Soccer Strawman Arguments

Many within football like to make wide-sweeping statements. Most listeners fail to see the context of how that situation applies. What coach said might be true for their environment, but might not be applicable to your environment. That doesn't make them wrong. The extreme example is grassroots coaches watching recovery sessions of pro teams, and then replicating that session with their U8s, having them run around cones, jump over poles, and finish from crosses like some kind of football style assault course.

What Bayern are doing here is part of their mid-season break. Yes, it is designed by experts. Yes, they are some of the best coaches and players in the world. Yes, they are an incredibly successful team. That doesn't mean you should copy them with your one hour U8 session on a Wednesday evening. The demands, needs, and environment of your kids and the Bayern players are completely different. One can forgive a coach pontificating, and others applying the methods without realising the context in which it should be delivered. That forgiveness ends as soon as you are monetising it.

Coaching education has skyrocketed, with the bar representing the required level of expertise being pushed higher and higher, that most can't keep up. Coaches have to be generalists, not specialists, holding a fairly deep knowledge in plenty of fields. A Jack of all trades, if you will. Technology helps us to share and discuss information and ideas. It is via these new media that we look to fill our knowledge gaps with downloadable content, failing to fully appreciate the context of that information.

Football is very philosophical. It elicits deep emotions within the spectators and the participants. We have preferences and biases, with these becoming our value systems, which then dictate how we compartmentalise new knowledge. Analysing information is hard and takes a while, and as humans our evolution and survival depends upon us learning fast. That's why stereotypes are so widely used. As soon as we interpret a stimulus as ticking several boxes, the stereotype protocol kicks in, allowing our brains to quickly fill in the rest of the boxes without having to gather anymore information. In the wild, it helped us to develop fear of certain animals or plants. If a scaly animal was poisonous, and we failed to recognise that, we would be dead. If the scaly animal was not poisonous, but we deemed it so, and ran away anyway, we would be wrong, but we'd still be alive. This is also why humans are risk averse. Our brains developed in an environment where we didn't have time to learn al the facts, so had to mine the information for the important data, making split second "educated guesses," often erring on the safe side.

You're wrong, but you're not dead.

Our philosophy on football becomes intertwined with our self-image. This is yet another defence mechanism on display. If something threatens our self-image, we become very defensive, sheltering ourselves from all information that is contrary to our narrative, thus preserving the image we have developed a need to maintain. Think anti-vaxers and conspiracy theorists. No amount of evidence will convince them they are wrong, and a persistent campaign of attempts to do so causes these people physical pain, as their brains cannot handle what is a perceived attack on the very fibre of their being.

Football is for everyone, and typically activities with such a low bar for entry get dragged down to the lowest common denominator. This is why tired clichés still persist within the lazy punditry we are subjected to. The fodder of which provides ready made talking points to the layman fan, who wants to participate in the social discourse, and does so by parroting what he heard the night before on TV. Always remember these two key points when witnessing debates, not just in football;

1. People are more concerned with appearing to be right, than actually being right. That means that the average discussion participant isn't embarking upon some noble search for truth, but instead they are trying to win or score points against what is seen as an adversary. Ad hominem attacks are a frequently used method by those who are holding onto their argument by a thread.

2. Most arguments can be described by the mental representation of two people playing a game of tennis against each other on two adjacent courts. They listen to reply, ignore any points made by the opponent, just hitting serves and not returns. Too often, one or more of the participants is ignoring the points being made by the other side, or bringing up points which are irrelevant.

This is where some observers play the "both sides" card, allowing themselves to switch off and remain in the sanctity of their own neutrality. Although I have seen "both sides" use the same research to justify their points, one side is more correct than the other side. If you're unsure, consider who would have more to lose monetarily if they were wrong.

With that in mind, let's take a look at some frequent bollocks that comes up in discussions.

Twitter Coaches - This is often said in quotation marks or a mocking tone. When one uses "quotations" incorrectly, it begins to chip away at the validity of their argument. Nobody is on Twitter pretending to be a coach. No coaches are pretending to be on Twitter. There are coaches who have Twitter accounts. Due to the repeated topics that cycle through social media again and again, and some of the boneheaded opinions espoused with authority, anyone seeking to discredit an argument can imply that it is a school of thought created by social skill lacking basement dwellers partaking in Guardiola cosplay. That's not the case. There are certainly a handful of tossers on Twitter. No doubt. It might just be my experience, but the average Twitter discussion between coaches comes from a point of view of knowledge sharing and discovery. Often the participants will have combined experience of decades worth of coaching, at a whole range of levels, across many countries, being highly educated, both academically, and in terms of coaching license. The Twitter coach community is not a homogenous blob of hivemind groupthink, but instead it is a large community of very different people, with very different opinions. We don't vote as a bloc.

