You've done your trick, now pass it on!
The hidden curriculum of children's football #2
This weekend in England there is an initiative whereby coaches and parents attending youth football matches should only show appreciation by applauding from the sidelines and not offering any verbal encouragement. This is the first year that this is being rolled out nationwide and the aim, according to the FA, is to give children ‘a better opportunity and environment to find their own voice, improve their on-pitch communications skills, develop their own game, and most importantly have fun.’1
Parents shouting from the sidelines can be problematic in multiple ways. Firstly, parents can sometimes take their entitlement to involvement too far and become overly aggressive. Just last month all youth football in Merseyside was cancelled for a weekend because of the consistency of ‘threatening behaviour’ towards referees.
Secondly, however, those calmer souls who just want to give their little precious advice will often contradict the aims of the coach. Parents want their child to be the star, yet coaches are developing the skills for playing football as a team and shooting just because your parent can see your name in the stars and implores you to “SHOOT!” does not make for being a good team player.
If you are that coach and you have been working with your players on not just shooting when they are near the goal but passing the ball till they have worked a better position, the question is this: just because you know what you want them to be doing does that give you more of a right to shout out from the sideline?
“You’ve done your trick, now pass it on!”
Mervyn Carless, every weekend circa. 2002
I have written about the creep of professionalisation into the arena of children’s sports, and the shift more broadly towards formal rather than informal play. I lamented the professionalisation of the aesthetics whilst praising the professional development of coaching across grassroots football but I want to roll back on that slightly.
Because we are all finned beasts of the culture we swim in.
When I was a teenager Merv Carless was my football coach. He was extremely knowledgeable about football and a top bloke to boot. I remember him telling me weekly to do my trick and pass it on, but it obviously made no difference as come the next week he would be on the touchline again offering the same advice.
“The ball is gold dust; you wouldn’t give away gold dust would you?”
Mervyn Carless, every weekend circa. 2002
You do your trick and pass it on because the ball is gold dust. The more tricks in a row, the more likely you are to lose it. I see that now; he was right all along. Up to a point.
See not passing it on when I was a teenager taught me a lot about how to play football as an adult. All those times I did my trick and followed it up with another trick and not a pass I got to self-assess if that was the right choice: maybe I should have passed, maybe we could have scored, maybe losing the ball there on the pitch is risky, maybe if I had passed I wouldn’t have got kicked, lesson, after lesson, after lesson.
Eric Dier, who plays for Tottenham, compared the approach in Portugal growing up to when he moved back to England as a seventeen year old.2
It’s a very relaxed approach at Sporting in terms of football. They pride themselves on bringing you up as a polite and respectful person. They would never get angry with you if you missed a pass but they would do if you were disrespectful to someone. There was no shouting. I hear a lot that that is the case in England.
A good player for them was someone who could understand when they made a mistake and correct it for themselves. When I first came to England to play I saw coaches having a go at players when they made mistakes and they would literally be talking them through the game.
In Portugal the coach would sit on the bench and not say a word. We’d just play. It was a matter of us making mistakes and learning from them by ourselves. You understand the game a lot better that way. For me, the sign of a bad player is someone who makes the same mistake twice.
This is actually the advice that the FA dispenses in their coaching courses. Coaches should have minimal input whilst they are playing matches because, as the quote regarding the Silent Support Weekend indicates, they need to develop their own game. During training sessions and before matches is the time to give information to players, but whilst they are playing it is best to let them problem solve on the pitch on their own.
They recommend that even at half-time and straight after a match might not be the best time to give advice on how to improve and state that if you do choose to give out praise to make it specific.3
“Well the league have asked us to do it but personally I am not going to. I think my girls respond best to positive encouragement.”
Another football coach from our club on the club WhatsApp
I once watched a National Geographic documentary where a leopard learnt to catch catfish in the dry season. These big monstrous fish, squirming and writhing in the slowly baking mud, wriggling violently, tantalisingly close to the feline. After pacing the small pool and a few tentative paws towards them the cat works out how to bat one out of the shrinking pool, and wrapping it’s jaws around the mud encrusted fish it pierced its gills and feasted. This new hunting skill learnt it promptly gorged itself on giant fish after giant fish.
