In his book The Talent Code, Dan Coyle talks about how the Spartak Tennis Club in Moscow doesn’t allow any of their students to play in a tournament for the first three years of their study at the club.  Coyle goes on to say that “It’s a notion that I don’t imagine would fly with American parents, but none of the Russian parents questioned it for a second.”  The head of the club, Larisa Preobrazhenskaya says that “Technique is everything.  If you begin playing without technique, it is a big mistake.  Big, big mistake!”


Why wouldn’t it fly with American parents?  I believe, that if I were to start a club, that this would be the only way to properly run a club.  In the United States, we currently have very little standards for our soccer clubs other than that the families must have enough money in the bank for the check to clear.  We don’t have a system currently in place where a player must graduate from one level to the next.  This isn’t grade school, where a player actually has to perform to move on.  Yet we pass kids onto the next age group just because of their chronological age and not their soccer age.


Imagine the development path where all competition was in house and everything was about the player and the ball.  Imagine a club where a player must be in the youth academy for three years before making it to a team.  Would parents trust the process?  Or would they abandon ship to another club where they were given a roster spot on a team that travels all over the country for tournaments and competition?


In the United States everything is sped up in terms of player development.  This is in large part due to the fact that the primary goal of youth soccer players and parents is to play in college.  Playing soccer in college is a great accomplishment, but it shouldn’t be the end game.  Why?  Studies have shown that a soccer player reaches their prime from the ages of 24-27.  Most college soccer careers are over by the age of 22 or 23 and they don’t have a realistic pathway to continue their careers with professional teams, especially not in the United States when it comes to the womens side.  


The fact that college soccer is the primary goal for most athletes is what ruins a players development.  Players are thrown into national competitions by the age of twelve and thirteen where they are expected to play a brand of soccer tactically that they are incapable of playing technically.  The players often times never learned the confidence on the ball necessary to play at a world class level, yet they are expected to have the same game awareness and decision making as a world class player that is ten to fifteen years older than them.  Chalk that one up to the coaches.  Where coaches will spend hours studying the training sessions of Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp and install that into their next weeks training, with their U12 team.  It doesn’t add up.  Again, we are expecting the game to look like a Champions League game from our twelve and thirteen year olds.


So again, why couldn’t we be more patient when it comes to player development?  Why couldn’t the players have to go through a rigorous training program before entering competition?  Is it FOMO (fear of missing out)?  Fear of falling behind?  Fear that if you don’t get in the club early enough that you’ll never make it?  The reality is, none of those fears exist in the realities of youth soccer at the highest level.  If you were to go around looking at the top twenty girls U17 ECNL & Development Academy teams in the country, or the top twenty boys U18 Development Academy teams, you’d find that less than a quarter of those rosters feature players that were in that same club when they were nine or ten years old.  A previous DA club that I coached for recently posted that there were only four players that went cradle to grave with the team (U9-U18).  Which means, players come later.  Players that wait to go to the big clubs until the ages of thirteen to sixteen, are better off.  Now knowing this, would you be more patient?  Would you not care about that “big” U11 tournament coming up?


If your organization, club, or league, proposed that you must go through a two or three year training period with a technical coach from the club, before playing in a league or traveling to a tournament, would you sign up?  Has anyone ever seen this type of development before?  The closest thing I’ve seen to it was a club in Michigan, where they formed teams at six years old and would play them in the U8 or U9 brackets.  They would clearly get demolished, but the parents saw the plan.  The following year when the players were seven years old, they competed, but still lost nearly all of their games by wide margins.  By the third year, when they were playing their appropriate age groups, they were steamrolling everyone.  This wouldn’t have happened if the players and parents didn’t understand the reasoning.  Could this be the right way to do things?  As the great developer of soccer talent in the world Tom Byer always says, “Soccer Starts At Home.”  Which means we must get players to start playing at a younger age.  That doesn’t mean in leagues.  That doesn’t mean in tournaments.  If I were to ask parents, would you be willing to sacrifice games for the first two or three years of your soccer players career, would you do it?  I’d love to hear the answers and thoughts on this.  Email me at PlayMakerTraining13@gmail.com

​

With nearly the entire midwest in the midst of an arctic blast, many schools have closed down and clubs have cancelled their training sessions for the next couple of days.  How should your players past the time?  How should coaches pass their time and still be productive?  

