❌‼️ This Thread is now CLOSED. NEW THREAD link on last page, been a great Year ❌‼️

Would you spend €100+ on Paul Pogba??

  • Yup, still very young and filled with potential...

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  • Nah, no CM could be worth that much...

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Noskey said:
Galaxy signed Nigel de Jong
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Why my man gotta go to those lames?
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HEGGSY said:
View media item 1903747
Looks awful on the shirt :rofl: :smh:
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Wow, that really, really, looks ridiculous. EPL are making a big mistake here. That font, I've seen it in use, Microsoft? Apple?

But a circle, on the kits!! Way to ruin the kits mayn


HEGGSY said:
Was just thinking about that actually, does this mean they'll be new fonts for the name sets?
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I would assume so, or the EPL can do the practical thing like every other league in the world and let the TEAMS HAVE THEIR OWN fonts and numbers. We get it, you okay in the Premier League.
 
PLANET FUTBOL
How France is helping mold MLS academies, coaches

As 2016 shapes up to be a pivotal year in player and coaching development in the United States, Planet Fútbol dives into just what American clubs and the federation are doing in their quest to evolve as a soccer nation. This is the second of a three-part series on the subject. The first, on how audit firm Double PASS is bringing its methods to U.S. Soccer, can be read here.

As Major League Soccer enters its third decade of existence, league officials continually push youth development as the next big challenge to conquer. Every franchise runs its own fully funded academy at no cost to the players, but to continue raising standards within those academies, MLS entered into a partnership with the French Football Federation in 2013.

The agreement allows MLS academy directors and coaches to complete the Elite Formation Coaching License, administered by the French federation. In 2015, the second cycle of MLS coaches began the licensing process to earn the equivalent of a UEFA Pro License for youth coaches.

“Our owners have done a remarkable job in terms of their commitment and their investment in youth development, but one of the things that we were always thinking about was, how can we connect internationally?” MLS executive vice president Todd Durbin told SI.com. “How can we make sure that what we’re doing is on par or better than our international counterparts? By going through this program, it’s really allowed us to push our coaches to really benchmark themselves against the best development systems in the world.”

The MLS course resulted from a trip that Durbin took to France to get some ideas on how MLS could improve its development efforts. He met with French technical director François Blaquart in Paris, and the idea of the partnership came out of their discussions.

The first cycle of the Formation License took two years and involved 320 hours of on-field and classroom instruction spread over eight weeks, two weeks of immersion at an academy in Europe and on-field work in the coach’s home environment. The second cycle has been scaled down to a one-year period, but the intensity remains the same, with coaches alternating weeks of instruction in France and the U.S.
“That course was the single hardest educational thing I’ve done in my life,” former Seattle Sounders academy director Darren Sawatzky said. “It was harder than my college degree.”

Many coaches passed the course, including Sawatzky, but several did not.

“You had five major projects, and your final major project that you had to deliver to them—Powerpoint, Prezi, whatever it was—mine was 46 pages long with embedded video and everything you can think of,” he said. “That course is really about pushing you to the point of what you’re capable of. You’d work 16-hour days and have to stay up until 1 in the morning doing Powerpoints that you’d have to deliver the next morning.”

Instructors expect complete mastery of the principles of play, but not just so candidates can explain the differences between playing 4-4-2 and 4-3-3. Instead, coaches are trained to pass the finer points of the game onto their players, which naturally means the coach must know the game inside and out.

“The first thing is, as an educator and somebody who needs to teach kids to play football, you yourself have to be a master of these principles,” said LA Galaxy academy coach Mike Muñoz, who is currently going through the course. “If you can’t recognize any of those moments [in the game], there’s no way you can teach your kids that. First and foremost, it’s becoming a master of the game. Then the next big piece that they try to get across is how to teach it. You’re the educator, and without telling the players the answers, how do you guide them?”

Self-reflection becomes a natural part of such an intensive and all-encompassing course.