Possession without a purpose - If someone ever says this, they probably don't agree that Pep's Barcelona were the best club team to ever exist. That's already a problem for me, as our understandings of football branched away from each other a very long time ago. Possession always has a purpose. Ultimately, it's a defensive one. If you have the ball, the other team cannot score. Securing possession, first and foremost, is a defensive objective. Therefore, it is never without purpose. The phrase is often used by those trying to distance themselves from a non-existent version of football. "Hey, we play possession football, but not that mindless passing for passing sake, that's just stupid." Similar to Americans who vote Democrat, but don't believe healthcare should be free. Do they actually believe it? Or are they just saying it to avoid being perceived as an extremist, because society has conditioned us to believe the truth is usually somewhere in the middle. Truth is binary way more than people think it is. The two views may be extremely poised on different ends of the spectrum, but it is entirely possible that one of them is correct and the other is incorrect. 

Passing for passing sake - English commentators say this so much that I genuinely believe it has held back the development of English football by at least ten years. You pass the ball to move the opposition. Sometimes, the opposition doesn't move. It might be that two players are passing back and forth without inviting pressure, because it is allowing their teammates further up the field to make runs, perform rotations, and get into more advantageous positions. That isn't always shown on camera, and certainly isn't talked about on highlight shows. Secondary effects are psychological and physical, that it tires out the opposition by making them run a lot, by constantly forcing them to readjust their shape, and it is frustrating to be out of possession for so long. If you were to ask someone who makes accusations of "passing for passing sake" what they would suggest, it would always be to send it long. Get balls into the channels, try and turn them, get the ball in the box etc. Other great suggestions being that the team isn't scoring enough goals because they don't have two strikers on the pitch.

We are a team that plays through the thirds - Code for "possession based football." In reality, every team plays through the thirds. All teams attack along a spectrum of directness. Due to the offside law, and the limits of most players struggling to kick accurately over sixty yards, only in extreme cases do you ever see a team boot the ball from one box to the other. Even some of the best assists by Neuer and Ederson only put their teammate through on goal thirty yards out. Watch a team defend a lead by parking the bus. They are camped on the edge of their box. The opposition have largely uncontested possession near the halfway line. After passing horizontally along the ground for a while, they then try a direct ball. Even though the ball is direct, in the air, and bypasses several lines of the opponent, it has still only gone from the middle third to the attacking third. This is still playing through the thirds.

The game is the best teacher - This clearly means two different things across the Atlantic. In England, it means providing the kids with realistic, challenging, game like environments. Perhaps a few constraints, but it definitely looks like football. This is the movement of representative task design. It has to look and feel like the game to provide relevant, rich experience to the practitioners in order for learning to transfer. In the USA, it has somehow taken on the meaning of putting the kids into a game, and then neglecting them. Nothing more than a barely supervised scrimmage. The misunderstandings that come from this mean that two coaches who are identical in their beliefs can appear to be diametrically opposed during a debate. If they haven't resorted to insults and quit the discussion, they may eventually find out how the phrase has different meanings depending upon your perspective.

Free play - Again, maybe my experience, but I see very few advocates for letting kids play all the time in unstructured environments. What most of us mean when we express our concerns about the lack of free play of modern kids is that they are not supplementing their formalised training hours with any kind of play in the park, streets, or back garden. Many schools have banned ball games at recess. Despite increasing safety levels in the western world, parents are now more scared than ever to let their kids go to the park on their own, or aimlessly wander over to a friend's house. When kids do get together to play, there are typically devices, or adulted provided structure. So they train for a couple of hours a week, with a game on the weekend, and then what? Nothing in between those hours. I have tried to establish some free play environments in the USA, and the kids are paralysed with fear. Just pick teams and play. Here's a ball. Go! They shuffle nervously, seeking some kind of adult approval or direction. I'm not saying scrap your session plans and just let the kids scrimmage for an hour, although that is beneficial from time to time. What we should be doing is opening up school playgrounds, dropping our kids off at the park, and opening our community centres for just play sessions.

Opposed v Unopposed - "There's a time and a place for both!" types the coach, furiously, at seeing this pop up again on their Twitter feed for the third time this month. There is. Both have use. Not only is what coach is saying true, but it is also neutral. That gives coach even more credibility, for not being an extremist, championing either doctrine. While both opposed and unopposed can be useful, opposed is more useful, to more players. I keep saying that players get good at what they do. If you dribble round cones, you improve your ability to dribble round cones. If the cone dribbling individual has the knowledge and experience to flesh out mental maps in their mind, cone dribbling can improve their ability to dribble in real game environments. The problem is, especially with beginners, they cannot apply the context in their mind, so the learning transfer to the real environment is minimal. Doug Lemov talks about learning per minute. We'll call it LPM. The more visually representative of the game, the more LPM will occur during any given exercise. That's why opposed training is better, and should be used more, and in more situations than unopposed.

Defend from the front - Everyone does. In modern football, when out of possession, all players are defenders and are thus expected to perform certain defensive duties. It's a phrase used by those who mean to say they defend with a high press, in that they look to regain possession, or force turnovers, in their attacking third.

Oversimplification, plus lack of context, with idiots looking to score points.