Soccer Best Practice--Play like you're broke

"I want to thank my parents for the greatest gift...poverty!"

--Roberto Benigni accepting the Oscar for Life is Beauitiful.

A documentary on the youth baseball development in the Dominican Republic displayed young kids playing catch using a glove fashioned out of card board. Later browsing through a sport magazine there was a advertisement in the back of the magazine: "revolutionary baseball training device!" It was a piece of cardboard with a hole in it.

"He plays like he's broke"
--Jimmy Connor on the success of Rafael Nadal.

It's been termed the "poverty advantage," how is it that the inner city disadvantaged become the best at baseball, basketball and soccer? Is it that hunger? That drive to to excel or else? No, it turns out that being poor puts you at the advantage of best practice, that is: If it cost money, you don't need it. Or another way to look at it, the more it costs, the less it helps.

And the advantage created by the misplacement of two essential resources: Time and Money.

MONEY
Think about it, we are now training whole clubs in domes that cost $500 and hour. This is not the cheapest or simplest, and it is not the best. We are buying $400 shoes and balls that cost $150. But it is the great joke that soccer plays on us, the more we try to organize and perfect training and development, the more it teaches us the simple way is the best, and if can be made simpler, well, that is better still.

I was at a conference where the current English FA technical Director, Trevor Brooking, spoke an earnestly on what was going wrong with the developmental academies in England, "the turf the kids play on today at our academies...it's too perfect. They are not developing the touch required off an uneven pitch. We give them too much. We have taken away their chance to learn and play."


Barefoot soccer turns out to be the best developer, playing on uneven surfaces creates adapability, learning to forge and a game out of a group of friends creates leadership and social strengths that are not available through a club over organized training. And, most importantly, it builds that essential internal motivation, that determination and belief in oneself to grow. Don't have a ball, make one, don't have shoes, play barefoot, don't have that field, stadium? fans? Imagine them. If you believe you are scoring that last second goal in the upper corner it will happen. Don't have a coach? Coach yourself. Go to a library, you tube, watch games, study movements and copy them.

You're not on an elite team that travel to far away tournaments? Well, that cost money, which means you don't need it anyways, here is why...

TIME
As always time multiplied by quality best practice and the redoubtable 10000 hours looms large. In his Book, Soccernomics, on the economics of soccer, Simon Kupor tackles the question of the poverty advantage:

"In soccer, it is the poorest European boys who are most likely to reach the ten-thousand hour mark. They tend to live in small apartments, which forces them to spend time outdoors. There they meet a ready supply of of local boys equally keen to get out of their apartments and play soccer....A constant in soccer autobiographies is the monomaniacal childhood spent playing non stop soccer...By the time these boys were fifteen they were much better players than the suburban kids."

For instance, here is Nourdine Boukhari, a Dutch-Moroccan soccer player who grew up in an immigrant neighborhood of Rotterdam, recalling his childhood in a dutch magazine:

I lived more on the street than at home...And look at Robin Van Persie, Mounir El Hamdaoui and Said Boutahar. And I'm forgetting Youssef El-Akchaoui. [Like the other players Boukhari mentions, El-Akchaoui is a current professional soccer player.] Those boys and I played on the street in Rotterdam together. We never forgot where we came from and that we used to have nothing except for one thing: the ball.... What we have in common is that we were on the street every minute playing soccer, day and night. We were always busy, games, juggling, shooting at the crossbar. The ball was everything for me, for us.

These friends had nothing but each other and the ball. He makes no mention of travel teams, or coaching, or perfect pitches. So play and train like you're broke. Nothing but the ball and friends. Make games everywhere. Never forget where you come from.

TK