Rousing, responsive and resilient

The general nature of the concept of intentional learning for coaches often seeks to divide and constrain us to binary choices. Two examples follow; the first related to style of play, the second to how we might support players to learn how to play.

• Should I be a coach who coaches positional play or one who focuses on what is now referred to as ‘relational’ football?
• Do I work from an information processing perspective (where players are taught pre-defined moves and language that they can draw from memory) or support an ecological approach to learning where solutions to problems emerge from individuals’ interactions with the environment?

If we choose one or the other, we wed ourselves to a particular way of doing things. If we stand in the middle of the road, we likely get run over in both directions. 

These narratives can also imply that we can only choose from the narrow menu that’s in front of us, or that we are controlled by currently accepted perspectives.

Whilst creativity can often be said to require a framework to support its’ emergence – the game itself and the people playing it might be better considered as frameworks to guide both player and coach decisions, rather than arbitrary popularised, and often polarising, positions.

This could be viewed as a constraints-led approach to coach and player development; enabling a person to take a focused, flexible and responsive approach to human development and, ultimately, soccer. Seeking to coach soccer through this lighter footprint can ensure that we don’t co-habit a conventional corridor. Instead, we can explore a broader, wilder territory, ensuring that alignment is not achieved by everyone mirroring the same template, but by supporting nations, clubs, coaches and players to navigate today, whilst futureproofing for sustainability and environmental resilience. 

Focusing attention and learning towards better understanding the game and the human beings playing it as a means to consider playing and coaching soccer can free us – and, more importantly, the players – from rigid rule-based, routine and rote replication. That’s to say replicating playing and coaching soccer like someone else, or repeating specific moves and patterns that players are taught to rerun.

Connecting what’s important in our context to the nature of the players in our care becomes the unique landscape that we navigate. Systems of play, specific principles and sub-principles, standardised player profiles and core practices become redundant and irrelevant in environments guided by a more responsive approach to learning to play soccer.

For the purpose of advancing this perspective, I encourage you to consider playing soccer and supporting player development in ways that are rousing, responsive and resilient, such that we can win games and support player development. Rousing refers to the capacity to elicit positive emotion from the people playing and watching the game. Responsive means responding in ways that take account of our ever-deepening understanding of the people in our care (and the opposition we compete against). That rousing and responsive approach to playing football should be resilient across time, when the competitive temperature dials up and when the opposition adapt to what they believe they know about us.

As outlined at the outset, we can often feel the pressure to choose. We choose to win, we choose to develop or we choose to play aesthetically pleasing football. In choosing, we often feel it’s necessary to compromise one or more of the others. But perhaps we can commit to all of them, connected together.

“Connecting what’s important in our context to the nature of the players in our care becomes the unique landscape that we navigate”

Playing football

The narrative surrounding relational or positional play is, mostly, unhelpful. It’s as if relational and positional play are churches to worship. If understanding the players and the important factors within our context are what we believe is important, narrowing ourselves to a specific religion of the game may be inhibiting.

The below are some ways of considering the game:

• Principles - Moments that are important in the game of football
• Strategies - Team interactions that can help the team and players navigate those moments
• Tactics - More specific ideas that might help us start attacks, stop attacks and score goals.

In the Elite Soccer Coaching Award preview learning hub, you can access some footage of how the four finishing attacks tactics in Figure 1 may look in the game of football.