“Essentially, from the first minute, it was the ability to know yourself and this idea that you can’t really do much until you know who you are,” said current Sounders academy director Marc Nicholls, who also passed the course and now mentors three candidates. “That idea of knowing yourself was something that, obviously, you don’t expect on a coaching course.”


As such, the technical and tactical aspects of the game are only a small part of the material covered. Participants are taught to think of themselves as teachers or instructors—not coaches. Much of the terminology used in the course comes out of the classroom rather than off the soccer field.

Candidates are schooled on the difference between pedagogy, or the theory and practice of education, and andragogy, the theory and practice of education in adults specifically.

“It was about your art and the delivery of your message,” Sawatzky said. “It’s maximizing the potential of a child. You don’t talk to an 11-year-old the way you talk to an 18-year-old, and the way you talk to an 11-year-old is now going to dictate whether they can bring information in for themselves.”

In France, every head of a professional academy must hold an Elite Formation Coaching License. In April 2015, U.S. Soccer launched its first Academy Director License course after a pilot the previous year, but directors are not required to hold the license at this point. Both are comprehensive courses that cover every aspect of running an academy, but the French course has years of trial and error to its benefit.
“The idea is just to take over all the sporting issues of the academies of the MLS clubs,” French federation deputy director general Victoriano Melero said. “So I think the idea behind all this is to improve the training of young American players and, at the end, it will benefit of course the MLS but in particular, the national selection.”

Not that the first run of the French federation license with MLS coaches went perfectly. Translation of the material was notably difficult, eventually requiring FIFA translators who would be familiar with soccer terminology but also able to translate in real time, through the use of headsets like at the United Nations or a World Cup press conference.

Current candidates will convene again stateside in early spring, following their first week of instruction at France’s national training center, Clairefontaine, in September 2015 and a second week in Philadelphia two months later. Since then, candidates have also gone through their immersion experiences in Europe.

In the first cycle of the course, Sawatzky visited Athletic Club Bilbao, where he ate breakfast with then-manager Marcelo Bielsa two mornings at his hotel, and Sporting Clube de Portugal.
“The reason I went to Bilbao and I was so excited about it was they only take players from the Basque region,” Sawatzky said. “You cannot have foreign players, which means if you don’t do a good job of development, you’re screwed.”

Nicholls visited Real Sociedad and Lyon, and Muñoz has been to Villarreal so far in the current cycle.

“I had complete access to the sessions, to staff meetings, to anything that you could imagine,” Muñoz said. “They were very friendly, very welcoming. No secrets, and it was good to see because their types of players are pretty similar to the types of players that we have in L.A., in Southern California. A lot of the exercises and sessions that they do were similar as well, and it was good to also kind of assess the talent based on the age groups compared to where we’re at.”

The next step is connecting the material from the Formation course to the coaches’ everyday work at home. As part of the first cycle of the partnership, MLS academies were encouraged to create or modify their current curriculum with the information they gleaned from the course.

French instructors were quick to praise the mentality of American players. Their motivation in training and willingness to listen to the coach—which Nicholls, an Englishman, also noted as a unique aspect of the U.S.’s general reverence for coaches—could be a strong base upon which to build better players.

“I don’t want to lose the American mentality. … We win all the time when we shouldn’t,” Sawatzky said. “Why would you want to train that out of kids? Keep that. You can still deliver the message and put an environment together where they can learn, but also learn to be winners.”

At the same time, Muñoz said his discussions with colleagues on the course since they began last fall have shown a shift in the training culture of MLS academies. As with the focus of the course, the changes are less explicit on game day and more obvious in the way coaches teach their players.

“They have structured their week-to-week, their month-to-month, based off of these principles,” Muñoz said. “For example, Week 1 and Week 2, we’re working on possession for progression. So within that principle, they break down Monday through Thursday or Monday through Friday, different topics within that principle. So I would say [it’s] less about the games, more about the actual week-to-week and what goes into that.”
MLS also hired Frédéric Lipka, former Racing Club de France and Le Havre academy director, to serve as a liaison between the league and the French federation. His job description also includes guiding candidates as they attempt to finish their license and integrate it with their academy curriculum.

