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By Dave Wright
Recently, I delivered a presentation to the parents of the U13-U17 players at our club. A key component of the presentation was to explain why we include street football into our programming at the club.
We design our street football nights to be mixed-age, competitive and tournament-style.
We do it to navigate the fact that almost all children experience “organised” sporting environments more than free play these days.
Johan Cruyff once said: “Now that street football has disappeared, everything has become theoretical. Six-year-old boys are trained by people who have diplomas in football. I don’t think they should have trainers until they are 12. Training should respect the characteristics of street football as much as possible. The street is the real learning place for young talent.”
I have to be careful here because a quote like this taken too literally could render coaches redundant! However, the point Cruyff makes here relates to the power of play, the importance of exploration, decision-making, trial and error and how modern youth environments are overly organised and potentially dominated by coaching instead of players playing.
There is a huge amount of wisdom in this sentiment and it’s critical that we ensure a play-based approach for players at all ages and stages where possible. Utilising small sided games, ensuring training sessions represent the game and that we maintain realism will allow us to create environments where players learn the game by playing the game.
This doesn’t mean we can’t coach, it doesn’t mean we can’t question, guide or facilitate, but appreciating the value of street football and acknowledging that in contemporary society, pick-up games and street football are not as prevalent (at least in Western Culture) as they once were.
Two things to consider
Consider how you can deliberately programme street football into your weekly or monthly planning. At our club, we ensure that within every cycle, we mix up the age groups, create different types of games, and let them play.
Can you include 20 minutes of free play in every session? This is a simple way of ensuring that whether coaching youth or senior football, the players get the chance to play the game without compromise.
One thing for you to try this week
Plan a session that is entirely game-based but uses different types of pitches. This could be anything from back-to-back goal games, four-goal games, counter attack or simply a small-sided game with normal rules.
One critical resource on the topic
Check out this article by James Vaughan called Back to the Streets which discusses street football and Futsal as key tools in player development.
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Dave Wright
Dave Wright is a UEFA A-licensed football coach and co-founder of Player Development Project. Currently completing his OFC Pro Licence, he has been coaching since 2002 in England, Australia and New Zealand with players at all levels. During five years in the United Kingdom, Wright worked for Fulham and Brentford and in Australia, he coached the U-20s at A-League club Melbourne Victory. He is a high performance consultant for Oceania Football Confederation, director of coaching at Northern League club Birkenhead United and head coach of the Westlake Boys first team.
As part of their commitment to help coaches, PDP shares content with Friends of Football in this regular column. Each week, we will re-publish one of the PDP newsletters from their library of content.
This story was first published on September 3, 2024.
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