Revolution must start now if national game is to be saved

With English football at one of its lowest ebbs, The Times begins a series in which the sport’s biggest problem will be addressed

“I think we would have the best team if we could go into every household and throw away every PlayStation, X-Box, video game” - Robert Green, West Ham United and England

English football has a huge decision to make, and it needs to make it now. It is 41 years since we won the World Cup and England have reached only two significant semi-finals since then. Our players are technically inferior, the Barclays Premier League is filled with foreigners and our children are not coming through our youth football system with anything like the skills of their counterparts in many other countries.

A stroll across recreation grounds on a Saturday and Sunday can be a sobering experience. Last weekend was freezing, the pitches were rock hard with frost or hopelessly muddy and throughout the country children from the ages of 7 upwards were playing football. Or at least trying to.

We wonder why the England team play a long-ball game, or at least revert to it when the pressure is on. The answer is there for anyone to see every winter weekend. How do we expect seven, eight and nine-year-old children to move the ball from one end of a mud heap to another without hammering the ball forward? How can we expect to produce our own Cesc Fàbregas when a shuddering slide tackle is ten times more common than a successful ten-yard pass in an undereights match?

Issues of a new England manager, the constitution of the FA board and the influx of foreign stars are relatively simple to deal with. What The Times wants to address are the far more fundamental flaws at the heart of the national game, the heart of your children’s sporting lives and the heart of your community.

We will be interviewing Sir Trevor Brooking, the FA’s director of football development and the man ultimately responsible for youth football. We have spoken to children, parents, coaches, sports scientists and experts in Brazil and the Netherlands to discover where we are going wrong and how we can improve.

There is no doubt that the FA has put a lot of effort into youth football. The introduction of mini-soccer in 1999 has been a huge success, making sure that our younger children play only small-sided matches. We have thousands more coaches than in previous years and facilities are better, but if we want a glut of top-class young footballers ready to lead the challenge for the 2018 World Cup, which could be held in England, a huge improvement is necessary. In fact it is a sea change in thinking that is required.

Here are some of the areas we will look at over the next three days, and the problem might not be with the FA, it might be with you.

Parents

On these pages today Alyson Rudd highlights the dismal behaviour of some parents at youth football matches. Children as young as 6 and 7 are being yelled at by parents who should be encouraging, not criticising, and the situation is so bad that parents are being “fenced in” at some matches to keep them away from the pitch.

I have next to my keyboard a letter from Ray Ward, the county secretary of the Surrey FA, sent to all youth clubs in his area on October 17. “Just what do these adults think they are going to achieve by abusing referees, opposition parents and club officials?” it says. “It is beyond my comprehension why some adults devote so much time during the week in order to provide children with the opportunity to play football and then lose all self-control and ruin the day for those same children.” Makes you feel good, doesn’t it?

“Coaches and parents shouting from the touchlines could not only damage children psychologically but also make them not want to take risks, [rather] play safe,” Les Howie, the FA’s player development manager for grass-roots clubs and coaches, said.

Strategy

The mini soccer for all children under ten has been wildly successful and by 2006 there were 21,806 mini-soccer teams in England. So far, so good.

But let’s take a look at the mini-soccer handbook produced by the FA. Page 14, Law 3 - Number of Players. In the under-seven and under-eight age groups, matches can be four-a-side, or five-a-side, or six-a-side, or seven-a-side. Under-nines and under-tens can play six-a-side or seven-a-side.

Is this some kind of joke? This is the age of sports science. Surely the FA’s job, and more specifically Brooking’s job, is to find out the optimum number of players who should be playing in any match at each age level and lay that down as law. There is a huge difference between a four-a-side game and a seven-a-side match in terms of how many times a child touches the ball, how far they have to run and what positions they play in. What is best, who knows? Does Brooking know? Rick Fenoglio thinks he does, as Nick Szczepanik discovers below.

Coaches

If your child joins a football club, they will probably be coached by a parent who should have an FA Level 1 coaching badge. Which is good. The bad news is that some are focused on results, not the development of players or the children.

I have had one coach tell me that “football is all about winning” and he was in charge of a team of seven-year-olds. And we wonder why we do not produce skilful youths. It might be because they were too scared to try a trick or make a mistake after taking a bollocking from a demented under-eights coach.

PlayStation, Wii, X-Box, parks and predators

Remember going to the park for a kick-about with your friends in your youth? Now how do you feel about letting your eight-year-old do the same with his friends? Not such a pleasing prospect, is it? Perhaps they would be safer killing aliens in the living-room on a video game . . .

There is no easy solution, but parents have got to take responsibility. If they do not feel that it is safe to let Jonny or Janet go to the park with their friends to play football, go with them. But do not then try to coach them. Let them play football.

The weather

In his book, The Italian Job, Gianluca Vialli recalls a conversation with Fabio Capello. Capello says: “I went to Scotland and worked with a Scottish youth side and had them do the same drills I would do in Italy. Between the wind, the rain and the cold there was no way they could do it.” So if we are serious about this, we need more Astroturf pitches. At least then our children can pass the ball on a decent surface – and we need a lot of them. And we need a large number of indoor centres as well. And finally, how about shutting down youth football leagues during December and January? The children play in summer tournaments, so the rest may do them good.

Tomorrow The future’s bright, the future’s Oranje. Rick Broadbent examines the Dutch system

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