English football and the Football Association

Some years ago, when my sons were a bit younger, I was interested in running a boy’s football team and before I started I was concerned that I might not get enough boys interested in playing. As it turned out, one team rapidly burgeoned into 15, the club was very successful in every aspect and despite (or because of) the huge effort I put in the whole project was very worthwhile in many respects. To this day it was probably the single most satisfying thing that I have ever been involved in.

In the beginning, because I wanted to do everything properly, the first thing I wanted to learn about was modern coaching methods. This led me to do the old FA Preliminary coaching badge – equivalent to the newer UEFA ‘C’ certificate. On top of this I discovered the Dutch Coerver system of coaching and met one of my childhood heroes, Charlie Cooke, in the process. After that I spent a weekend in Leeds looking at Simon Clifford’s Brazilian system. It was all very interesting and eye-opening stuff at the time.

As I went along, absorbing and trying new ideas, what was often very noticeable was how the FA always lagged the trends, both in terms of coaching ideas and in its understanding of what was happening on the grass-roots touchlines. They tended to adopt new ideas only after first rejecting them and then by being persuaded of the value of them by dint of other people’s efforts.

Simon Clifford; a hugely impressive and persuasive individual, is a very good example of this. He took it upon himself to borrow money in order to go to Brazil and try to work out why the Brazilians produce so many excellent footballers, whilst the English do not. One of the stories that Simon recounts is the one about Stan Mortensen coming back from the 1958 World Cup and reporting to the FA exactly how advanced the Brazilians were in terms of technique, coaching, fitness, and every other aspect of preparedness for international football. The FA responded by immediately setting up a committee to look into Mortensen’s findings. They had one meeting and then called it a day.

In my experience the FA and its officers are reasonable administrators, but they are certainly not visionaries, they are not the kind of people you can rely upon to send a surge of fresh energy through the coaching structures in England. The smart ties and blazers image is not just a myth, it really is what they do best.

As a result of losing to Croatia, England, quite rightly, went out of the 2008 European Nations Cup competition a couple of nights ago. I say ‘quite rightly’ because, over the course of a competition, league results do not lie. And the results say that after 12 games and 36 points to be played for England were third best, and so deserve no place in the finals.

On this occasion the England players were not good enough and, perhaps, the now departed manager, Steve McLaren, was not good enough either. If things change in the future and the England side reaches the levels of performance that England supporters crave it will probably be because somebody, somewhere, maybe even Simon Clifford, changed football in England from the bottom upwards. I cannot believe that it will be the FA, though, they simply don’t have it in them. No imagination, no drive.

Anybody interested in the pioneering work of Simon Clifford might want to have a look here: http://www.icfds.com/

By the way, I am not the founder member of the Simon Clifford Supporters Club, it’s just a credit where credit is due thing.