A Day in the Life of a DIII Soccer Coach in Maine

Bates:

“What do you do in the off-season?” It is a question many wonder about college coaches who compete for short two to three month seasons every year. We decided to follow Bates men’s soccer coach Stewart Flaherty for a day in the off-season to gain some insight behind the scenes of a Bates head coach.

- John C.L. Morgan

The Coaching Education of Jurgen Klinsmann

ESPN Soccernet:

It is only when the U.S. manager opens up about his playing days that you realize he learned the game from some of the most iconic coaches in modern football -- Arsene Wenger, Giovanni Trapattoni and Cesar Luis Menotti among them. Klinsmann smiles as I mention those names, and admits "I always had supportive coaches I adored and early on, I began to try and be a sponge and learn from them."

- John C.L. Morgan

Best Soccer Writing of 2012

A Football Report:

2013 will bring new stories, and writers will continue to unveil value in the context of our day-to-day lives. But before we jump ahead, we really should take a step back. The internet is a wonderful place, but our constant consumption of content allows us to forget which stories were truly compelling, creative, well-researched, and told with conviction.

- John C.L. Morgan

Recommended Reading: Pele's Entropy

Grantland's Brian Phillips on his ambivalence about Pele and the reason for why the superstar can't really help being the way he's been (corporate shill, cranky opiner, etc.) in retirement:

You make people feel good, which makes you feel good, and you see that this is a kind of lovely feedback loop, that if you just keep smiling and talking about yourself the whole tone of the room lifts. You're like a drug, essentially. Only then one day you retire, and the day after you retire you're exactly the same person, and the week after, and the month after, only somehow something is different, some underlying universe-dynamic has gone very slightly wrong, so of course you try harder to compensate.
- John C.L. Morgan

Recommended Reading: The Secrets of Barca

Soccer journalist Simon Kuper on the seven little-known (until now) tactics FC Barcelona coach Pep Guardiola stresses:

Guardiola once compared Barcelona’s style to a cathedral. Johan Cruijff, he said, as Barça’s supreme player in the 1970s and later as coach, had built the cathedral. The task of those who came afterwards was to renovate and update it. Guardiola is always looking for updates. If a random person in the street says something interesting about the game, Guardiola listens.

- John C.L. Morgan

Recommended Reading: Klinsmann Picks Up Pick-Up

Ryan Dempsey on U.S. Men's National Team coach Juergen Klinsmann's belief that youth soccer players should play more pick-up soccer:

Now the head coach of the U.S. national team, Klinsmann says the approach to soccer in Germany is a bit more similar to basketball in the United States--a combination of pickup and playground play as well as organized teams--than it is to the U.S. soccer culture, which for so long has revolved around structured training and having to pay to play for youth soccer clubs or organizations.

- John C.L. Morgan

Recommended Reading: MLS and the Paradox of Possession

Armchair Analyst:

Of the 213 victories in MLS 2011, only 83 of the teams winning that game managed more possession than their opponent (39 percent). Also important to say that of the 75 sides to manage 60 percent or more possession in an MLS game last season, only 15 of those sides managed to win that game (20 percent).

For what's worth, seven of the eight victors in games played over the kick-off of the 2012 MLS season were won by the team who also won the possession battle.

- John C.L. Morgan

Recommended Reading: Revs and the Era of Mutual Love

M. Willis:

Major League Soccer’s history has been marked by eras - the Honeymoon Phase (‘96-‘97), The Era of End Zones & Yard Markings (‘98-‘00), Operation: Survival (‘01-‘03), A Series of Hyped Events (‘04-‘07), Guys! The Guardian is Talking About Us And Not In A Mocking Way (‘08-‘10), and currently, the Age of Mutual Love.

Also, check out Willis's thought-provoking posts on how the Revs brand should be rebooted.

- John C.L. Morgan

Recommended Reading: Quarrelsome Cruyff

Simon Kuper on the roots of Dutch great Johan Cruyff and his recent takeover bid of Ajax:

Yet this is probably the final act of the long psychodrama. Given Cruijff’s history, it’s not hard to predict that this will end in quarrels. After that, one struggles to envision a successful Sixth Coming. Dutch football is slowly escaping the grip of its maker. Cruijff himself is impossible. Only his ideas will live on.

- John C.L. Morgan

Related: Bite-Sized Review: The Freaky Side of Soccer (February 24, 2010)

Recommended Reading: Player Development Model

SoccerAmerica:

A less sensationally marketed document, but free and definitely worth a read, has been unveiled by U.S. Youth Soccer, which has delivered its 117-page “Player Development Model.” You’re thinking, Another curriculum!? Right, it arrives eight months after the USSF unveiled its "U.S. Soccer Curriculum." But this one’s more similar in scope and is designed as a complement to the USSF’s excellent “Best Practices for Coaching Soccer in the United States,” which came out in 2005.

- John C.L. Morgan

Related: Geography of Talent (December 15-20, 2011)

Recommended Reading: Egyptian Soccer Riots

NYT:

At least 73 people were killed in a brawl between rival groups of soccer fans after a match in the city of Port Said on Wednesday in the bloodiest episode of lawlessness since the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak one year ago. Police officers around the stadium appeared unable or unwilling to control the violence, and video footage showed officers standing idle as groups of fans attacked each other with knives and other weapons.

