Guest post by best-selling author, Johnnie Lowery
Over four million children in England play football, which for many is the start of a lifelong love affair with the sport. Many years down the line these children will become the volunteers that keep the game running, whilst many will continue playing well into their later years. A very small portion of them will even make it professional.
But it is a very small portion. At any given time there are around 5,000 professional footballers in England. For context, that’s around 0.1% of the original participation number.
For the vast majority, then, football is something designed to be something that simply brings joy to these children’s lives, rather than anything more serious. The way we coach our children should reflect this.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t have coaches that want to help children improve. Every kid wants to get better and it is the coach’s role to help them do that. However, the outputs should be measured in performances rather than results. Many youth leagues have a league table, sure, but the value in them is purely intrinsic. Nobody is qualifying for Europe at the end of the season. For some teams just picking up the odd point is an achievement, and that’s okay.
I know I certainly played in that team for a couple of years when I was a kid. We stuck at it because we had a manager who made training fun and handed out praise when we worked hard on the pitch, even when we were clearly outclassed by our opposition. Gradually, some of the bigger kids who had been running circles around us each week disappeared, and by under-17s level we’d won the top division of the league we were in.
This may seem like a moot point given that I’ve just played down the importance of league tables, but there is a relevance to it. Creating an environment where kids are having fun gets the best out of them. They want to be there, they look forward to training after a hard day at school. Matches on a weekend are a chance to meet up with friends, have a laugh, and express themselves on the pitch.
I remember an interview with James Ward-Prowse in which he remembers his father always emphasising that the main objective of each session was enjoyment before his son got out of the car. He didn’t do too badly in the end.
Of the disappearing kids that ran rings around my side at under-12s level, I’m sure some made the step up to academy football and bigger things. However, I also suspect quite a few dropped out of football altogether, suffering burnout from playing in a system that treated them as though they were already professionals.
It is vital to always bear in mind, for wellbeing purposes but also for talent retention, that the four million plus children playing football are exactly that. Children.
Johnnie Lowery is the author of Match Fit: An Exploration of Mental Health in Football. The book is available from Amazon here.
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