Character  Commitment  Leadership  Determination

WORLD TTTRENDS IN YYYOUTH DDDEVELOPMENT Training the Individual and the Team

To: MSC Coaches

From: Troy Letherman, Technical Director, Matanuska Soccer Club

Date: 2/24/2009

Re: Total Soccer—creating a development plan for the year-round club

IIINTRODUCTION After decades of toiling in anonymity, with little to no relevance on the international stage, US Soccer thrust itself into the spotlight during the 1994 World Cup. This was the game in its grandest form—played in our stadiums, in front of our fans. The sport’s popularity spiked in the aftermath of the tournament, MLS was launched, and most importantly, the US Soccer Federation for the first time grew serious about creating a cohesive plan for youth development.

At the time, Americans plying their trade in the top leagues in Europe were tragically scarce. In fact, only six members of the 22-man roster were playing overseas. But less than a decade later it was no longer a novelty to see Americans on foreign rosters: Claudio Reyna was captain of Rangers; Jovan Kirovski was picking up a Champions League winners’ medal with Borussia Dortmund. Today the change is even more apparent. Americans are currently playing in 15 different European countries, including those that host the planet’s top leagues like Serie A, La Liga and the Premiership and Bundesliga. More telling in evaluating the upgrades made in youth development since 1994, several members of the US team that so impressed during the 2007 Under-20 World Cup were already on European rosters or have since made the move: Freddy Adu is playing for Benfica; is starring at Heerenveen (and about to break the record for goals by a midfielder in the ); Danny Szetela is at Brescia; Gabriel Ferrari plays for Sampdoria; and Sal Zizzo, Bryan Arguez and Preston Zimmerman are all in the Bundesliga, playing for Hannover 96, Hertha Berlin and Hamburg SV II respectively. , who just turned 18, won’t be far behind.

That this kind of representation abroad marks a sea-change in world opinion about the quality of our players is more than obvious. But it also says that in the nearly fifteen years since the World Cup final was played in the Rose Bowl we have become much better as a nation at identifying and developing our soccer talent. How we got there is important to understand.

AAA DDDUTCH SSSTART It should come as no surprise to find lessons from the at the base of the US Soccer development pyramid. With a population numbering fewer than 15 million, a professional league only 50 years old and a comparative lack of financial resources, the Dutch have managed to compete at the highest levels of world football by becoming experts in youth development. No other country in the world has squeezed so much talent from such scarce resources as Holland. As a testament to that prowess, even the most soccer-rich nations on the planet take MATANUSKA SOCCER CLUB SOCCER MATANUSKA youth-development cues, if not coaches, from this tiny Western European nation (Thomas Rongen, coach of the US Under-20 team, is Dutch, making it four-out-of six foreign head coaches of US national teams on the boys’ side).

Matanuska Soccer Club  PO Box 876997  Wasilla, AK 99654 Website : www.matanuskasoccerclub.org

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But becoming this good at developing young talent is down to more than necessity—it takes ingenuity as well. “Because we’re such a small country, we have to be very inventive” says , current manager of Russia’s national team and probably the foremost of the current crop of Dutch coaching exports. “That’s why we get the best out of our young players and that’s why our training for coaches is long and hard and spread over many years.”

In the U.S. we have been quick to absorb key Dutch ideas and in fact have become a leader of youth development in our own right (that title is still largely self-proclaimed, however, as despite our laudable progress, we’ve yet to win a major international tournament at any level or to produce a truly world-class outfield player). Though it’s been in place since 1971, US Soccer’s coach-licensing programs have undergone several curriculum overhauls in the intervening years, culminating in a current system that looks a lot like the player-development program instituted by the Royal Dutch Football Association (KNVB), with its emphasis on small-sided games and individual technique, especially at the youngest ages.

In helping to build our national program, Tim Carter, former director of youth development for the US Soccer Federation, made a whirlwind research tour to evaluate player development in some of the world’s foremost soccer programs, where he discovered that while many had varying philosophies on youth training, the quality of the people they had instructing

was consistently excellent. Based on this tour, US Soccer concluded that the prominent reason for success was the ability of those who were coaching the young players. Or, as legendary North Carolina women’s coach Anson Dorrance wrote, it boils down to strength of leadership, including enthusiasm, passion, commitment, connection—all the many ways that people inspire and motivate others.

