Children and some reasons behind 'Play' - Part 2

Part of the discussions with the young people has been to hear their views on winning and losing and I’m sure what you are going to see will resonate with some of your own experiences. Firstly, this article extends from the previous blog post on ‘Children and Play‘ so please have a read of that one first if you haven’t already to get up to speed. 

Here’s a big thing from kids - winning and losing isn’t actually that big a deal for children. Now of course, there are always anomalies to everything but broadly speaking, the kids aren’t overly concerned. We heard some great quotes from children from the research we did:

“If we’ve lost I’ve normally forgotten about it by the time I’ve had a shower”

“I’m not that bothered about the score, trying your hardest is the most important thing”

“As long as I can have cheesy chips on the way home I don’t really care”

The big thing from children is that the disappointment is short-term. Ten minutes after the game their lives have moved on. But for the adults, it’s ruined their weekend!

So, it could be suggested from all the research and evidence out there that the outcomes of winning and losing is an adult paradox. People (grown ups) tell me that sport teaches you about winning and losing and makes you understand these important life lessons, but does it? 

I once gave 20 coaches on a course a really difficult spelling test and then put on the flip chart the scores from their efforts - 95%, 82%, 64%, 43% etc. and all the way down to the lowest score 4%. I then started writing the names at the top alongside the scores, starting with the highest. The feedback, unanimously in the room after writing the first name, was that the adults didn’t want me to complete the list as the lowest people didn’t ridiculing. Hang on, hasn’t that 20 years of sport taught you to win and lose? Evidently not... 

One of the questions we asked the kids was “would you like a close game where you win or lose 3-2 every week or would you rather win 9-0 every week?”. The feedback was overwhelming, the kids always want the close game, and recognise there is no value in winning 9-0 every week (“every one just starts hogging it”) or losing 9-0 (“it’s just no fun”) every week. But the development comes from close games are staggering, things like:

“You learn about coming from behind to win and how good that makes you feel”

“I like the game to be interesting from the start to the end”

“It’s a much better challenge to be in an even contest”

Now relate this to when we as kids organised our own football or what still goes on in playgrounds or before training now. Four kids turn up, so they play 2v2. One team will start to win and one will start to lose so when the next player turns up, what team do they put him on? The team thats losing, because they wan’t to even the experience up. And if another turns up, they either play 4v2 or move people around to keep the game even. Adults don’t see this - we still want massive goal differences because that might be worth an extra point at the end of the season!

I got into a discussion in the West Midlands with a League there and we were talking about an U13 match. One team had turned up with 14 players and the other turned up with 8 (standard stuff - school ski trip, someone’s birthday etc.) so the two manager’s agreed the score for the League and let the team with 8 play with the 3 subs to play 11v11. Great game, common sense and exactly what the kids wanted. However, the League found out so docked them points for playing ineligible players and fined them! Now, I understand why, because the League just followed the Rules that are in place, but sometimes we need the desires of children to drive the Rules, not the other way round. 

If we are going to make football truly child-centred we have to listen to the children. The outcomes of this might lead to a game that adults don’t agree with, but why should we agree? This is the children’s game and it’s probably about right we gave it back to them in some form. 

Questions to consider:

How important is the value of winning and losing?

What are children’s responses to this - straight after the game, 15mins after the game, at the next training session? Do they align with yours and the parents?

How can you create an environment that moves the child values and adult values closer together?

How do these values change as children get older? Should your behaviours change?

Children and some reasons behind 'Play' - Part 1

One of the interesting discussions I have around the country, often with coaches and other adults involved in grassroots football, is why do children play football? When I share my views this often traverses into tangents from adults, denying the belief in research we have done or thinking that, for some reason, their children are ‘different’. 

Well, I’d like to use this first part of a two-part blog post to share some of the views from the research we have done with children, and share a couple of stories from a recent coach education course and hopefully leave you a few things to ponder. 

When we first started this research into the whole youth football debate it made perfect sense to start in one place - what do the children think. After all, it is their game, they are the ones that play and know more about being a child today than an adult does. Our childhood was very different you see; You Tube hadn’t been invented, there wasn’t access to football on loads of TV channels from loads of different countries and playing football on a computer consisted of waiting ages for the tape on the Commodore 64 to load up. Now there is instant access to FIFA12 to play virtual opposition from the other side of the world. So who should decide what a 10-year old’s game looks like?