We have all grown up swimming in this culture, floating along in the current of praising children for doing well. But this pond of praise is slowly shrinking, and whilst it may look a safe place for catfish like us right now, we will soon be baking in the mudflats too. The fierce heat that is evaporating this body of water is the body of research presented by Alfie Kohn in his landmark text Punished by Rewards.
“Soon praising children will seem like such an outdated idea”
Wishful thinking from progressive educators after reading Alfie Kohn’s new book circa. 1993
I remember playing football for decent enough teams that there would be a hundred or so people watching. The ball would go out for a throw in and you would run over to take it. As you get to the touchline you are looking into the crowd for the ball. You’re maybe half an hour into the game at this point. Totally focused on the game on the pitch, and totally focused on getting the ball back right now. In the flow state. Completely. The crowd are sort of visible. You can see all their faces in one sense, but in another they are like people out of an L.S. Lowry painting. Then you see the ball and it’s in the hands of one of your good friends. It rips you out of your time-space location.
This is not your attention shifting, this is moving from one state of consciousness to another. Your field of vision is slightly different in this present moment, more specific and focused as you narrow in on his face. You catch the ball he has tossed to you, say cheers mate, and throw it in down the line. By the time you get it passed back to you your perception has widened and your flowing again.
“You can’t really focus on what people are telling you to do when you are trying to do it”
My daughter when questioned about this a few days ago
See for my money the problem is two fold. When you are playing you can’t really be helped by advice. The FA, Eric Dier, Sporting Lisbon’s Academy and my daughter are right. You need to work it out for yourself, you need to fully focus on the game. You need to make mistakes and learn from them. Football is more about quick contextual decision making then many people realise and you only get better at decision making by making decisions yourself.
Furthermore, when you are playing you often are fully focused. When you are in the zone you can’t always hear what is going on around you anyway. When you are in the flow state you are not receptive to people giving you advice from afar anyway.
“How am I going to manage to do that?
Absolutely zero chance
Not even sorry”
A parent on hearing that they have to watch in silence this weekend
Of course we all need to do some deschooling. The research that Alfie Kohn presented thirty years ago is pretty conclusive. And the afterword for my twenty-five year anniversary version is just an extra thirty odd pages of more research from the intervening years that further proves his point.
The chapter entitled The Praise Problem deals with the problem of dishing out praise rather thoroughly.
Praise often benefits the giver more than the receiver. It fails on its own oft-stated metrics: enhancing performance, promoting appropriate behaviour and increasing self-esteem. Praise can affect performance by signalling low ability, making people feel pressured, inviting a low risk strategies, and impairing intrinsic motivation.
The conclusion put succinctly is to consider two things. For ‘every compliment we give we need to ask whether we are helping that individual to feel a sense of control over his life... And the other principle is [how are we impacting] intrinsic motivation.'4
Progressive educators, self-directed learners and democratic teachers have been barely doggy paddling to keep themselves afloat since it came out however. The tide hasn’t really turned. If anything the swell has gone the other way and we are awash in a culture that has doubled down on praising children, handing out gold stars, incentive plans and at football matches on weekends giving out medals after each match for the girl of the game.
I guess I will just sit on this ball grumpily then
Gary Neville circa. 2012
When I was at Manchester University playing football for the first team I was blessed with an opportunity, through our coaches Man Utd connection, to meet Gary Neville and Ryan Giggs. They were working on getting their coaching badges and we went along to be coached by them at the United training ground, whilst they were being coached on how to coach us by someone high up in the FA.
After twenty minutes of us playing a game with Gary Neville stopping it every now and then to interject and tell us what we could do differently the coach gave some feedback to Gary where he highlighted all of the things that he hadn’t done that would have made it better. In other words he coached him. Ryan Giggs ran the rest of the session and Gary Neville just sat on a ball looking grumpy as hell watching on, totally unimpressed with having the flaws in his coaching highlighted to him.