A handful of coaches who passed the course during the first cycle, including Nicholls, also returned to mentor the current group of candidates. Nicholls joined the new crop for one week of the course to deliver training sessions, and he speaks frequently with his three mentees as they progress toward their own licenses.

“Part of the course is in between sessions, the coaches have to complete 10 to 15 training blocks, so it’s looking over that with them, speaking to them about their training,” Nicholls said. “Sometimes, they’ll send video of their training. Helping them with the methodology, discussing ideas and then the other parts of their work, helping with that, in terms of other projects that they have to do for the course. Also, sometimes it’s just a case of just being a friendly voice and running ideas and them asking for clarity and discussing our experience.”

For the French federation, having a coach hired by MLS is one benefit that goes the other way in the partnership. Melero said the federation has enjoyed exchanging ideas with MLS and learning about the structure of the league.

The federation has also begun a program to place former French academy players at American colleges if they don’t sign professional contracts.

“It’s a real opportunity to go further in the U.S. soccer market and develop training programs not only dedicated to the MLS clubs but also to the university level,” Melero said. “So that will be our next challenge, and this is also of course an opportunity for us to have French people that are working for MLS clubs.”

In other words, the benefit of globalization and exchange of ideas that Durbin highlighted can go both directions. While the French federation gains a new perspective on the game, MLS and American soccer in general can learn how to build players of global quality from the youngest ages to push onto the first-team level.

“I think the take-on from it, one of the biggest, was that we can all change for the better in spite of this sort of machine that we’ve created here with tournaments and pay-to-play,” Nicholls said. “It can change, and I think it’s gradually starting to, so from a long-term perspective, it’s not just about this lovely certificate. It’s something that we can genuinely influence the game.”

Moving forward, MLS academies have to focus on finding the best players at younger ages and building them into professionals, while not losing sight of the community focus that many of the league’s franchises have taken on board.

In Seattle, for example, the Sounders want to bring players like DeAndre Yedlin and Jordan Morris through their academy from the newly created Under-12 age group through U-18 and to the first team, rather than taking them when they have almost aged out.

“We’ve identified players and taken them for a year or two, exposed them and helped them, but truly develop them?” Nicholls said. “That has to be our goal.”

http://www.si.com/planet-futbol/201...ench-football-federation-coaching-development
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Can This Man Save U.S. Soccer?
How one teacher is attempting to train a generation of globally competitive players--starting with their coaches.

Americans perform about as unimpressively in soccer as they do in education. In both cases, the United States has suffered from a lack of focus and rigor, despite significant investments. More than 4 million kids are now registered in American youth-soccer leagues—more than in any other country—and yet the U.S. has never produced a Lionel Messi or a Cristiano Ronaldo. The men’s national team still struggles to compete internationally. The women’s team just won the World Cup, a shining accomplishment, but its players owe their success more to speed and athleticism than to technique; with powerhouses like Germany and France finally getting serious about girls’ sports, the American women will likely face stiffer competition in the years ahead.

American soccer officials are therefore humble in a way that other sports executives are not. “We need to improve, or in a few years, all those people we’ve gotten to pay attention [to soccer] will drift away,” says Neil Buethe, the head of communications for the U.S. Soccer Federation, the sport’s governing body in the United States. “A win only happens if our players get better, and our players only get better if the coaches get better.”

This thinking has led U.S. Soccer officials to an unconventional idea: that a teaching expert they first read about in The New York Times Magazine—a man with no professional soccer expertise—might help them advance the sport.