In comes the greatest invention in modern history.  Netflix.  Here are a few Netflix documentaries and/or shows that any soccer junkie should spend the next few days diving into!

First and foremost, Concrete Football.  I don't think that the United States will ever catch up to the rest of the world simply because we lack a certain CULTURE.  After France won the World Cup, NIKE seemingly the next minute had a commercial that spoke about how France did not win the World Cup in Russia, it was won before that. It was won on the streets.  Concrete Football goes behind the scenes of what makes France the biggest soccer hotbed in the world.  Their street soccer CULTURE.

Bobby Robson will go down as one of the best managers of all time.  This doc has interviews with other legends such as Sir Alex Ferguson, Pep Guardiola, Jose Mourinho, and The Real Ronaldo.  This is a must watch for any soccer coach or student of the game.  Listening to how the players talked about him is what every coach should dream of being talked about by their own players.

"If you're a famous painter you're never rich until you're dead.  With managers, you're never appreciated until you're gone." -Bobby Robson

This is a series of ten episodes that breaks down some of the best players to ever play in the Premier League.  I especially enjoyed the Thierry Henry, Jamie Carragher, Paul Ince, David Seaman and Ruud van Nistelrooy episodes.  Through these episodes players take you through the adversity they went through to become what they now are.  Legends.​

This one is especially for coaches!  This is a subtitled documentary that follows three lower level clubs in Germany.  From a promotion and relegation battle, to an in-season firing, this really gives an in depth look of what coaching at the professional level is really like.

​There are many more documentaries that have been on Netflix in the past that are currently unavailable that you should keep an eye out for in the future. 

• The Class of 92' | The players who inspired a generation documentary on Manchester United
• Becoming Zlatan 

There are also many that I have not watched and look forward to watching ASAP!

• Barca Dreams
• Becoming Champions
• Sunderland til' I die
• Class of 92 | Out of their league

Each week when I work with players I always ask them about what they do at their club or high school training sessions.  The usual answers are the usual suspects of a soccer training session.  Injury prevention warmup, a technical warmup with the ball, a possession exercise, maybe some shooting if we are lucky, small sided games, and a scrimmage of some sort.

Every once in awhile, I hear about an instance where something goes on that I believe isn’t age appropriate.  In my fifteen years of coaching Professional, NCAA Division 1 men’s and women’s, ECNL, Development Academy, High School and every age group of youth soccer… there is nothing more polarizing to a team than when a coach separates a drill into starters versus nonstarters.  

Imagine an exercise of 6v4 to goal where all of the remaining players rotate through the defensive four positions.  The coach never subs out one of their front six players and only focuses on the movement patterns of that front six and neglects the back four and the remaining non starters.  

You would probably think that is an absolutely normal practice in soccer.  But what about in a U12 practice?  Would you say it’s age appropriate?  What it shows me, and unfortunately the player that told me the story, is that this coach is not focused on developing everybody on their roster and is primarily focused on the teams starters.

Coaching a team where the gap between the top player and bottom player is large always seems like a dilemma for most coaches.  I’ve never seen an issue with that as long as you have standards for each and every player and you hold those players accountable to those standards.  I can often see the measure of a coach based solely on the treatment of the best player on the roster.  If a team is focusing on technical aspects in attack, and the best player makes a bad decision with their first touch, and is not corrected, that sends a red flag to me about the level of the coach.  It is also a red flag when nothing is said when the worst player makes a mistake and isn’t corrected.  Every player deserves to be coached.

Players at the younger ages should rotate through attacking and defending roles in training.  If this is so hard to ask, consider that the Croatian Development Curriculum created by world renowned coach Romeo Jozak, states that players rotate through all field positions until the age of thirteen.  It’s sad when a player comes to me and tells me about a coach that can’t even rotate players in a training session.  This is not developing everyone on your soccer team.