“You get back in the sea… you finned c*nt!”
Stewart Lee circa. December 2013
Look we are all finned c*nts swimming around in this culture.5 Most quite happily it seems. Back in 1993 that hot sun faded and the muddy pool was swamped with water, the pools joined up and the rainy season created a river that took us down the delta and out to sea. The leopard is prowling miles away inland.
I’m as much a finned beast as the next man. Deschooling is a constant process and I still have much work to do too. And it’s hard. Moving from a schooled mindset to one where you see and treat children as human beings in their own right is as much a shock as sucking in the hot fierce air into proto-lungs as you let your gills wither away.
But what I find interesting about this particular example is that the coach who refused to take part was not the only one. Numerous other coaches agreed that they wouldn’t be taking part either. Plenty of clubs didn’t even bother to sign up to it.
This isn’t just an FA initiative for one weekend.
This is standard FA coaching advice espoused in all their coaching courses. That apparently a lot of coaches don’t take heed of at all. And herein lies the problem. It seems that this advice is well reasoned and follows a lot of the some thought patterns that Alfie Kohn would argue for. In other words, it seems to be grounded in psychological research in how best to develop young people for playing football.
And why wouldn’t it?
The Premier League is a multi-billion dollar product. It makes sense for the FA to provide the best advice for developing young players into better footballers so that we can keep producing potential world class young footballers like Phil Foden in this country.
I get it. It is hard being a coach and that people give up a lot of their valuable time should be commended. I am not trying to single anyone out here.6 My experience with Gary Neville demonstrated that even the best footballers can find it hard to take on advice on how best to coach football, let alone some dad who has just finished a shift on the scaffolding. Even Pep Guardiola, probably the best contemporary manager, has admitted he shouts at his players too much from the sideline because, he says, he's human and often cannot help but get carried away with the passion of the moment.
But my main gripe is that the problem seems to be something more systemic.
For just as the FA’s best practice is being seemingly ignored by coaches around the country, we also have world class educational research telling us how best children respond to “behaviour management”, rewards and praise being ignored up and down the country by people working in education.
We really are all finned c*nts and we are all swimming side by side in this deep cesspool of failing young people because this is a cultural issue for which we all bear responsibility.
But we could be leopards. Praise is one of our culture’s childhood catfishes. We ignore the lessons of Alfie Kohn and dress praise up as something it isn't; we say it is in their best interests, claim it to be loving and beneficial. But Kohn warns us that we do that at our peril. Because after all when we lift the veil we find that it is just the same old tired truth: childism.7
This pool of childism has many catfish swimming in it, many things we do to young people that are harmful but that we dress up as for their own benefit.8 Let us be leopards. Let us take our paws and bat these writhing beasts on to the banks and piercing their mud encrusted scales reveal their insides for what they are: the rotting flesh of an old and dying system.9
Yes I will keep banging on about the increasing move from informal to formal play and how it has negative impacts on children, but it does offer us an opportunity. For in the cracks of the old system may land the seeds of the new, rooting in the thin chalky soil.
Football clubs could be spaces of educational revolution; they interact with huge numbers of children regularly enough. By allowing our formal sessions to be more and more informal, by having adults owning a space by getting out the way, we can allow football clubs to be places, like our learning community, that demonstrate that children can be related to differently. Here they could be given a genuine ability to own the learning process, an opportunity to self-direct their learning, whilst having fun at the same time.
It seems that is what the FA would like, but it is not happening. And I wonder how much of that can be laid to blame at the door of our culture or how much of this is on education itself. How much of the way children are related to in this culture stems from the way that the behemoth that is the state education system chooses to relate to young people and how much that feeds into how other adults think children need to be related to.
Maybe the coach is right. Maybe they do respond best to positive encouragement. But I would argue that maybe that is because that is the only way they have been related to so far in life and throughout their schooling. Let’s leave the last word to Alfie Kohn.