Among teachers, Doug Lemov is a sort of celebrity. He’s spent years studying great educators, creating a taxonomy of techniques they use to manage common challenges (like defiant kids or tired kids or kids who need a lot of time to learn something that other kids learn quickly). Each year, he trains thousands of teachers around the world to use these tactics. He’s also written a popular book called Teach Like a Champion and co-founded a chain of public charter schools in the Northeast.

When U.S. Soccer first reached out to Lemov, in 2010, the organization was already in the midst of a wholesale reformation. Four years earlier, soccer executives had toured the world, studying what other countries did differently. They had learned, among other things, that kids in other nations spent less time playing soccer games than did their American counterparts, and more time practicing. In response, the federation created its own youth league, called the U.S. Soccer Development Academy, modeled after international best practices. Top youth-soccer clubs could apply to join, if their coaches agreed to get licensed and follow a new model for training. The academy now comprises 152 soccer clubs across the U.S., which have produced more than 180 professional players.

Still, officials felt that more could be done. “For 20 years, we had focused almost exclusively on closing our global gap in the technical and tactical components of the game,” says Dave Chesler, U.S. Soccer’s director of coaching development. “In doing this, perhaps we had lost perspective on the quality of our delivery—a k a the essential mechanics of teaching. ” Chesler, who had himself spent 15 years as a high-school chemistry and physics teacher before becoming a full-time soccer coach, realized after reading about Lemov in The Times Magazine that he had never transferred some of his own best teaching techniques to the field. He made immediate modifications to his coaching—for example, slowing down practices and focusing more on watching the players, making sure each one demonstrated every step in a drill before moving on—and he sent copies of Lemov’s book to his national staff. And then he asked Lemov for help.

Lemov was thrilled to hear from U.S. Soccer. But he was nervous, too, like a fanboy unexpectedly pulled up onstage. He understood teaching, and it so happened that he loved soccer, but he didn’t know whether his work would translate for coaches—or whether they would listen.

Lemov started playing soccer when he was about 7 and still has the build of an athlete, tall and broad-shouldered. He was never a star, but he managed to win a spot on the Hamilton College soccer team through constant, solitary practice. It was a highly inefficient process, he now realizes, akin to learning French by sitting in a room, alone, with a French-English dictionary. Like many American soccer players, he was largely coached by people who lacked expert knowledge of the game. Once, at a friend’s house during his senior year in college, he found a dusty videotape on defensive tactics, which demonstrated how best to bend your knees and angle your body when confronting an opponent. Lemov felt blindsided. The advice made sense, but he’d played defense for 14 years, and he’d never heard it. “All my life I’d been yelled at to ‘defend,’ ” he says, “but no one had ever told me how to do it.”

These days, he spends more time watching his own children on the soccer field than he does playing. He has seen them coached well, which fills him with gratitude. But he’s also seen them coached poorly. One of his son’s coaches sometimes yelled negative, perplexing things. “He would speak in these riddles: ‘Where should you be?’ ” Not knowing the answer, the boy would stand still, afraid of making a mistake. Lemov found the scene heartbreaking and also familiar; he’d had the same feeling many times before, standing in the back of classrooms, watching well-intentioned teachers flounder.

This coach, Lemov knew, was generously donating his time and doing what he thought was right. But coaches, like teachers, need practical training and meaningful feedback to do well. Teachers rarely get that support; coaches almost never do. And so, with Chesler’s help, Lemov set about identifying specific tactics coaches could learn from great teachers—establishing rituals so drills start faster, say, or helping players get comfortable making mistakes in practice. So far, Lemov has trained about 200 coach educators, who in turn teach rank-and-file coaches around the country. He and U.S. Soccer have also created an online lesson that will be required viewing for tens of thousands of volunteer coaches seeking the federation’s entry-level license.

The United States has never produced a Lionel Messi.
This training will not look familiar to American adults who learned to play soccer at more traditional practices—where they ran laps to warm up and then waited in lines to take practice shots on goal. Little kids don’t need highly structured warm-ups, according to U.S. Soccer; they arrive ready to move. And kids of all ages should be touching a ball as often as possible, without wasting any time waiting around. Throughout practice, players need productive, quick feedback in a culture that encourages them to take risks and make mistakes.