​

As the first round of the 2016 European Championships are upon us, one of the games I was most excited to watch during the opening weekend was the German National Team opener against the Ukraine.  Recently, I read the book "Das Reboot: How German Soccer Reinvented Itself and Conquered The World."  I collected some of the most interesting highlights of the book that I found can help in our development of youth players in America.

Belgium Double Pass System and how it changed the Bundesliga Clubs

• Today, Double Pass (via its subsidiary Foot Pass) judges the clubs performance centers on 250 criteria, ranging from infrastructure (minimum requirements of four training pitches, including one made of Astro Turf) to personnel (at least one sporting director with a UEFA A-level license, a minimum of two coaches with a UEFA Pro license, at least on A-level coach, one goalkeeping coach, two physiotherapists), performance diagnostics and the adoption of a uniform philosophy or blueprint throughout the club.  Their ratings system follows that of Michelin - three stars signify educational excellence.
• In the initial ratings period, 2007-9, seven Bundesliga clubs were awarded three stars by Foot Pass, the top mark.  By 2011, eleven top-flight clubs were rated excellent, and in the latest round of testing (2014), fifteen out of eighteen Bundesliga clubs were awarded three stars.  A bonus star is available for performance centers which produce a high number of first team players.

I had to lead with this because the United States just formed a partnership with the Double Pass System to rate all of its Boys Development Academy clubs.  I truly cannot wait for this to take place in our countries clubs, as I think it will make a huge difference.  Belgium, Germany, and most recently England have partnered with the Belgian firm.  

Struggling to score goals

• At the World Cup in South Africa, Germany had converted 37.2 percent of their goalscoring opportunities, more than a third.  That figure had fallen to 28.6 percent at Euro 2012.  Germany had needed thirty-five chances to score ten goals in that competition....
• Specifically devised training exercises in South Tyrol were supposed to encourage quicker, more decisive shooting.  The players were made to score under pressure, in internal competitions, and with a shot clock running.  Bierhoff: "When you do something on a daily basis, it becomes a habit and part of your mentality.  We had seen before how dangerous it was to play without that final bit of determination to score that goal at all costs.

Finishing is a mentality.  Goal scoring is a mentality.  Bierhoff said it best.  PlayMaker Training focuses on the training habits of players.  Repetition breeds success.  Good habits breeds success.  PlayMaker Training breeds successful players.

Das Reboot on Thomas Muller

• "Muller was to describe what constituted 'a team' as part of his homework.  'Togetherness', 'always fighting' and 'don't grumble if a teammate makes a mistake' were Muller's answers.
• 'Its not easy to find somebody who plays this strangely,' Muller said of his own positional vagueness.  'I'm not great at following orders, I follow my instinct, it's something deep inside.'
• But Low had found thatt he could once again rely on Muller's sixth sense in Brazil.  In him, he had a player who never stopped running ('He did a great job up front,' Low said, 'he kept on creating openings for others') and hassling defenders until they lost the ball or their head or both.  He never got injured, and, most importantly, he never seemed to feel any pressure.  Low: 'He has the unbelievable quality to never choke or show a nervous reaction in front of goal.'

No question Thomas Muller is one of the top players in the world.  Numerous times I have watched him and he always would make runs that I didn't even think could be made.  Sometimes, players need to be able to play with their intuition.  Too often, coaches tell players what NOT to do.  If a center back has space to dribble, they should dribble.  Players need to learn what they are capable of, whether that's their 1v1 ability, how far they can test a goalkeeper, or making a run where the odds of getting the ball are slim to none.

Das Reboot on Jurgen Klinsmann

• 'Are you prepared to suffer to reach the ultimate target?  Are you ready to run up and down the pitch once more, fifteen minutes into extra-time?  Do you completely identify with your task, are you prepared to sacrifice yourself for the team?  Or will you only give 90 percent?'  These were not just questions for professional athletes, he says.  'I've always been fascinated by people who find satisfaction through total commitment in their jobs.  They could be bakers, painters, or footballers.  The painter who comes up with a new color he's truly proud of is as happy as the striker scoring goals.  Maybe even happier.'
• Football, he believes, remains a 'player-driven game.'  Americans sometimes find that hard to understand, Klinsmann says, because most team sports are considered coaching-driven there.  'You'll often see players look to the coach for direction.  But football doesn't work like that, because it's too fluid.   You need players to take charge.'

