To the player, parent or coach reading this,
I want to tell you what football is for me, because everything I do starts from here.
It starts from one word, Ubuntu, often summed up as “I am because we are”. I first heard it in a documentary about a basketball team, and it stayed with me because it describes what I see on a pitch. The winger’s dribble, the striker’s goal, the vision of the number ten: none of them exist without the runs of the teammates nobody watches.
I have seen teams with too much freedom, where the game falls into chaos and the best players play below their level. I have seen teams with too much control, where football turns robotic and nobody tries anything outside the plan. I don’t think we have to choose between talent and tactics. They need each other. When everyone knows where the others are, a player finds the courage to take a risk. Structure doesn’t limit talent, it releases it.
For me, football is a game of relationships: spaces, timing and the people next to you. I pass to one teammate in a certain way because I know how they like to receive the ball, and to another in a different way, because I know them too. I play it into that space because I trust you will be there. Nobody can draw that trust on a whiteboard. A coach can build the conditions for it, or kill it.
That is why I want players who think, not soldiers. Players who look around before the ball arrives, who know where the free teammate is, who understand why they do what they do. Reading the game can be taught, and the earlier the better.
Many young players are so scared of failing that they stop trying. In my teams, a mistake is a signal that our support system needs to improve, and we help each other grow. If you go to press, someone covers you. Covering a teammate’s space is not fixing their error, it is us doing our job. Nobody is alone under pressure.
Before the player, there is a person. Players, parents and coaches are people first, and almost always we are all trying to do our best. Players notice everything, and if a coach doesn’t believe in what they ask, the team feels it at once.
Some players will meet opponents who are faster, stronger or more skilled, and will think they lack what others were born with. They can only say that after trying everything. The moment talent blooms can come today, next year or at twenty. I want to help build a place where it can happen, for everyone who keeps looking for their own way.
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