Soccer, it’s sometimes said, is a player’s game. The 22 people knocking a ball around a big field are bound by few rules. Predictable patterns rarely occur. As a result, coaches can’t succeed by designing plays and ordering players to execute them, as they can in, say, football. Players have to make judgment calls in the moment, on their own.

This means that rote skills, while essential, are not in themselves adequate. “The thing that makes elite players is decision making,” Lemov told me. “They need to integrate not just how to do something but whether, when, and why.” He sees parallels to the difficulty many American students have solving problems independently. “If you give [American] kids a math problem and tell them how to solve it,” he said, “they can usually do it. But if you give them a problem and it’s not clear how to solve it, they struggle.”

Jürgen Klinsmann, a former soccer star in Germany who now coaches the U.S. men’s team, has remarked that it’s hard to get Americans to see that a soccer coach cannot be “the decision maker on the field,” but should instead be a guide. “This is a very different approach,” he told USA Today. “I tell them, ‘No, you’re not making the decision. The decision is made by the kid on the field.’ ” Outside the U.S., most soccer players learn to play independently very early on; from the day they can walk, they are kicking a ball every free moment. In the process, they gain both physical and mental dexterity. “That’s not always [been] the case here,” says Jared Micklos, the Development Academy’s director. “We didn’t have a lot of unstructured play where kids could develop creativity. It was a lot of tournaments and pressure and sideline parents and trophies.” In the absence of back-alley pickup games, soccer players in the United States must develop their skills in supervised practices. That’s why high-quality coaching is so essential to nurturing world-class American players. “If we want better players, we need better coaches,” Micklos told me. “In order to get better coaches, we gotta coach them.”

On the first truly cold night of the fall, a group of coaches from all over Virginia gathered inside a rec center in Arlington to learn from Lemov. The scene was noticeably different from his teacher trainings, where audiences tend to be disproportionately female and to clap a lot. The assembled coaches, most of them men, most of them wearing Adidas jackets, were a little less affirming, a bit more jocular. (One had written “God” on his name tag.) Still, Lemov addressed them with the same gentle intensity that he uses with teachers. “I appreciate the work that you do,” he said, taking pains to make eye contact with each coach through his small, wire-frame glasses.

As he does with teachers, Lemov asked the coaches to write up sample lesson plans describing their practice drills, predicting errors that players would be likely to make along the way (accidentally fouling another player, say, or letting the ball drift too far from their feet), and describing the ways they would try to correct these mistakes. Next he played a short video of a girls’ soccer practice in which players fumbled through a poorly explained drill. (The girls had been asked to do too many things at once, a classic mistake.) He called on the coaches by name, just as he trains teachers to do, asking small questions to check that they understood what he was teaching. “What did you notice, T.J.?” “Why didn’t the girls understand, Ryan?” He puts the question before the name so that everyone feels compelled to contemplate an answer. Lemov takes the mechanics of teaching deadly seriously, in hopes that his pupils will too. Before the lesson ended, he’d called on everyone, including “God.”

Finally, the coaches headed outside to observe one of their own, T. J. White, leading a practice. White explained the first drill to a group of 20 not-quite-adolescent boys, and soon the frigid air filled with shouts. “Over here!” “What are you doing?” “Yes!” “Back corner!” For an hour, they played happily, paying no attention to the scrum of adults watching from the sideline.

At the center of the group stood Lemov, who was busy taking notes. He timed how long White took to explain each new activity. Could he have been quicker, so that the kids stayed engaged and spent more time playing? Lemov counted the number of quality touches on the ball per minute. Were all the kids getting lots of chances to play? He watched to see whether White had designed the drills in such a way that he could easily look at all the kids at once and assess whether they had mastered a given skill before moving on.