The focus group interviews with the children were built on the following methodology - get a dozen or so children together to talk about their views on football, on the game they play. Build the presentation into being about them, a few questions to prompt them talking and then listen. Let’s just pause on those few words, read them again, “and then listen”. They are important. Because, when you give children the opportunity to talk about what they want and to listen to what they think, it’s fascinating. 

Another key aspect was the environment - let’s keep away anyone that could influence their views. So the coach of the team? Sorry, you’ll have to wait outside. Parents? You can sit and chat in another room too. This was because they can influence the views. For example, the coach picks the team (is often a mum or dad anyway) and the child wants to play so they aren’t then going to speak honestly for fear of damaging this opportunity. 

The first question for them to discuss was very simple - why do you play football? 

You won’t be surprised at some of the responses:

“Because I love the game”

“Because it’s really fun”

“Because I get to hang out with my mates”

These reasons are common and consistent with children across the country. No matter where we speak to children, whether from professional teams or grassroots teams, boys or girls, rural or urban, top of the league or bottom of the league, typically the responses all correlate. Why? Because they are children. They think like a child. What motivates a 10-year old child, motivates a 10-year old child, whether you are in Devon or Durham and I’ve done focus groups in both those places and many in between!

We then talk about the things they don’t like. Can you guess what they say? Here’s a few things that children don’t like; getting injured, not playing, bias referees, adults shouting at them. 

It gets interesting when you start talking about parents and their views on winning and losing but I’ll save these for future blogs.

After a few more questions we then get on to an interesting task. We provide the children, in small groups, 16 pieces of paper that have a host of different statements on, from intrinsic motivators to the extrinsic. They are as follows:

1. I love scoring or stopping goals
2. I like meeting new friends through football
3. I like to show off my skills
4. It’s a really good game and I love it
5. I like skilling people
6. It helps keep me fit and healthy
7. It’s important to me I win the league
8. I like learning new skills
9. I play because it makes my parents happy
10. Trying my hardest is more important than winning
11. It’s important to me I try to win matches
12. It’s important to me I win trophies and medals
13. I like playing football with my friends
14. I love playing football because it’s fun
15. Winning is more important than trying my hardest
16. I like playing matches against other teams

The task for the children is to select the ‘Top 9’ most important things for them about why they play football, discard the ones that aren’t important, and then organise those 9 into order of importance, with 1 being the most important. 

Reckon you can predict the Top 6 the children pick? Have a go now. Get a pen and write down the numbers of the top statements that are the most important for children. What did you have as the top one? I’ve completed this with over 50 groups of children and the results are very consistent and when I have done this with groups of adults, to predict the kids responses, they never get them all right!

So, the top answer by far is number 10. By a long way. Did you get it right? Trying their hardest is more important to the children than winning. Now, marry that up against the values that an adult brings to game day. Do they match or are they different? Read that again, do the adult values match what the children want from their game? They should do.

The next five you could probably have a good guess at - numbers 2, 4, 6, 13 and 14. The children, aligned with academic research too, are driven by internal motivators. That’s what gets the children there in the first place. It could be said that children come to training motivated and our job as coaches is to maintain that motivation when in fact some of us are probably good are minimising their motivation through unexciting drills and boring standing in lines. 

And the ones right at the bottom of the list? Number 12 and 15 have NEVER been picked by any group of kids amongst over fifty that have done this task. Number 7, winning the league, has been picked once and finished low down their list. They just simply aren’t important to the children. Who are they more important to?

On a recent coaching course delivered by one of my colleagues he shared this list, to which a couple of candidates strongly disagreed. He set them the challenge - send a group text to your teams’ parents and get them to ask their kids ‘why do you play football’ and see what they come back with. One coach that disagreed also did this with his own three children, ranging from 8 to 13 years old. Unsurprisingly, the results matched up, virtually identical! One of his own son’s even talked about trying his hardest being more important than the outcome. The next day the coach came back to the course, his head in his hands and apologised, not only for disbelieving the research but more importantly, for putting his own needs before those of the children. 

