The traditional 'he didn't make it after City, so he was no good' comment.

While they might have justification in thinking that the path is blocked, they're not doing their job if they're doing their best to get the best players in. And if they genuinely think we're ruining players they should find another club to work at.

Ha well that's the point. Some think they're being phased out one by one. They feel they're being replaced by yes men and whatever they do is irrelevant. Not all of course but some do feel that way. They're old school technical coaches some of them and like producing for the first team and aren't a fan of the academy loan farm sell for profit culture. Probably a bit dispirited tbh
 
As you'd imagine, it's a collation of many different problems.

Firstly as cop outty as this sounds, there's the weather to contend with. We live in a cold, rainy and often muddy country where pitches at grassroot levels are often waterlogged for half a season. This doesn't encourage players to develop their passing game and instead focus more directly. This can be solved by greater funding from central bodies such as the FA and local councils but it can also be solved by tiny local clubs/leagues not spending 75% of their yearly budgets on annual award shows where they celebrate their season and instead ensuring they have proper investment in the pitches that they play on. That's not an exaggeration either - from my experience in grassroots coaching in England, which is getting pretty extensive now if I do say so myself, the biggest cost for small youth leagues is the big party at the end of the year.

Second is that the FA is WAY WAY WAY too cowardly as a player and coach development body to ever really achieve the great change that it wants us to in terms of the depth of technically excellent players that we produce. Public and media pressure on the FA is constant because football has the Climate Change problem. The Climate Change problem is an idea that humans don't really deal well with solving large problems of this magnitude because there's a significant lag time between initial investment and the first measurable results and this means that in that time between, new directions are plotted as this one is seen to have failed/done nothing. A culture change takes a generation to achieve and really bear any sort of fruit. Older coaches need to be further educated which concentrates on your coach development pathways, players who are badly educated in their groundwork will rarely have the ability to transition over to the new paradigm so won't reach their potential, parents and other stakeholders need time to understand what it is that you're doing different and need to have implicit trust in both the worth of the programme and the ability of the coach to follow the guidelines and develop the player. That's not really something that happens in our culture which is very much focused around results first. So we produce players focused around results first to instil in them this mythical fantasy of a "winning mentality" hoping that that will drive them onto success. It's just "English Lions pashun" by a different name and no more mythical than that as a functional system of development. In the past 20 years we have had several fundamental changes to how players should be developed in this country, with several things such as pitch sizes for certain ages changed then changed then changed again. We've attempted our own model, then tried to copy the Spanish model, then tried to copy the German model and now are working under a model that tries to copy all of them a little bit. I imagine in 5 years time, once the England Youth players who did so well this summer get into the first team and fail due to not being able to physically bully opponents and just twat long balls towards the corner flag for the speedy wingers to chase, we'll have another public session of navel gazing where the influence of Pep Guardiola and the public success of the Ajax Academy will convince us that actually the Dutch model is the best thing to copy and we should do that instead. Strong leadership at the top of the chain in the local FAs and the wider national FA just does not exist and even worse is that I hear that there's a bit of a cull of dissenters recently and the open exchange of ideas is being stifled in lieu of being "on message".

Thirdly, children have changed and we as a nation haven't really caught up with this. When I was a kid, I used to watch a bit of telly then go out on the park and play football every day with my mates for hours at a time. Computing was just starting to take off but wasn't the cultural phenomenon it later became. The internet wasn't a thing yet to any real degree. Mobile phones didn't exist. We played football because it was either that or doss around doing nothing. This isn't the life of a 21st Century British child and the actual hours of balls touching feet have been significantly dropped in recent times. We don't have poor areas any more where kids learn to play in an alleyway and develop that close control nor the culture to push children out onto the streets. Most adults I know are scared of letting their kids play out, let alone pushing them to get out. we've become far too insular and far too scared of a paedophile boogeyman to allow kids the freedom to develop. The amount of kids who suffer from forms of anxiety now is almost shocking, and getting them to try things like stepovers or to take on a person one vs one is hard as they fear the "humiliation" of failing. We also don't communicate with children in ways which they can connect to. Kids have grown up Youtube their entire lives and smartphones and tablets and these technologies are not integrated enough into coaching to show them the concepts that they're attempting to teach. Instead it's the old "everybody sit down while an old guy drones on for 10 minutes and nobody pays attention" thing. That's a training issue that the FA needs to solve, primarily.