Total commitment in their jobs.  Total commitment in their development.  Players of all ages, at the end of the day, develop themselves.  Their commitment level dictates how far they go as a player.

Football/Soccer doesn't have timeouts.  They don't have a particular offensive play that you can run.  The game is fluid.  The game does not stop.  This is why having a player first mentality in terms of player development is vital.  Is your club developing teams?  Or are they developing players?  Players must come first, team success will follow.

Sami Khedira on being a PRO

• A key moment in his career was turning up late for the team bus as a teenager and being left stranded.  He's been punctual ever since, a fully-paid up defender of the Swabian work ethic. 'You'll never get beyond a certain level as a professional athlete if you're sloppy,' he said.  When a serious knee injury at eighteen threatened his career, he read books about leaders in business and politics in order to find the secret of inner strength.  'Successful people have similar strategies.  Success always starts in the head.'

You wonder why he is a top player in the world.  Again, at the end of the day, the best players develop themselves.  DO NOT RELY ON  A COACH OR A CLUB TO DEVELOP YOU.

Joachim Low's Training Style

• The sessions mostly consisted of short passing games.  We had to keep the ball on the ground.  Jogi would say it incessantly.: 'I don't want any high and long balls.  It's much easier to do something with the ball if you keep it on the ground.'
• With Germany, though, the training games would be stopped every time someone played a long ball.  Every single time.  There were clear instructions to build from the back, through the two center backs and midfield, and then to move out as a team.  Jogi didn't stand for it if somebody didn't follow that plan.  Eventually, playing that way becomes second nature to you.
• Teams were most susceptible straight after losing the ball.  We concentrated on those moments of transition.  It was imperative that we all moved up as a unit, it was just as important as all of us coming back to defend.  Those drills were being repeated again and again.

No coincidence that he's now been in charge of Germany for 10 years now.  He was adamant at getting these players to play his way.  It's worked.

The Solution

• There was, however, as Schott is keen to point out, no comprehensive master plan for the technical education of Ozil, Gotze etc.  'Some people felt that we should provide a full, binding curriculum of lessons to be taught at the academies.  Others said the coaches should be given free rein to allow for individualism and prevent everyone doing exactly the same thing.  Those were the two extreme positions.  We met in the middle.  We came up with a framework of basic objectives that should be met, without being dogmatic.  I don't think that was very important, though.  The biggest, most decisive effect resulted from the increase of full-time professional youth coaches.  In 2000, we had about a hundred, FA and clubs combined.  Today, there are four hundred- four hundred licensed coaches who do nothing else but to think about coaching youngsters football every single day.  We provide them with platforms of regular meetings, for the exchange of ideas.  As they get better and improve, so does their training and the players they develop.'
• 'The football that is being played today has nothing to do with different training plans for a "more modern football."' Schott reiterates.  'It's simply due to talented players at eighteen, nineteen or twenty having enjoyed between 50 and 100 percent more training sessions in their lives than those who came into the league at the same age fifteen years ago.  Elite youngsters trained three, at most four times a week.  Now it's six to nine times a week, with full-time professionals who don't just happen to know football but can also teach it.
• The biggest, most eye-catching day-to-day change on practice pitches Kersting can attest to is the prevalence of individualized drills: 'Footballers spend nearly as much time on the ball by themselves now as playing with the team.'

These three points are vital.  Too many "clubs" still have father coaches or volunteer coaches.  It's time that there are more full time coaches that only coach soccer.  In Buffalo, New York specifically, there needs to be more clubs that employ full time coaches if it wants to become the next American soccer hotbed.
The amount of training isn't even close to good enough on the world stage.  Our highest boys level, the Development Academy, mandates 3 training sessions a week.  Germany did that when they were failing.  Now they are training 6-9 times a week.  Impossible for American clubs to provide that.  That's why outside training is needed.  Hence, PlayMaker Training.
The last point is all I care about.  The player on the ball.  They dictate the game.  If they take care of it, we have a chance to win.  If they are careless with it, we have a chance to lose the game.  Simple.