- John C.L. Morgan

Recommended Reading: What the Hell Do These Player Ratings Mean, Anyway?

John Godfrey of the New York Times's soccer blog Goal has a good post on his philosophy regarding the ubiquitous 1-10 player ratings writers and viewers like to assign players after a game, as well as real-life examples of the ten possible results:

The Goal Blog publishes player ratings for most United States national team matches. Like most who do ratings, we use a 1-10 scale, and the volume of responses they produce shows these posts are both popular and a great tool for sparking conversation. But a Twitter conversation with the former U.S. national team defender Alexi Lalas, now an ESPN analyst, produced a bigger question: what do the numbers really mean? What’s the difference between, say, a rating of "5" and a rating of "7"? And is there any way to quantify or qualify the distinction?

- John C.L. Morgan

Recommended Reading: Brian Phillips

Grantland writer (and Run of Play editor) Brian Phillips on why soccer fans love soccer despite the boredom that can often plague the game:

But--and here's the obvious answer to the "Why are we doing this?" question--those same two qualities, difficulty and fluidity, also mean that soccer is uniquely adapted to produce moments of awesome visual beauty. Variables converge. Players discover solutions to problems it would be impossible to summarize without math. The ball sproings up in the air … and comes down in just such a way that Dennis Bergkamp can pull off a reverse-pirouette flick that spins the ball around the defender and back into his own path … or Thierry Henry can three-touch a 40-yard pass in the air before lining it up and scoring a weak-foot roundhouse … or Zlatan Ibrahimovic can stutter-fake his way through an entire defense. In sports, pure chaos is boring. Soccer gives players more chaos to contend with than any other major sport. So there's something uniquely thrilling about the moments when they manage to impose their own order on it.

- John C.L. Morgan

Recommended Reading: Thierry Henry

Sports Illustrated columnist Steve Rushin on Thierry Henry's triumphant homecoming for Arsenal earlier this week:

But then there was only that brief glimpse of him in repose, because 10 minutes into his return Henry slipped behind the Leeds defense, took a pass at a dubious angle to the left of the goal and curled the ball past the keeper and just inside the far post for the game-winner. As the stands shook, Henry sprinted around like a man in flames, thumped the Arsenal badge on his chest and bear-hugged Wenger while looking like an actual bear. Outside the stadium, his statue sprung goose bumps.

- John C.L. Morgan

Recommended Reading: Michel Bruyninckx

Sports Illustrated:

Football, Johan Cruyff said, is a game you play with your brain. Michel Bruyninckx takes that claim more seriously than most. Terms like pedagogy, didactical principles, cognitive readiness and differential learning trip off the Belgian coach's tongue as easily as catenaccio as he explains his "brain centred learning" approach to training young players. "When you make use of difficult words people feel resentment," said the Standard Liege academy director, who is arguably the first football coach to develop a training method specifically to target improvement in the brain's performance. "But when you see the training you can see it works."

Some video of Bruyninckx's training sessions can be seen here.

- John C.L. Morgan

Recommended Reading: The History of Soccer in New England

Via Dave Litterer in The American Soccer History Archives:

The history of American soccer finds a prominent place in New England which was one of the 3 major hotbeds of US soccer for much of the earlier part of the 20th century, and the later part of the 19th. In fact, the team commonly called the first regular soccer club in the country was the Oneida Foot Ball Club which played undefeated for most of its seasons between 1862 and 1967, and played many of its games on the Boston Common, where a plaque memorials their presence.

- John C.L. Morgan

Related: Revs Should Complement New Uniforms with Throwbacks (December 6, 2011)

Recommended Reading: Tom Howe

Tom Howe, one of the founders of the illustrious youth club Scott Gallagher SC in 1976, spoke to Soccer America's Mike Woitalla in March 2011. Among other topics (long-term player development vs. short-term results and the inceasing youth soccer industrial complex), Howe addresses style of play for young soccer players:

I wish everybody would try and play like Barcelona. If all
the clubs across the country did that you’d have some pretty smart players when they hit the ages of 18, 19, 20. And there’d be more people wanting to watch soccer in this country. Barcelona’s the best team I’ve ever seen. They’re just fun to watch.

Update: Though Howe summarizes the Barcelona style of soccer he'd like to see more American youth coaches employ, Michael Cox of Zonal Marking just published an in-depth look at the ten principles of Barcelona's success, nine of which have to do with their style of play. Even though the article looks at those principles through the lens of former Barcelona youth coach Luis Enrique's implementation of those styles of play at AS Roma, it complements today's recommended article perfectly.

- John C.L. Morgan

Related: Recommended Reading: De Toekomst (December 7, 2011)

Recommended Reading: De Toekomst

Here's a June 2010 New York Times Magazine article on the youth development program at Ajax:

The youth academy of the famed Dutch soccer club Ajax is grandiosely called De Toekomst--The Future. Set down beside a highway in an unprepossessing district of Amsterdam, it consists of eight well-kept playing fields and a two-story building that houses locker rooms, classrooms, workout facilities and offices for coaches and sports scientists. In an airy cafe and bar, players are served meals and visitors can have a glass of beer or a cappuccino while looking out over the training grounds. Everything about the academy, from the amenities to the pedigree of the coaches--several of them former players for the powerful Dutch national team--signifies quality.

- John C.L. Morgan