Fourthly, and I believe this to be the most important one, player development is an odd pursuit whereby the more you try to control it the less results you garner. That isn't to say that we should have an anarchistic model from the FA but there's needs to be a level of flexibleness in the plans in order to help people learn. The education system is going through a revolution recently where it has seemingly realised that people have different styles of learning and to get all pupils to the same benchmark then you have to employ different, sometimes personally shaped, methods in order to overcome that. This exists in the football sphere too. I have a bit of a catchphrase that I say to @BillyShears in conversation and that is that "England could never produce Xavi". Xavi doesn't just have a ridiculous amount of technical skill but he has an emotional intelligence to his game that we can't get into our players. Steven Gerrard is a perfect example of this - a player of great skill but his whole mindset was of desperation and anxiety.

Here's a good piece that talks about this:
Good post and I totally agree with your third and fourth points, it drives me mad the amount of times you hear the term "get rid" at grass roots level, no encouragement whatsoever to enjoy the ball and be happy with it at your feet.
 
Good post and I totally agree with your third and fourth points, it drives me mad the amount of times you hear the term "get rid" at grass roots level, no encouragement whatsoever to enjoy the ball and be happy with it at your feet.

You still hear it from Glen Hoddle, during the game last night between Real Madrid & PSG for example.
 
As you'd imagine, it's a collation of many different problems.

Firstly as cop outty as this sounds, there's the weather to contend with. We live in a cold, rainy and often muddy country where pitches at grassroot levels are often waterlogged for half a season. This doesn't encourage players to develop their passing game and instead focus more directly. This can be solved by greater funding from central bodies such as the FA and local councils but it can also be solved by tiny local clubs/leagues not spending 75% of their yearly budgets on annual award shows where they celebrate their season and instead ensuring they have proper investment in the pitches that they play on. That's not an exaggeration either - from my experience in grassroots coaching in England, which is getting pretty extensive now if I do say so myself, the biggest cost for small youth leagues is the big party at the end of the year.

Second is that the FA is WAY WAY WAY too cowardly as a player and coach development body to ever really achieve the great change that it wants us to in terms of the depth of technically excellent players that we produce. Public and media pressure on the FA is constant because football has the Climate Change problem. The Climate Change problem is an idea that humans don't really deal well with solving large problems of this magnitude because there's a significant lag time between initial investment and the first measurable results and this means that in that time between, new directions are plotted as this one is seen to have failed/done nothing. A culture change takes a generation to achieve and really bear any sort of fruit. Older coaches need to be further educated which concentrates on your coach development pathways, players who are badly educated in their groundwork will rarely have the ability to transition over to the new paradigm so won't reach their potential, parents and other stakeholders need time to understand what it is that you're doing different and need to have implicit trust in both the worth of the programme and the ability of the coach to follow the guidelines and develop the player. That's not really something that happens in our culture which is very much focused around results first. So we produce players focused around results first to instil in them this mythical fantasy of a "winning mentality" hoping that that will drive them onto success. It's just "English Lions pashun" by a different name and no more mythical than that as a functional system of development. In the past 20 years we have had several fundamental changes to how players should be developed in this country, with several things such as pitch sizes for certain ages changed then changed then changed again. We've attempted our own model, then tried to copy the Spanish model, then tried to copy the German model and now are working under a model that tries to copy all of them a little bit. I imagine in 5 years time, once the England Youth players who did so well this summer get into the first team and fail due to not being able to physically bully opponents and just twat long balls towards the corner flag for the speedy wingers to chase, we'll have another public session of navel gazing where the influence of Pep Guardiola and the public success of the Ajax Academy will convince us that actually the Dutch model is the best thing to copy and we should do that instead. Strong leadership at the top of the chain in the local FAs and the wider national FA just does not exist and even worse is that I hear that there's a bit of a cull of dissenters recently and the open exchange of ideas is being stifled in lieu of being "on message".