A question to finish... Where do some adults place their emphasis? How much money do we spend on trophies and medals? Why do we do a top goalscorer trophy every year that tends to go to one of two kids? Why do we spend thousands on them when we still put U11 kids in adult full-size goals and don’t have enough balls for one each at training? Where are the adults priorities? I’m not saying don’t buy them but maybe think differently.

One U12 lad in Hull said to me “I’d rather have a decent match ball for every game than a trophy at the end of the year”. Poignant. 

So let’s see if we can think outside the box, do something different, do something that meets their needs. Take them to a Premier League or Football League game. Buy them all a new boot bag. Or a football pencil case for school. Ask them if they want anything different. 

If you are sitting there reading this now questioning what you have read, do me a favour, send a group text out to your parents and get them to ask their kids one question - why do you play football? 

Nature v Nurture: Either or both...

This week saw the performance of an athlete in an elite football setting that marvelled many of us - Messi. And it was far from messy. It was composed, creative and captivating prompting many debates from radio to the pub - how do we create a player like that? Are they just born that way?


Apparently, if myths are to be believed, if I complete 10,000 hours of 'something' then I will become an expert. It's that easy. Well, that is the law according to some and the truth for all involved in talent development. However, is that the answer, just do loads of hours? 


The background to this field of discussion has come from work in the early 90's by Anders Ericsson, who looked at a variety of different 'experts' and concluded that this was the magic number. And the scary thing is, for those that have then gone on to read Bounce, Outliers, Talent is Overrated etc. it has become the Holy Grail, deeply ingraining this in modern talent development society. People are getting hung up on the fact that greatness needs to hit this number. 


Now, I don't profess to be an academic and a lot smarter people than me are debating this issue but one thing I do like to do is read around a subject. So, Ericsson says 10,000 hours is the number, what do others think? Why should I believe Ericsson and take it as read? When you actually read into this subject, it gets quite interesting, and for us involved in developing athletes in sport, or more importantly, developing people, things start to get unearthed about the matter. 


For example, Ericsson's research has no variables within it - so it doesn't say if some people took 2000 hours and some took 25000 hours, its just a neat average of those that became experts. Furthermore, the research was undertaken largely with finger manipulative tasks like playing the violin, or chess, so how does this relate to a cognitive, physical, physiological, technical team game like football? Or doesn't it?


Evidence exists in other research of elite athletes that have played international sport having completed 4000/5000/6000 hours of training and the work of the Australian Institute of Sport highlights athletes that have crossed into sports with no experience and competed with far fewer hours. 


The one thing that is evident is you need to work hard, using deliberate and deep practice, and this is why I'm not convinced totally that it is all about 'nature'. No-one gets born with a talent and they just become world-class without hard work. Messi has completed years of practice, honing skills, recognising pictures within games, understanding tactical elements in order to play the game successfully in amongst other exceptional players. You don't get born with that skill, it comes from experience. 


However, is it totally down to 'nurture' then, the environment you are in, the opportunities you get given and presented with and as it happens, the time of year you were born? I don't think you can totally rule out 'nature' either. Some of us born with a genetic predisposition to do certain things to certain levels. Height is an obvious one. I would have struggled however many hours of practice to play in the NBA. There is the odd one under 5' 10, but that is very much the exception. Sprinters from Jamaica, long distance runners from Africa - this is something that we probably don't fully understand but something makes this happen genetically. 


So what does this mean for us when developing our players? From my stance, it comes down to a focus on the environment and the things we can control. 


- Make it an incredibly enjoyable place for young people to come to. No-one stops doing something because it is too much fun!
- Try and use practices that are as close to the game as possible. That's what they come for, to play the 'game', not to stand in lines and take their turn. 
- Ensure your coaching knowledge is up-to-date and current. Do you understand questioning techniques? Do you know about when, where and why to use different coaching styles?
- Focus on aspects wider than just technical work, help them become better people through sport first and foremost.
- Provide opportunity for children to play. If they want to play, and are intrinsically motivated to do so, they will play forever. As someone told me recently, children are the experts of play, not the adults.
- Help kids fall in love with the game. 


Simple.