As White ran his practice, he called on players to check for understanding, just as Lemov had. He gave the kids breaks, but they were short, so as to keep things moving. His voice remained calm and positive throughout. When the practice ended, White jogged over to the other coaches. “You’re a little bit nervous in that situation,” he told me later. “I’ve never been given feedback in front of 18 people.”

Lemov described what he’d seen, using words rarely strung together on a soccer field: “Competitive, joyful, and intelligent.” White nodded, looking worried. Lemov asked him how he thought the practice had gone and listened carefully. Finally, he made a suggestion so delicately worded that it almost seemed like an afterthought: “I found myself wondering what would happen,” he said, “if you did just one drill instead of three and layered on challenges within that one drill.” White agreed that might be worth trying. Then Lemov closed with the ultimate compliment: “I’d let my son play for you.” With that, White smiled for the first time all night, and the two men shook hands.
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Source: Mark Cuban isn't the only big-name investor in futsal; other NBA owners, prestigious soccer clubs have joined in

Last week's announcement that Mark Cuban had become a principal owner of a new North American league for a sport called "futsal" heightened buzz about the venture.
As in, "Maybe this league is going to be a bigger deal than many imagined."
Indeed, a source told The Dallas Morning News on Monday that the 16-team Professional Futsal League franchisees include "multiple" NBA owners and some of the world's most prestigious soccer clubs.
In other words, it will be a marriage of soccer and basketball, which is how many describe Futsal, which is five-per-side indoor soccer, the only one sanctioned by FIFA.
The NBA owners include Brooklyn Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov and the Buss family, which owns the Los Angeles Lakers.
World-power soccer clubs that have committed to full or partial franchise stakes include FC Barcelona, Atletico Madrid, Boca Juniors of Argentina and Corinthians of Brazil.
And though futsal is played in 198 of the 207 FIFA member associations around the world, the Professional Futsal League is being planned as the world's most preeminent, with the top players being funneled here and receiving the sport's highest salaries.
Although the league doesn't plan to begin play until 2017, early details of its proposed structure emerged Monday evening because representatives from the 16 franchises and officials from soccer clubs in Europe, South America and China are scheduled to meet Tuesday and Wednesday in Dallas.
Why Dallas? It was in North Texas where plans for the league began to hatch during the spring of 2014, with Mavericks president of basketball operations Donnie Nelson and sports entrepreneur Brian **** ultimately becoming principal league owners (joined Feb. 3 by Cuban) and Nelson's daughter, Christie, becoming executive director.
Along with Dallas, cities that will have franchises include New York, Los Angeles, Seattle/Vancouver, Boston, Chicago and Miami.
Donnie Nelson did not immediately respond to messages Monday evening seeking comment.
During the next two days, PFL are expected to decide such details as roster sizes and the salary cap. Among details that emerged Monday:
-- Along with Dallas, cities that will have franchises include New York, Los Angeles, Seattle/Vancouver, Boston, Chicago and Miami.
-- New York will have two teams. One will be owned outright by FC Barcelona; the other by Prokhorov, although the Nets owner probably will form a partnership with a world-power soccer organization.
-- FC Barcelona has two teams in Spanish futsal leagues, an indicator of how futsal is regarded as an effective training ground for top-level international players.
-- The PFL season will consist of about 50 games. The season's start and end dates probably will be largely determined by TV networks.
-- FC Barcelona, Chelsea and Bayern Munich have or are in the process of establishing offices in New York, a sign of their eagerness to tap into the North American market and strengthen.
-- Every PFL team will be either owned by or in partnership with a powerhouse soccer club outside of North America.
Twitter: @townbrad
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Mastamind89 said:
 
PLANET FUTBOL
How France is helping mold MLS academies, coaches                                                                                                               http://www.si.com/planet-futbol/201...ench-football-federation-coaching-development
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Man thanks for posting this I've been wondering what was happening with that France partnership since it was announced. Some great stuff in there. 
 
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