This month, as we are between seasons, I have stayed mentally busy. After completing my last assignments for my Yoga Sport Science course, I have been reading widely, including revisiting Jonathan Wilson´s excellent Inverting the Pyramid, a variety of Soccer Journal back issues, including David Trapp´s thought provoking short ¨A Soccer Renaissance?¨ and Delgado and Mendez´s ¨Tactical Periodization¨ and from Journal of Sport Psychology in Action, Gilbert et. al.´s 2010 piece on coaching philosophy ¨The Pyramid of Teaching Success in Sport.¨ It has me thinking about what makes a teacher, what makes a complete player (complete being a common descriptor of the very best lately, especially in light of the excellence of the Spanish team at Euro 2012) what makes a good coach, and what makes a good manager, and of course, where do all of these various ¨goods¨ intersect.
The work I´ve been doing preparing for the season has been outlining session plans and periodized fitness plans for Leeds United LFC, where Andy Burgess has been brought on as manager, and I´m again providing services as a technical consultant. I´m also updating the U9/10 curriculum for my local club, Century United, as we prepare for the upcoming season. Meanwhile, I´m still doing private sessions for both yoga and soccer clients, so my professional life, such as it is at the moment, is mirroring my reading list: a search for the complete coach, complete manager, complete player.
The term Total Football arose after the Rinus Michel´s system and approach was well and truly mature, after the 1974 World Cup. The etymology of the term is telling: Gropius, the leading Bauhaus designer and architect was a proponent of total architecture as early as the 20s -- that all design should take into account all of the particular uses and interactions of the object and should be designed taking into account all available construction materials and techniques, without regard to tradition or previous forms or styles. The Ajax team of the early 70s (and their counterparts at Dynamo Kyiv under Lobanovskyi) was steeped in the innovation of the methodo, referred to the verrou and catenaccio, but neither Ajax nor Dynamo were bound by anything that went before. More importantly, there was a holistic approach to training: from youth development, training, fitness, nutrition, and obviously the functions of each player on the field. Sports science, in its infancy (but most progressed in the Netherlands and in the USSR) was used to improve the athlete to his optimum. Each player was expected to be able to interchange freely throughout the park, and, much like with total architecture, was valued in the utility of interaction and the squad was to be appreciated as singular complex system.
Holistic football is perhaps a better translation of totaalvoetbal than total football. It is, in many ways, the antithesis of the moneyball approach so touted today as the wave of the future. Where the common theme of performance analysis is reductivist -- measuring the value of a player by analyzing discrete indicators, total football is holistic in its approach -- viewing the game as a singular system. This isn´t to say that performance analysis is useless however, as the insights it provides can generate reliable indicators of how the whole networked system of a squad at play can operate.
Moving back to the individual athlete, thinking about the holistic approach of course brings me to thoughts near and dear to my heart, yoga and football. Sport science gives us very good measures of fitness that predict work rate and injury prevention, and tests exercise protocols to improve fitness. However, at the end of the day, the athlete is a complex system that reductivist measures cannot quantify. Why is Leo Messi the best footballer in the world? Why doesn´t he get injured with frequency? The data gives us hints, but ultimately it is because the whole system -- not just Leo Messi´s muscles, tendons, joints, blood, &c &c -- but Leo himself that works together to be the athlete that he is. The sum cannot be adequately described as the addends.
So the exercises that my athletes do that I pick from yoga, or the yoga sessions I lead are somewhat secondary to my point: it is the holistic attitude, looking at an athlete as more than just a summation of techniques and physical attributes that must inform coaches and managers. I am no Luddite arguing against use of every tool that sport science and analytics gives us, but for total football, those tools must be used to organize, teach, engender, and nourish the player
Still a lot of thinking to do, but I am convinced the future lies not in the cold numbers of the game, but in its warm beating heart . . .
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