting problem in youth soccer, that referees and coaches and all the other volunteers who provide a service for children each weekend do so in an increasingly poisonous atmosphere, all spittle-flecked rage and threats.
I knew that English soccer in particular had been held back, for years, by the emphasis on the physical and the industrial and the cynical, by the tyranny of booting the ball out of danger when in any doubt. I knew that elite academies now cherish technique above all else, that they teach children to revere the ball, not to surrender it at the first opportunity.
And I knew, a little counter-intuitively, that no less an authority than Pablo Aimar — one of soccer’s last great true artists — feels that the emphasis on passing at any cost is debilitating to young players’ technical development. If children are not encouraged to dribble, Aimar believes, then the thrill of seeing a player slalom between opponents will be all but lost.
The problem, of course, is that there is nothing so dangerous as a little knowledge. In my three months or so as an under-7 coach, I have learned many things. I have learned that some people take youth soccer very seriously: One of our opponents had rigged up an iPhone to film the game, presumably so that the coaches could review the tape afterward.
I have learned, too, that on occasions, children can be too obedient. They take things both seriously and literally. If you tell them, say, to put the ball out for a throw, then that is what they will do. Every single time. (This does not work in a domestic setting, with tidying up, for instance. I’ve tried.)
Mostly, though, I have learned things about myself. I would never have thought to describe myself as competitive, not really. If I am playing, of course, I would generally prefer to win than to lose, but the result does not prey on my mind, particularly.
There is something, though, about seeing your child play — knowing their happiness is dependent, to some extent, on the outcome; knowing that you want them only to experience pleasure, and never pain; knowing that you are all but powerless to determine what happens — that sharpens the senses.
Perhaps that stands to reason. Perhaps that is something people have always known, that it is in sports that parents catch their first, unnerving glimpse of what is to come: a son or daughter, out there in the world, no longer under their protection, reliant only on themselves and their friends to overcome the challenges being placed relentlessly in their path.
But it still comes as a shock to know one thing and to feel another, to tell yourself that the outcome does not matter, that it is the taking part that counts, that what they learn today will serve them well tomorrow, and yet to want more than anything for them not to taste disappointment, to fret at the prospect of sadness and dismay.
I had always found reports of referees being verbally abused in youth soccer troubling, of course, but also somehow laughable: The idea of being so worked up over a bunch of children chasing a ball seemed essentially absurd to me.
I know now, though, that at least once I have had to stop myself from offering an instantaneous and unfavorable review of a referee’s performance. And that was after I had refereed my first game, and come off the field to some pretty pointed criticism from both my son and his grandfather. (I knew it was a foul, I just thought my son was being dramatic. It was a teachable moment.)
Mostly, though, I know now quite how much it can mean, to be there with your child as they start to do this thing that you love, that you have loved, for so long, and to see it start to bring them the joy that it has brought you.
We won our first game last week. My son scored twice. I don’t think he was trying to put either of them out for a throw. (He has subsequently described them as “Luis Díaz goals.”) At the final whistle, he and his teammates ripped off their jerseys in the cold November air and wheeled away in celebration, beaming at what they had achieved. I have loved soccer for a long time. But it has never made me happier than it did then.
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