A good footballers knows how to stay on the pitch, a great one knows where the others are!

What you see on the youth soccer fields are training sessions that are very far from the reality of the game: long lines, players standing still, coaches who talk too much. So how can we develop the ability to anticipate and predict in our kids? These are qualities that are trained from the age of eight onward. The child must learn to play, but above all he must know the game in all its forms, or he will never be a protagonist but only an executor of orders given by the coach! If you are a coach, you must know the game as a complex system, not the 442 or 352 game modules. You must know what the eight dimensions of the single player are and how they interact between teammates and opponents. You must know the basics of sports pedagogy and psychology! The game of football is unpredictable, and it must be accepted without imposing pre-packaged schemes. Football is unpredictable because it is based on the choices of individual complex systems that self-organize among themselves without a central command! Think for a moment about the movement that an attacker performs to receive the ball. What elements will condition the choice of teammate before executing the pass?

The direction of the teammate's run.

The movement of the defender,

The positioning of teammates and opponents not directly involved in the action

The conditions of the ground, and last but not least, the perception one has of the environment!

In 2023, we can't continue to train the separate parts and then put them together, first the technique, then the tactics, and the athletic part; it's a huge methodological mistake against the dynamics of the game of football! There is no technique without tactics; consequently, every motor action, both coordinated and conditional, is aimed at the goal that the game requires and not vice versa.

Dom Gangemi