Today, the scope of coaching education in the United States is as large as the country itself. As our society is woven with the threads of many cultures, so is our soccer the product of the styles and experiences of the many diverse communities across the country. While this presents us with a set of challenges that are unique to the United States, this diversity also helps to continually breathe life into our soccer community. It is against this backdrop that US Soccer approaches its R CLUB R responsibility to prepare coaches to bring the game to our young players.

Still, just having some ideas on coaching and curriculum hasn’t proven to be enough. Andy Roxburgh, former Scotland manager and current UEFA technical director, explains that approaches to youth development boil down to two categories: by chance or by design. “The preparation that goes into youth development in Holland is very detailed,” he goes on, noting that if anything Dutch technical directors are over-prepared. They study it all, analyze everything (think about how Wiel Coerver famously used slow-motion video of world soccer stars acting instinctively to develop his individual-skills training method), but they don’t just make the kids do training drills. “In Holland, they train regularly, and then they’re given time to practice on their own so they can develop individual skills, too.”

That last point ties together two of the next hurdles facing American soccer. One, our players are entering the international arena behind their counterparts around the world technically, in discipline and commitment and in tactical knowledge and understanding of the game. And two, the environment of the elite player is not good enough, especially as regards limited training sessions. Our best players never learn to train in a professional manner, and it shows.

Following a comprehensive review of elite player development in the United States and around the world, US Soccer has come to the same conclusion, reiterating that the everyday training environment is the most critical aspect of improved youth player development. As a result, using the U-17 National Team Residency program as a model of training and focus, they’ve created the US Soccer Development Academy, which while reaching a much greater number of players than ODP, remains too narrow. To compensate, the USSF has again stated their desire to shift more focus to the local level, where, if the United States is to improve as a soccer-playing nation, the clubs must have a scheme in place for the development of all players, in all age groups and at all levels of play within the club.

MATANUSKA SOCCE MATANUSKA EEELITE DDDEVELOPMENT AND THE AAACADEMY SSSYSTEM In today’s soccer climate, with competitive parity commonplace and player transfer fees and salaries spiraling into the stratosphere, youth development has taken on more importance than ever before. Now every major club in the world administers its own youth academy, networks of scouts scour the seven continents in the hopes of unearthing the next

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gem and national teams have gotten involved with youth training at ever-earlier ages. And within the competitively- charged arena of youth development, if there is a universally acknowledged story of modern success, it’s in .

In 1973 the French set to work on creating an academy system in an effort to improve their national team. Within their setup, the elite French youth can progress from his local club to one of nine regional training centers, and from there to the national academies. But it’s not only recruitment—for over two decades the emphasis in the French academies has been on technique, from top to bottom, and it has paid off: By 1998, les Bleus were world champions. Two years after that they’d won the European Championships as well. Six more years and they were in another World Cup final. It was an unprecedented run of success, and all down to an academy system put in place 25 years earlier.

Conversely, in England the story of modern youth development has come under much scrutiny for failing almost as spectacularly as France’s program has succeeded. Though there is plenty of blame to go around, much of the consensus fallout from England’s failure to qualify for Euro 2008 has focused on the belief that English players just aren’t good enough technically to compete at the highest levels anymore. Most of that burden falls on the country’s network of youth academies.

George Prost, head of Marseille’s academy for the last seven years, says part of the problem in England amounts to a simple lack of training time, especially at critical ages of development. “It’s the golden age—the Under-13s, 14s and 15s— that England are missing out on,” he explains. “This is the age where tactically and technically they are the most receptive, but in England they only have two sessions a week. In France it would be five times a week.” To put that into hours, over four years, between the age of 12 and 16, a French boy attending an academy receives 2,304 hours of training, nearly twice as much as an elite player in England.

