The Bottom Line Capture the ‘WOW factor’ with a short video (the shorter the better) to peak interest. In-person talent assessment is hard enough, so your video(s) need to kick ass. Video must be good quality, or your audience will leave after 5 seconds. In a long-form video, try to capture all 4 player properties […]
How to Spot a Likely Soccer Hack
OH MAN … be careful who you listen to. 3 Spanish, and 1 Portuguese team That’s the makeup of this year’s Champions League, and Europa League finals. Together, they offer a nice backdrop to highlight the need for perspective. So here we go… After every season, it seems broad conclusions on the state of the […]
[Video] Setting The Standard for U13 Possession Soccer in America
We’ve shown you what the current standard for U11s looks like. And we’ve demonstrated how this translated to the global stage with competitions against the best academies in the world. We’ve also shown you what it looks like at U12. Now we present what it can look like at U13. Enjoy and study the crap […]
The 1 Soccer Policy that Cripples the National Team all the way to 9 Year Olds
US Soccer not creating a true soccer pyramid with promotion & relegation. That’s it! You want youth development on par with the rest of the world? You want our top flight pro teams at the level with the best in the world? You want the National Team to consistently be a legit World Cup contender? […]
Who Else Wants to Win?
Yeah, that’s what I thought. Winning fucking matters! And don’t you ever forget it. The only question (AND IT’S A CRITICAL ONE) really revolves around context. Under what circumstances has winning occurred? What were the pros/cons considering short, medium, and long term objectives? But, whatever your answers … on the whole, winning matters. Chronic losers […]
Soccer Development or Player Development? Start Getting it Straight
Time to recalibrate! We’re not interested in player development here, we’re interested in soccer development. While related, they are not the same. 1) Player Development This is not the end all, be all, of this country’s issues. As conventionally discussed, and comparatively speaking, it’s irrelevant. It’s just a tiny speck of what’s going on. If […]
The “Possession Movement” Has Finally Hit American Shores: How Prepared Are You?
There is a movement towards possession-based soccer in our country – and it’s about time. The possession-based game, in one manifestation or another, has dominated global football for decades. But unfortunately it has taken an extreme interpretation and execution of possession, in Barcelona/Spain, to awaken us in the United States. As a result, the word […]
They Laughed When I Said It Could Be Done; But When I Started to Coach!
That’s pretty much it, right? All too often it seems that if you want to do something that breaks the mold, people react strangely. It’s like you’re an extraterrestrial or something. Two kids want to build a search engine better than multi-billion dollar incumbents? Larry and Sergey create Google. Twitter? Who the fuck is going […]
How to Execute: Who on Earth are You Learning From?
The figure breaks coaching down into 3 fundamental elements – all of which contain huge challenges. For instance, we’ve got over 4 years of philosophy-based content here, and we’ve barely scratched the surface. But now I think there’s enough of a base to start efforts in the other two elements – Activities & Execution. The […]
How Can You Take World Class Soccer Methods, and Apply Them In Your Environment?
I think we can all agree that taking what they do elsewhere in the soccer world and applying it here, is not easy. But the reasons behind that aren’t necessarily what you think. Perhaps the biggest and least understood reason for the difficulty is interpretation. You see, reading or witnessing something, and properly interpreting what […]