Developing at all Costs 3 -Mercy!

It's 10:30 on a Saturday morning and already your beloved angels are down 5:0.

What is a coach to do? 

Should referees and leagues have plans in place to save young children from large score lines or should the game be allowed to find its own winners and losers?

I've seen some coaches advocate that the team that is currently winning should be asked/forced to play in ways that make the game "fairer" for the sake of the other players. You know the sort of thing, twenty passes before scoring, play with weaker foot etc.

This seems like a noble attempt to spare some children's blushes but sometimes I wonder if all it actually does is coddle the ego of the watching parents.

The nature of club and league football at really young ages seems to create the problem not over zealous coaches. Although I've seen that also. 

One thing I'm sure about though is this issue is not about DEVELOPMENT. It gets mixed up with "well this is a great opportunity for the kids to learn" with this argument being used, strangely by both sides.

I'm going to try to explain firstly why trying to add development into the mix is a doomed idea and then show where the issue truly lies.

Development and Scorelines

Most coaches will quickly insist that the score in Foundation level football tells you little if anything about which team is playing football well, correctly or in a modern, forward thinking way. ( whatever that means) 

And yet some are also just as quick to insist that things must be equalled up if the score gets too out of kilter. Wouldn't a better idea be to ensure parents and children all know the score isn't reflective of how hard they are trying, how far they have come or how they are playing?

Wouldn't it be better to make sure children knew how to walk off the pitch full of confidence without it being based on the score? 

After all, leagues are banned from keeping scores at this level and we all know that the kids forget very quickly.

So, if the kids couldn't care less after lunch who are we trying to appease?

Let's look at the scenarios that could crop up and see if altering the game improves development.

Two teams are playing and team a has been coached well for a few years and is progressing nicely. They play modern football and try their best.

Team b has been put together over the last two years and only includes the biggest strongest players around. They do not play modern football and their coach has not really tried to help them. The score is his only concern.

Team b is winning 6-0.

What do you want to happen in this scenario?

Team a is already playing football correctly and will go back to being coached well at training next week.

Why on earth do they need things altering? What exactly would improve their development?

They are already doing everything correctly!

What about this one?

Team a and b are both good footballing teams who play in a modern way, they have good coaches and games are normally very competitive.

However, today team b is winning 4-0 after 20 minutes. 

Both continue to play in the way they've been taught but team a is going to struggle to make up ground. 

If they are already both playing decent football what on earth are you going to do to improve development during this game?

What about this one?

Team a and b are seen as pretty poor teams but both try really hard and have great fun.

Team a is winning 5-0 at half time.

What the hell can you do during this game that the coach hasn't bothered doing at any other time that would effect the development of the players?

Both teams need to start playing football differently which means they need coaching differently. 

So let's put this argument to bed.

Altering the rules of a game for a player is not about developing them. Feel free to say it is, but it isn't. 

What it's actually about is FAIRNESS. 

So let's look at this different scenario. 

Team a is better in every definable way than team b. They are winning 6-0 at half time and team b is clearly a mismatch for them.

This isn't the coaches fault, not the parents or the players. Its the leagues fault and is a symptom of how football is for kids today.

Sometimes this is actually unavoidable due to small leagues or age groups and yes there is a way of dealing with it. 

We need to understand the reason why this inequality could arise and why it didn't in the past.

Up to about 25 years ago, kids were not really playing league football aged 7,8,9,10. 

What they did do was get together and pick teams between themselves. Two captains picking equally through the group that wanted to play. This happened every break time in every school across the country. 

Teams were chosen fairly. 

If a score became too one sided alterations were made but not always! If there was a sense that everything was fair when teams were chosen, they'd play on.

Skip forward and we now have teams and clubs choosing kids how they want to. Some with trials beforehand, some with an open door policy, some poaching kids from other teams and some kids being hawked around by parents.

This leads to a huge differential in what a team looks like. However, it has zero bearing on how well they are being developed. None at all.

If you are lucky, a decent league will attempt to equal this out with a number of divisions but this isn't always possible. Most leagues will also try to rearrange teams mid season to help.

So leagues do see, accept and try to deal with this unfairness. But guess what, some games as we can see form the scenarios above will just look unfair. 

Some coaches will want to deal with this unfairness and that's fine, good on you. The scenarios show though that coaches pretending they can cite development as a reason for altering the game is a smokescreen. It's actually punishing the kids that are trying to do the right thing for the benefit of kids who, are also doing the right thing so what's the point, are not interested in doing the right thing so what's the point or are being chosen specifically to do the wrong thing so who cares?

A coach should, before a game starts have worked out how best to challenge his team to build on their development. If they aren't doing this then what's the point of pretending to do it when a scoreline looks unfair? Its a con.

My belief is that kids turn up to games wanting to play because its the best part of their week. I want them to love the game for what it is and dream about it all week until Saturday comes. I do not then want to alter that game for them by giving out the message that winning by too many is wrong. 

By saying "ok, these guys are playing great football but we are playing even better so I'm going to punish you" we are messing with those dreams. We are messing with the game and we are wrapping it up falsely if we pretend its to aid development. 

What we should be doing is building better environments for young kids to turn up and enjoy football without a league structure. Large hubs where kids turn up in the dozens and pick teams themselves, fairly and just get on with it. Then, when they move to league football we wont pretend that being 6-0  up is a bad thing and the game needs altering to take account of it.

Salisbury Rovers have led with this approach and should be applauded for trying to replicate environments that young children really enjoy and flourish in. Coaches shouldn't be looking to artificially alter the outcome of games when they could actually try to build similar environments.

I believe its clear what causes skewed scorelines in football. I'm also clear that messing with the game under the smokescreen of development has no effect.

What do you think?