But it’s not just quantity, it is quality, too. “It was Gerard Houllier’s idea to introduce what is known as ‘preformation’ training,” says Andy Roxburgh. “The idea was that between the ages of 13 and 16 most of the coaching should concentrate on individual work and developing technique.” Again, this focus on technique is a common touchstone across every successful academy program in the world. At every level, in every country, coaches must take a critical approach to player development, constantly assessing the quality of what they’re doing and the appropriateness of their intent, being careful to remember that no convoluted approach can replace investing in the basics of the game.

In the United States, probably the two greatest academy success stories at present belong to Josef Schulz, director of the Schulz Academy in Boca Raton, FL, and John Fischer, who is director of the YPT Academy in Lancaster, PA. More than 10% of the players currently in residency at the US national-team training centers hail from these two academies, which have also produced such notable current pros as Jozy Altidore. These academies are run as programs outside regular club soccer and the training curriculum at both are heavily slanted towards the individual.

“We’re trying to raise the technical level of players in this country,” Fisher explains. “Because of the society we live in, with the youth sports culture being so competition-driven, a lot of the technical training that young players need is forgotten. Because coaches have players so little, and they’re feeling the pressure from their club or parents to win, they’re doing things like fitness. They’re doing things like tactics and they’re forgetting the real key technical aspects. We’re trying to give players a much stronger technical foundation.”

Schulz adds that creating a successful youth development portfolio necessitates first deciding that individual players are the priority, not teams. “In general, we try to get players relatively early and introduce them in a fun way to the sport. The second part is almost at the age of 14 or 15 we specialize in the development of individual players. Team training does not exist in our academy. We really focus on individual development. Not only does the experience show, but 11 good players at the end make a very successful team because they can all play.”

MATANUSKA SOCCER CLUB SOCCER MATANUSKA Fisher, who has extensive ties with several European clubs and regularly utilizes coaches from places like Manchester United at his academy, concludes that individual development is sorely needed for properly training our elite players. “In bringing our young players over to Europe,” he says, “we are finding that their biggest weakness is their technical ability when compared to kids their own age. American players are respected for their size and speed. The problem is that club coaches spend too much time on tactics and fitness and not enough time on turning the ball with the outside of the foot

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or striking a good long ball. As a result, the European club might say, ‘Well, he’s a good athlete, he’s got a good work rate, but technically he doesn’t quite have what he needs, and we don’t have the time to go back and re-teach him.’ That’s a heartbreaker.”

American coaches and club technical directors should take heart, though. As Schulz, Fisher and Roxburgh agree, it’s not an overnight process but rather the initiation over time of a culture that eventually infiltrates every level of a club. Take for example, Arsenal Football Club of England, where for the past ten years Frenchman Arsene Wenger has revolutionized the club’s approach to player development, overhauling old ideas on fitness, tactics and most importantly, training. The emphasis at Arsenal is on technique, skill and practicing always with the ball, and their teams play the same technical style from the youngest ages up to the senior team.

Of course, clubs like Manchester United and Arsenal start with the talented players, but according to Liam Brady, head of youth development at Arsenal, size and speed isn’t necessarily what they’re looking for. “We just concentrate on looking for all the things that we believe are vital attributes, and above all else the technical ability of each individual boy,” he says. “We then try to develop that talent to a point where he is going to be good enough to operate at the top level. But you can’t repeat it often enough: Technique is king in Wenger’s world.”

TTTHE DDDEMISE OF SSSTREET SSSOCCER Of course, academies aren’t the only place to learn to play soccer at the highest level— and George Best didn’t learn in an academy, they learned on the street, and it’s well known that countries in which most children continue to play unstructured soccer in streets, parks, vacant fields or even beaches tend to develop the most gifted soccer players. This is because these children are allowed to experiment, take risks and be creative without outside influences. But cultural changes in Europe have seen street football decline for 20 years. In most of America, it’s never been big.

No less an authority than UEFA Coach of the Century agrees wholeheartedly with those lamenting the demise of the unstructured game. “My position is that street soccer is the most natural educational system that can be found. It is where youth players learn from their mistakes, unconscious of the technical, tactical, mental and physical qualities they are developing through the scrimmages being played.”