Thirdly, children have changed and we as a nation haven't really caught up with this. When I was a kid, I used to watch a bit of telly then go out on the park and play football every day with my mates for hours at a time. Computing was just starting to take off but wasn't the cultural phenomenon it later became. The internet wasn't a thing yet to any real degree. Mobile phones didn't exist. We played football because it was either that or doss around doing nothing. This isn't the life of a 21st Century British child and the actual hours of balls touching feet have been significantly dropped in recent times. We don't have poor areas any more where kids learn to play in an alleyway and develop that close control nor the culture to push children out onto the streets. Most adults I know are scared of letting their kids play out, let alone pushing them to get out. we've become far too insular and far too scared of a paedophile boogeyman to allow kids the freedom to develop. The amount of kids who suffer from forms of anxiety now is almost shocking, and getting them to try things like stepovers or to take on a person one vs one is hard as they fear the "humiliation" of failing. We also don't communicate with children in ways which they can connect to. Kids have grown up Youtube their entire lives and smartphones and tablets and these technologies are not integrated enough into coaching to show them the concepts that they're attempting to teach. Instead it's the old "everybody sit down while an old guy drones on for 10 minutes and nobody pays attention" thing. That's a training issue that the FA needs to solve, primarily.

Fourthly, and I believe this to be the most important one, player development is an odd pursuit whereby the more you try to control it the less results you garner. That isn't to say that we should have an anarchistic model from the FA but there's needs to be a level of flexibleness in the plans in order to help people learn. The education system is going through a revolution recently where it has seemingly realised that people have different styles of learning and to get all pupils to the same benchmark then you have to employ different, sometimes personally shaped, methods in order to overcome that. This exists in the football sphere too. I have a bit of a catchphrase that I say to @BillyShears in conversation and that is that "England could never produce Xavi". Xavi doesn't just have a ridiculous amount of technical skill but he has an emotional intelligence to his game that we can't get into our players. Steven Gerrard is a perfect example of this - a player of great skill but his whole mindset was of desperation and anxiety.

Here's a good piece that talks about this:

This is an excellent post, a lot this stuff I never realised or even considered.
I think another thing that affects whether a player gets into any Premiership or even European top division team is that the world is a lot smaller now than it was. It's not that long ago that foreign players were a rarity in the league and the majority of teams were made up of British players. For a youth team player to graduate to the first team they had to be one of the better players in the country whereas nowadays they have to b one of the better players in the world. Straight away this will make it statistically much more difficult for a youth player to break through into the first team of the club they start their apprenticeship at.
 
Great post that @Damocles. The point about Gerrard and Xavi is perfect too. As a slight aside, I found the story of Graham Potter, an English manager performing minor miracles over in Sweden, fascinating, primarily because he's been studying emotional intelligence and social sciences... https://www.theguardian.com/footbal...r-ostersund-human-touch-arsenal-europa-league

I think it's what makes Pep so untouchable. Not only is his this ridiculous borderline genius level individual, incredibly analytical and aware, but he's also exceptionally emotional and a genuinely great person. He knows how to get through to people on a pure human basis first and foremost.
 
Great post that @Damocles. The point about Gerrard and Xavi is perfect too. As a slight aside, I found the story of Graham Potter, an English manager performing minor miracles over in Sweden, fascinating, primarily because he's been studying emotional intelligence and social sciences... https://www.theguardian.com/footbal...r-ostersund-human-touch-arsenal-europa-league

I think it's what makes Pep so untouchable. Not only is his this ridiculous borderline genius level individual, incredibly analytical and aware, but he's also exceptionally emotional and a genuinely great person. He knows how to get through to people on a pure human basis first and foremost.