Foreigners coming into the system and taking spots from German youth players.

• The German FA were initially worried that the clubs would fill their academies with foreign teenagers.  They therefore imposed a minimum quota of twelve Germans in any class of twenty.  In practice, their fears have proved unfounded.  'Ninety-five percent of all academy players are eligible to play for Germany.'  says Schott.  It's telling that Bayern Munich, the country's wealthiest and most successful club, stopped scouting for youngsters in South America altogether in 2011, opting to concentrate on the talent coming through on their own doorstep, in Bavaria, instead.
• Two-thirds of all Bundesliga professionals were German in 2013-2014, and more of them than ever before were native youngsters.  Sixteen percent of U21 players were on the pitch that season.  In 200-01 that figure was 8 percent.

Imagine if the MLS would adopt a rule that said that their rosters must consist a certain percentage of American players.  We probably wouldn't have an MLS.  Also, how many U21 American players are currently playing in the MLS?

Soccer training in the 21st Century and beyond

• 'Finding new ways to improve a team has become more difficult.  But it is possible.'  Future increases in the playing tempo are more likely to come from quicker minds than quicker feet, he says.  At his clubs, the emphasis has thus shifted yet again, to cognitive training and the optimization of thought process through video analysis and special video games.  'The biggest untapped potential lies withing the footballer's brain,' says Rangnick. 'To get better in the modern game translates into taking in things more quickly, analysing them more quickly, deciding more quickly, acting more quickly.  We need to increase the memory space and the processing pace.'

Speed of thought, rather than speed of play.  That's soccer.


A lot of great content in that book.  As you watch Germany play during this summers European Championships, realize that it was a long process.  One in which they first realized that there was a problem in what they were doing, and they clearly took the appropriate steps in fixing the problem.  Enjoy the 2016 Euros!

When it comes to experts on youth soccer development, only one person can be rated above all others, and that is Tom Byer.  Tom Byer has spent the last 20 years helping Japan become a soccer nation, and now, he has taken his talents to China.  It's amazing that these countries go to an American when it comes to help on soccer.  Tom has coached over half a million kids in Japan and even had his own spot on national TV in Japan for 15 years to help kids learn soccer technique.

Recently, Tom came out with a book titled "Soccer Starts At Home."  I recommend every soccer player, parent, and coach read this book.  For those that won't, I will highlight the important parts.  A lot of the philosophy that comes through PlayMaker Training sessions, has been a result of following Tom Byer over the last five years.

Without technically competent players, it doesn't matter what system, tactics or formation you play - the results will always be dependent upon the individual qualities and characteristics of the players.  Results at team level will rely to a great degree on the technical competence of the players.  So, for long-term success, either at an individual level or at the national team level, it's clear that results will depend on developing technically competent players.

• I lost interest in tactics a long time ago.  My underlying philosophy is that you cannot introduce advanced tactics, until you have players with advanced technique.

The best way to make the 'elite' player better is by raising the level of the lower-level players.  They in turn will push the elite players to become better.  Imagine you have a team of 20 8-year-old players.  Three of the 20 are very skillful and the other 17 are not.  Those three good players know they will most likely play every minute of every game and in their preferred position, even if they goof off or miss practice.  So there is often a complacency with the best players who invariably are not pushed into making themselves better.  But imagine if all 20 of those players have a similar technical ability.  The competition then becomes much more fierce; they will fight to retain their position on the team and work hard to become better players.

• This is a tough one to comprehend but it is true.  It's hard to find coaches that have the ability to raise the level of each player on a team.  To raise the bottom of the team while pushing the top players takes experience.  It takes a coach that when it comes to performance, its not what they teach, its what they tolerate.  Every player cannot be held to the same standard,  the bottom player cannot be expected to do what the top player can do, but as long as they are held accountable for what they should be able to do, every player will grow.  For example, play a 4v4 three-touch-game, while pushing the top players to play 1 or 2 touch.