Soccer is a game that constantly changes, the ball is always moving and there are many contests, individual, group and team, all over the field. These myriad situations in each game require players to make adjustments. The real key to understanding what makes a player great is realizing that it lies in the unique adjustments and decisions he or she makes to solve the problems presented in a game. Michels, who as the father of Total Football guided the Dutch to the pinnacle of European achievement, insists that many players today are missing this key ingredient. “Playing soccer every day ensures this development,” he continues. “You also learn the team tactical principles without effort through playing the game. Your teammate, higher in the street-soccer hierarchy, forces you to comply.”

In African and South American countries, where the conditions for street soccer are favorable, Michels notes that you can immediately see their youth players have a head start. They go through a more varied technical and tactical development within their own experiences. Therefore, their ‘feeling’ for the game is also better. “Above all,” he explains, “they possess an agility, coordination and basic speed which players in Western Europe do not possess anymore. There are good reasons that these countries are so intensively scouted by top clubs from around the world.”

The Alaskan soccer club is faced with even greater challenges when it comes to street soccer—climate, a lack of fields and a tiny soccer-playing population being three of the most significant. Still, for the Alaskan club invested in elite youth development, an effort must be made to incorporate more unstructured play into the daily setting of our elite players. Outside the team- and club-training environment, the answer may lie somewhere in the realm of “semi-supervised

MATANUSKA SOCCER CLUB SOCCER MATANUSKA spontaneity.” In other words, the club, parents or individual coaches need to provide some form of safe supervision for children at designated times. The players need to organize themselves into teams and simply play, without coach or parent interference, as they might in a park or vacant field if no one was watching.

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TTTHE RRRISE OF FFFUTSAL In a way, for those with an interest in youth development the demise of street soccer might almost be forgiven if it meant more of an emphasis on futsal, a game that combines many of the benefits talked about above (small-sided play, a reliance on creativity and technique) with a less formal, coaching-free format that encourages improvisation and taking risks with the ball.

“Marcello Lippi is always bemoaning that kids are playing far less street football today,” says Andy Roxburgh. “We really need to try and recreate an environment where there is more spontaneity and freedom of expression with a football. They play a lot of futsal in Spain and Portugal, which is what the Brazilians do, and it’s great for the grassroots, but it’s not so big in Europe or America.”

While Roxburgh’s correct at the moment, the landscape is changing across Europe, with club teams in Holland, Germany and Italy already beginning to embrace the game.

The word futsal is derived from the Portuguese futebol de salao and the Spanish futbol sala/de salon , which can be translated roughly as “indoor football.” The game began in Uruguay in 1930, the same year that country hosted and won the first-ever FIFA World Cup. It is played indoors on basketball-sized courts without the use of sidewalls. Play is with the heavier, futsal-specific ball, which forces players to keep the ball on the floor and play their way out of trouble, while attackers must look to take opponents on and combine with one another in a quick, intelligent manner. On the full pitch, this is the style regularly displayed by nations where the game has become vastly popular (Portugal, Spain and most of South America). It’s a style most of the rest of the world has been trying to recreate for decades.

In the United States, futsal is becoming a more regular sight, and with gym space at a premium in most places, even during the winter season, it offers club coaches a perfect opportunity to sponsor a semi-supervised outlet for their charges. Like with small-sided games in general, the benefits of futsal are clear: playing faster in less time and space means tighter ball control, more ball contacts and a greater technical speed-of-play. For Alaskan clubs, futsal is simply an exceptional forum for maximizing a player’s ball contacts, teaching them to meet a variety of game-related challenges and helping them learn to make decisions with an appropriate number of variables, such as teammates and opponents.

FFFOCUS ON THE CCCLUBS ::: CCCREATING AN EEELITE TTTRAINING CCCULTURE It’s commonly accepted that the most vital component in improving any nation’s overall soccer standard is an all-around effective and comprehensive youth program. As a nation, we have made significant strides in the areas of physical, tactical and mental preparedness, as demonstrated by the numerous individual successes our players have had in European leagues, as well as some fantastic recent achievements by US national teams, but in spite of some very intensive efforts at improved youth development, technical and creative levels of play at the next stage (professional and international competition) have hardly progressed. This has led the powers within the USSF to ask, “Are spending enough time on appropriate technical training at every level of development?”