‘We tell them how good they are and they light up, eager to please, and try to please us some more. These are the children we should really worry about.’
Addendum:
For some reason I just thought I would google Mervyn Carless as I was writing this. The video that came up of him talking about his work in building the wire frames for hop growing is, in itself, an interesting watch on the practice and history of growing hops in Herefordshire, and his thick Herefordshire accent is like a balm to my soul.
Though I make the claim that you probably shouldn’t be shouting at people as a coach on the sideline and then told the story of him shouting at me about doing my trick and passing it on I would like to qualify a few things. Firstly, that was probably not the received wisdom that it is now. Secondly, the gold dust quote was his what every pre-match team talk was built around, not something that he shouted out at us.
But more to the point I think that this substack is really not about unschooling, play, self-directed learning but about childism as I said above, and about relating to children differently. I am coming to see the work I do to be defined more broadly as children’s rights advocacy.
What children need is adults who will relate to them in ways that have positive impacts on their lives. Football was a massive part of my life growing up and a vehicle through which I learnt a lot about my personality and gifts. I have written a second piece that tackles this in my pedagogy of wholeness series (not yet released).
So at this point I want to recognise that Mervyn Carless was an adult who had a positive impact on my life as a teenager. Not just in developing me as a footballer, his coaching did coincide with the time I moved up to playing county level, but, more importantly, as a person as well. Reflecting now if I named off the most important adults in my life during secondary school on one hand his name would be there. So thank you Mervyn. You gave up an awful lot of your time, not just for me, but everyone else who played Ledbury Swifts at the time, and it is much appreciated.
https://www.thefa.com/news/2022/oct/21/silent-support-weekend-20221021?utm_source=pocket_mylist
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/oct/23/tottenham-eric-dier-interview?utm_source=pocket_mylist
https://www.nottinghamshirefa.com/coach/coaches-club/newsletters/december-2017/silent-sidelines?utm_source=pocket_mylist
Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn page 107
I think it is worth noting that praise about be banned is not the conclusion. But praise as a classroom or behaviour management approach is not helpful. Praise from a place of genuine expression of excitement, something not phony or premeditated, is a different beast.
There is a difference between praising someone as the ball hits the net and the excitement of the goal scored is raw and still present, to praising someone after the match. The second starts to come across more as the adult’s evaluative gaze.
Sometimes I see people relating to children in the park and I think what are you doing? but I have great empathy for them, sometimes I witness things and have great sadness, other times I connect with feelings of anger. As you may have guessed from some of the language used in the ending of this piece I was writing this from a place of extreme frustration and disappointment rather than sorrow.
Here is the Stewart Lee clip on immigration from which this quote comes from. Highly recommended as always.
The coach whose message started this thought process I have to admit is not one I have seen managing during an actual match. But when he went on to claim that he needs to offer praise and advice to drown out the parents of his players I get the impression he is like many other coaches I have seen.
Childism is the idea that children are not treated as human beings in their own right. Adults do unto children and children have little say in how they are treated. In this context what power does a seven year old who doesn’t want to be praised when they make every tackle have in telling the coach? Or more to the point how much easier would it be for me to tell my coach, adult to adult, not to praise me compared to that child?
If praise is something that benefits the giver and not the receiver, and the adult is the giver and the child the receiver then we are talking about a situation where the adult is feeling the benefits at the expense of the child. In the context of this power dynamic, for childism is only made possible by the power dynamic that our culture affords adults consistently over children, we have a concrete example of what childism looks like in practice.
The subtitle of Alfie Kohn’s book references, gold stars, incentive, rewards, A*’s, bribes as well as praise. Punished by rewards and its associated techniques is only one facet of childism. You can count punitive behaviour management, enforced curricula, lack of bodily autonomy and many more among them.
I mean I hope that is the case. I hope I don’t look back in another twenty five years and see that some young upstart is writing a blog about how us alternative educators in 2022 thought that education, culture, society and childhood was going to radically change and shake their head at how misguided we were.