Imagine if a class of kids were sent home after school each day and only half of them were required to do homework.  It's obvious that the kids who don't do the homework will fall further and further behind the other kids.  If they're not studying away from the classroom, they won't be able to improve themselves and match or outstrip the other kids.  It's the same with piano practice and it's the same with soccer.  The kids need that practice away from the structured lessons to improve their technical skills.

• At the end of the day, the best players develop themselves.  Players need over 1,000 MEANINGFUL touches each practice to improve technically.  Go to your kids next practice, and see if they come even close to 1,000 meaningful touches.  That last line of this quote is why the players that regularly attend PlayMaker Training sessions, are passing the rest of their teammates.

I watch kids' teams play soccer and despair sometimes.  'How can they be so bad?'  I ask myself.  Most kids can't even move the ball from one foot to the other.
What's the problem?
The problem is people don't know what the problem is.
Federations are prescribing the wrong medicine for the wrong symptoms.  Federations see inferior performances from their teams and then come up with solutions they can't implement because their players aren't skilled enough to execute them.  They apply science, psychology, advanced training, more training, residential training, training that is totally irrelevant and bad training to the wrong people at the wrong time.  South American and African kids rarely get this training, but still manage to acquire superior skills.  Don't give players the wrong training and they will have a chance.  Give them the wrong training and their chances diminish.  And, as is the nature of soccer, they'll soon be discarded and left on the scrap heap.  Give them the right training and the sky's the limit.

• Never have words been truer to describe the United States Soccer Federation.

In the United States, you've got 23 million children under the age of 6 out of a population of nearly 320 million people (compared to 64 million in the United Kingdom and 23 million in Australia), and they have far more kids registered to play in an organized environment.  But they don't produce technically sound players.  There are some really good players, such as Landon Donovan and Clint Dempsey, but like England they don't produce great technicians.  Typically in the U.S., they try and throw science and money at the problem.  Nothing is happening for the youngest kids, the 2-to-7 year olds.  But look at kids in Africa and South America.  They're not rich and they don't have huge organized soccer academies: they're poor and they learn on the 'street.' And they're better.  Much, much better...  The simple truth is these countries do not have the players with decent technical skills to take on the world's best.  Latin countries do and it's not because they have better coaches; it's because the culture allows kids to develop their skills.

• Culture.  That is the key word.  And that is the sole purpose of this entire book.  Soccer Starts At Home.  Soccer starts with culture.  The top 50 players of all time were introduced to the game at the average age of 2 years old.  The average age a kid starts playing in the United States is currently 7 years old.  Immediately, we are starting 5 years behind.  The best players I have ever coached had parents who played.  If they didn't have parents who played, they were almost certainly to be a younger sibling to someone who played.  That is not a coincidence.

I believe, and I don't think it would be controversial to say, that the development of technically gifted players is based on having a 'soccer culture.'  What this means is that in countries with a soccer culture, young children are exposed- in some cases as soon as they can walk - to soccer and playing soccer with parents, relatives, and friends.  The content of this 'soccer culture' will vary from place to place, but it will be a core part of the overall culture wherever it is.

• The biggest thing we lack currently in the United States is the lack of culture.  We still have players on the national team where they are first generation soccer players within their families.  Compare it to other countries, where their top players all had fathers who played professionally, and grandfathers who played.  I don't believe the United States Men's National Team can realistically compete for a World Cup, until all of our players are third and fourth generation soccer players.

This book has been a great teaching tool for me and has opened my eyes to what needs to change in order for us to grow as a 'Soccer Culture.'  It is safe to say that Buffalo does not have a soccer culture.  Its great to have Buffalo FC, and the WNY Flash in our backyards, but that isn't what makes up a Soccer Culture.  A soccer culture starts at the youth level.  When players only have 3 or 4 clubs to choose from to play "competitive soccer" that isn't a strong soccer culture.  When U11 teams have to play U14 teams to get a "competitive game" that isn't a strong soccer culture.  Soccer in Buffalo is still in its infancy.  My sole purpose of staying in Buffalo, is to help build its soccer culture.