The answer they’ve met has been a resounding no. Their solution is to turn the focus back to the local level, where players spend the vast majority of their time and thus, where they have the most chance to have their future development impacted positively. One of the first problems encountered at the club level is—not surprisingly—something the Dutch have already worked out.

Rinus Michels explains: “When the KNVB met to find alternatives to street soccer, we discovered that in the past you played street soccer every day, often for many hours at a time, sometimes as many as 25 hours per week. In the place of this came an organized, uniform training and weekly match at the club. What happened at amateur clubs, especially with the youngest players, was that the players received only one or two hours of training per week.”

MATANUSKA SOCCER CLUB SOCCER MATANUSKA It’s not enough time to train competent soccer players, particularly if they’re not doing technical work on their own outside of the club activities. Additionally, Michels, like Schulz and Fisher mentioned earlier, notes that the curriculum is often lacking as well, making those few training hours less than desirable to begin with.

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“The very few training activities at a club may not be allowed to be activities with little or no solutions to real soccer situations, such as running laps, coordination training, isolated sprint training or individual techniques to get past an opponent, running technique and endless dribbling drills. It is a shameful waste of valuable time.” Furthermore, he goes on to note that this form of training very often turns players off to soccer, as it doesn’t connect with what they’re looking for in the game, no matter how young. “Players must continually be confronted with exercises in training that contain the ingredients from the real game, so the required match qualities can be developed,” he continues. “Of course, ball skills, passing, dribbling, moves to go around an opponent, shooting and heading are developed. However, they are developed only as a means to solve a problem in the game. Thus, it is a functional development.”

A functional development is exactly what US Soccer means when they talk about creating more ‘soccer savvy’ players, and it’s the clubs’ task to get them there. One place where we’re starting to see more success is with our youngest national teams, which year-in and year-out are probably the strongest in CONCACAF. A lot of that success boils down the training program at the national camps, as well as the improved development coming from the clubs.

“One thing we have always tried at these [national team] camps is to make the game itself the teacher,” says US Under- 14 Boys Technical Director Manny Schellscheidt. “We let the game and the situations guide the teaching.” Schellscheidt,

though German, was actually the first person awarded a USSF A license when the licensing program began in 1971. As a contributor to American coaching thought since then, he’s positioned better than most to see how the country’s outlook on youth development has evolved over time—with the results to prove it. “Just to see the talent of some of those 14- year-olds is amazing,” he continued. “With programs like this we are putting ourselves in a position where the young players coming through our youth national-team system can play with any other youth players in the world.”

To improve further, however, the onus is on clubs like ours to provide an even more professional approach to youth development. Still, that doesn’t mean greater sophistication in training, just more quality.

“A lot of youth trainers still have the tendency to use different training exercises when working with their players,” Michels warns. “They are afraid that their expertise is in doubt if they do not change it up. A good youth trainer, composed in the art of letting his group perform the standard training activities as regards to the game-form—however simplified—answers the challenge the elite youth soccer player is looking for. Basic forms are a reflection of the ‘real’ soccer match,” he explains, “where the players are confronted with opponents, teammates, goals, defined spaces, game rules and still new options to find solutions for more complex soccer situations. The repetition of these basic forms is a golden guideline for every youth training session.”

Michels goes on to recommend weekly “homework” assignments for club players, where he or she can continue to work to develop a complete handling of the ball (in Michels’ world, this means mastering the Coerver system), passing, dribbling and heading skills. The key is that the soccer learning process is not limited to the few hours of training and matches at the club. At the club, the emphasis should remain on the development of the individual. As the player progresses through the latter stages of youth development, the aim is to provide training and game environments that promote the continued growth of ball skills, an increasing game awareness and an appreciation for individual expression within the concept of the team.

Unfortunately, in Alaska it’s typically the best players, the most natural athletes, who are under-trained. Often these players are at a cut above the rest of the group in terms of natural technique or physical ability, and as such, coaches at the youth level tend to overlook their progression while struggling to raise the games of their teammates. By focusing on the development needs of the individual, clubs can ensure each player receives the appropriate training, tailored to his or her individual stage of development.

