English Youth Soccer Check-In

Coaching Confident, Creative Footballers

By Damian Nicolaou

Experts believe it is between the ages of five and eleven that children learn skills and habits, good or bad, that stay with them their entire lives - this applies equally to education, personality and sport. It is during this vital period that footballers can be made or destroyed. A few years of being coached by an aggressive, unqualified manager to boot long balls into the channels and 'get rid of it' at a formative age can result in a player who reverts back to that early training every time the pressure is on (as we have seen England teams do so many times over the years) or even loses their love of the game entirely.

In response to the latest confirmation of the failings of the national team, the FA recently launched a skills initiative to target youngsters in this age bracket. The aims of this initiative are to raise overall playing standards, to discover gifted players at a young age, and most importantly to make sure they receive the right coaching. The FA scheme, the brainchild of Sir Trevor Brooking, could actually benefit not just football, but English sport as a whole, as as one of its primary aims is to improve children's agility, balance and co-ordination, the foundations of many sports. The FA will deploy coaches across the country to undertake this task, and each region will have a further coach whose task will be solely to educate other coaches and raise the overall standard of coaching young footballers receive. Better coaching should hopefully result in future generations of technically accomplished English footballers able to play the fast paced passing game as witnessed throughout the age groups at Arsenal's North London academies.

For too long regional FA's have operated different policies to each other, resulting in confusion and inconsistency in youth coaching. For the first time there will be a coordinated, centralised strategy applied nationwide. Brooking explains: 'We have to integrate to raise the bar at grassroots level. If we're doing that we'll do it at the top level. That's why multi-skills are the starting point for every youngster. We want to look at agility, balance and co-ordination, then try to identify the ones who can become football specific. From those in the five-to-11 age range we can get the best, who should go into an elite programme.' A worthy aim, and one received well by other figures in football such as Newcastle boss Sam Allardyce who laments: 'We don't grow top sportsmen from a young age. Football cannot be expected to develop players from six years old without proper quality identification programmes and ways of schooling young people of promise through the early ages to develop their talent.' He then adds ominously, 'Until we get those basics in place our chances of breeding a World Cup-winning side are as remote as our chances of breeding an English Wimbledon champion.' It goes without saying that Andy Murray is, of course, Scottish.

English football is not short of money, the FA is one of the richest organisations in world football, and English clubs make more money than those of any other nation, but it is the way the money is spent that is the issue. Brooking wants more money to be pumped into training five to eleven year olds, and the introduction of specialist qualifications and assessments for youth coaches. He also wants the philosophy the English coaching to change, becoming more like the approach seen in Latin America, Europe and Africa. If he manages to do that then maybe, just maybe England might have a chance.

Ministry of Football takes a more enlightened approach to coaching young footballers. The emphasis of the Ministry of football method is on fun. Sessions combine dance music with elements of the Dutch and Brazilian methods. All Ministry of Football coaches are FA qualified, CRB checked and trained in emergency aid and safeguarding children. Ministry of Football coaching is currently available in North London.

Damian Nicolaou, Lightning Bug viral advertising and marketing