I agree with you, but Guardiola has been lucky (well, made his own luck) to be afforded time to develop and hone his methods. Very few get that opportunity (especially at big clubs) as it's so results driven and easy to fire managers now. It's interesting to compare to Gracia and Pellegrino who are very similarly aged managers in the PL but have never had more than 2 full seasons at a club. It has to be difficult to employ those holistic strategies when you know it's likely you'll be working with a bunch of new players in 6 months time.

Potter's been afforded that time because he's taken a small side upwards, similar to Howe and Dyche at Bournemouth and Burnley.
 
I agree with you, but Guardiola has been lucky (well, made his own luck) to be afforded time to develop and hone his methods. Very few get that opportunity (especially at big clubs) as it's so results driven and easy to fire managers now. It's interesting to compare to Gracia and Pellegrino who are very similarly aged managers in the PL but have never had more than 2 full seasons at a club. It has to be difficult to employ those holistic strategies when you know it's likely you'll be working with a bunch of new players in 6 months time.

Potter's been afforded that time because he's taken a small side upwards, similar to Howe and Dyche at Bournemouth and Burnley.

I don't think there's any luck in it with Pep. It all just falls back to his ability as a manager, and dealing with people is a part of that. I think he's been afforded that time because he's so good with people that he'd get more time with most simply cos of how well he speaks and how well he articulates his ideas, both emotionally and technically. Boards trust him, cos he's just fucking brilliant and he sweeps people off their feet with his ideas. People that intelligent/charismatic can sway people quite easily. I think he's just fundamentally that brilliant that he takes control of his own future. I don't doubt that Pellegrino is a good manager, but I'd be surprised if he is anywhere near as intelligent and as charismatic as Guardiola.
 
I don't think there's any luck in it with Pep. It all just falls back to his ability as a manager, and dealing with people is a part of that. I think he's been afforded that time because he's so good with people that he'd get more time with most simply cos of how well he speaks and how well he articulates his ideas, both emotionally and technically. Boards trust him, cos he's just fucking brilliant and he sweeps people off their feet with his ideas. People that intelligent/charismatic can sway people quite easily. I think he's just fundamentally that brilliant that he takes control of his own future. I don't doubt that Pellegrino is a good manager, but I'd be surprised if he is anywhere near as intelligent and as charismatic as Guardiola.

I think Pep is brilliant, but it's hard to argue that he hasn't been given all of the time and resources he needs/requests to implement his methods. As an alternative, look at De Boer at Palace this season. He was given the task of turning an Allardyce team of physical cloggers into a footballing side and was provided with the resources of Sakho and 5 games to make an impact.

I'm not saying that De Boer is as good as Pep, but I think that if he had different ideas of how to get the best out of his players, it's got to be incredibly difficult to get those ideas to blossom within 5 games, with a squad not cut out to play in the style you want them to.

Bringing this back to the topic in question, changing first team managers has to have a similar impact on them in terms of how close they are to the first team. At Palace, Allardyce may have preferred a youngster who was very quick, tall or strong who can help to counter quickly, whereas De Boer would probably favour someone who could be relied on to keep possession.

Everything in the UK (not just football) is so short termist.
 
I think Pep is brilliant, but it's hard to argue that he hasn't been given all of the time and resources he needs/requests to implement his methods. As an alternative, look at De Boer at Palace this season. He was given the task of turning an Allardyce team of physical cloggers into a footballing side and was provided with the resources of Sakho and 5 games to make an impact.

I'm not saying that De Boer is as good as Pep, but I think that if he had different ideas of how to get the best out of his players, it's got to be incredibly difficult to get those ideas to blossom within 5 games, with a squad not cut out to play in the style you want them to.

Bringing this back to the topic in question, changing first team managers has to have a similar impact on them in terms of how close they are to the first team. At Palace, Allardyce may have preferred a youngster who was very quick, tall or strong who can help to counter quickly, whereas De Boer would probably favour someone who could be relied on to keep possession.

Everything in the UK (not just football) is so short termist.

Absolutely, an education on delayed gratification could do wonders for understanding the need for patience.
 

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