MATANUSKA SOCCER CLUB SOCCER MATANUSKA At Matanuska Soccer Club, our motivated, talented, aspiring young players require challenging environments to stimulate them to fulfill their potential, and it’s our duty as coaches and administrators to create that environment. After all, what could be more important than the training culture we create for our players? Creating a training environment requires a clear understanding of what you want to accomplish, how you intend to accomplish it, and a plan to implement it (again, by chance or design?). By creating a consistent set of standards, empowering the leadership within our teams, preparing sessions and paying attention to details, we can unite all the club’s teams in the pursuit of excellence.

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CCCODA ::: TTTHE WAY FFFORWARD FOR MSC With the level of youth soccer being played in America steadily rising, and competition for players, coaches and tournament honors fierce in most regions, Alaska remains something of an open territory, an empty canvas just waiting for a club to step up and make its mark by committing to a program of elite development. Matanuska Soccer Club, as the only competitive club located in one of the state’s largest population centers, is uniquely situated to take on this challenge. We have no area clubs to compete with for players, we are not hamstrung by a lack of fields or facilities, and we haven’t really begun to explore the resources available to our players and coaches, whether that be more advanced training opportunities, outside travel, better camps or more cooperative efforts with model clubs outside the state. But first and foremost, before we can begin setting loftier goals, we must strive to professionalize our operations as a club, particularly as coaches who train and interact with our teams on a daily basis but also as administrators who are responsible to provide our players with the best possible opportunities to train and play at the highest levels. We may not be training future internationals, but we need to act as if we are.

Second, as a competitive soccer club, we need to admit that unlike recreational leagues, we can’t be all things to all people. Our mandate is elite training and development, and while that mission requires considerable outreach to the rec

leagues for things like fundamentals training and recruitment, we must focus on the task at hand.

Lastly, and related to both points above, we must now grow serious about creating a cohesive plan for youth development. Using guidance from US Soccer, where appropriate, and development lessons learned both at home and abroad over the past 25 years, we should endeavor to provide a club-wide development plan that team coaches can draw upon when necessary in evaluating the effectiveness of their sessions. More than ever, now is the time to make sure we’re acting by design and not waiting on chance.

Below I’ve listed several programs currently in operation through MSC that should play an integral part in our overarching development plan, as well as the logical progressions for taking our club to the next level.

• Formalize and accept a tiered development model with tangible objectives for each level of development. • Standardize player evaluations across the club. Receiving coaches should receive a file documenting each player’s development history, and be able to pass on the same to the next coach. If every player in the club is being evaluated the same, and we are following set standards for promotion criteria, then we can more accurately track individual player development. • Set relevant objectives for our club’s coaches and for the club as a whole. Coaches will be graded by their peer leadership on how well their players are meeting development standards, while as a club, we should determine an achievable but high standard and work towards making it a reality. Four teams representing MSC at the Far West Regionals in two years (June, 2010) is an ambitious, but not unrealistic goal for the club. • Expand the focus of our Elite Development Academies to incorporate more work on individual-player technique. These academies are designed to provide additional, intensive training in the more technical aspects of play, and we want to promote a culture of technical proficiency throughout the club. • Employ one to three club coaches devoted solely to developing and monitoring individual technique. Even Manchester United has a dedicated skills coach; we should, too. • Add an MSC Individual-Training component to our Academy offerings. Players can sign up alone or in groups for training with an MSC skills instructor. Program agendas would be tailored to the player’s needs. • Continue to encourage free play away from formal training, both through pickup soccer and our ongoing Futsal League. Expand the Futsal League to incorporate more teams, and organize a winter futsal tournament. • Aggressively expand the opportunities available to our coaches for continuing education. • Encourage all club teams to travel out-of-state, and assist them in choosing, planning and executing a trip.

MATANUSKA SOCCER CLUB SOCCER MATANUSKA • Add an individual-skills camp to the MSC agenda for the fall/early winter (Coerver Coaching). • Create a college-assistance program for our high-school-aged players, providing a process checklist, communication and resume assistance, academic guidance and Web-based video portfolios for each player.

Character  Commitment  Leadership  Determination