My hairdresser, my newsagent, the management consultant who sat next to me at
dinner last week all asked the perennial question and each time I couldn’t
believe the answer that sprang from my lips. No, this summer we’re not off
to France or Greece or some other hotspot, but to Denmark – Northern
Jutland.
The ferry port of Frederikshavn is described as a town “lacking in historical
glamour”. It is also the setting for the Dana Cup, a week-long youth
football tournament that promises to be the highlight of my 11-year-old
son’s year. Hardly my destination of choice, but how could I contemplate
going anywhere else?
Football parents, I believe, fall broadly into two categories: the intense
ones who are their children’s driving force (I am thinking of Ted Beckham,
who once told me: “I was the cog that started him off ”) and those – usually
mothers – who regard their offspring’s obsession with benign wonder.
For the first four decades of my life I managed to retain a bemused lack of
interest in our national game. My husband never liked football either
(probably part of his appeal) and my elder son took only a passing interest,
so why his brother should develop such a passion for the game was a mystery.
In fact, I had never addressed the question until I found myself summoned
last week to a pretournament parents’ workshop organised by the team coach.
“Why does your son like football? Discuss.” That was our first task, and the
feedback was diverse. “He’s naturally competitive,” said the dad next to me.
“He wants to be like Thierry Henry,” said another. Learning new skills,
making friends, glamour and team spirit were all mentioned, but no more than
half came up with the blindingly obvious reason that children give: because
it’s fun.
“There are countless studies of participation motives,” says Dr Misia Gervis,
a senior lecturer at Brunel University and sports psychology consultant to
the FA. “Top of the list for children is having a good time. The problem for
many parents is that they miss that point. For adults, football is about
winning. It’s about their team versus another. But the seven-year-old plays
with instinctive motivation.
“Watch children play when they are not in an adult-controlled environment and
you see that they do it differently. They decide where the jumpers go for
the goalposts, or they might not even have a goal. They are playing not the game
of football but with a football. Before they even begin to think about
winning, they have to love what they are doing.”
Paul Cooper is a football coach and the founder of Give Us Back Our Game, a
campaign group that asserts that the adult-propelled “win at all costs”
philosophy is turning young players away and throwing the grass-roots game
into decline. “Football is competitive and children are naturally
competitive. The problem is that’s the only thing being emphasised by some
parents,” he says.
According to Sir Trevor Brooking, the former England and West Ham player who
is now head of football development for the FA, 11 is the pivotal age.
“Between 5 and 11 children have that wonderful naivety,” he says. “They love
to master the task and gain in confidence. At 11 they become more cynical.
Their friends might say ‘You’re useless’. And that is the beginning of the
drift.”
Between the ages of 11 and 14, half the boys playing football for a local club
drop out, which deeply concerns the FA. Some give up because they find
another sport, some become disillusioned because they lack technical skill,
but many are put off by overbearing coaches and parents. In a survey of 9 to
13-year-old players, 54 per cent said that they felt there was too much
pressure to win, and 36 per cent said that their parents’ absorption in the
game lessened the fun.
Go to a recreation ground any weekend and you won’t have to look hard to find
absorbed, even aggressive, parents on the touchline. “He had that coming to
him,” said one mother as her son kicked an opponent at an under-11s match I
watched recently. My sister withdrew her eight-year-old son from his club
last year after a mob of parents stormed the pitch to badmouth the referee.
One London coach tells of the dad who chased another parent around the pitch
with a metal bar after a spat between their nine-year-old sons.
Some junior leagues, says Sir Trevor, issue questionnaires in which
teams are asked what they thought of the opposition’s behaviour, with
categories for players, coaches and parents. The answers are published in
the local paper – a name-and-shame policy of which he approves. “Someone has
to be able to say to aggressive parents, ‘Excuse me, but you are upsetting
your own children’.”
An emphasis on good parenting and the protection of referees are two strands
of a new FA coaching strategy (there is a national shortage of referees and
abuse from parents is a factor). Already in place is the FA Charter
Standard, a scheme launched five years ago to improve behaviour on and
alongside the pitch, to which 4,000 clubs (of 33,000 nationwide) have signed
up, along with 4,500 schools. They are encouraged to run workshops such as
the one I attended and to ensure that all parents and players sign codes of
conduct.
Golden rules for parents include applauding good play by both teams, praising
effort and performance more than results, and – particularly hard for some –
not coaching from the sidelines.
“General encouragement is one thing, but ‘do this, go there, pass this way’ is
a nightmare,” says Gervis. “Cognitively, eight and nine-year-olds cannot
process information from more than one source at a time. If someone is
screaming at you, you’ll either ignore it or switch your attention, at which
point you lose control of the ball.”
Football has, of course, changed beyond all recognition since today’s dads
were boys. The stakes have been raised by the mad amounts paid to
professionals, and the disgraceful antics of Premiership “heroes” are more
visible thanks to TV coverage. More subtle but perhaps more significant, is
the cultural shift that has produced the “stalker effect”. Sir Trevor
recalls playing on the street corner after school: “That informal play,
where we were free to kick around without being monitored, doesn’t happen
now because all parents want to know where their children are.” Similarly,
his early structured play took place at school, where parents didn’t attend
and there was only one voice of authority – the teacher’s.
Paul Cooper regularly runs coaching workshops at Premiership academies. Two
months ago he ran one for 80 Derbyshire dinner ladies. “They knew nothing
about football but everything about children,” he says, “and they came up
with more ideas on how to involve them in the game and ensure that they had
a good time than some experienced coaches.”
I know where those dinner ladies are coming from. I still know little about
football, but I emerged from my parents’ workshop feeling irrepressibly smug
about my detached stance. “Your sons want your encouragement but they also
want ownership of their game,” the coach told us.
What they really want, I suspect, is parents like Sir Trevor’s. “They
travelled everywhere to watch me play,” he says (his policeman dad was a
keen amateur player), “but they never uttered one word from the line. They
knew how much it would have made me cringe. The fact that they were there –
that was always enough for me.”
How to encourage your football-playing child
— Focus not on winning itself but on winning behaviour. So his team lost –
never mind, he still took a great free kick.
— Before a game, ask him what he wants to get out of it. Maybe he has been
practising a tricky tackle, in which case you can say: “I saw you do it
three times. Fantastic.”
— Cheer from the touchline but don’t issue instructions.
— Beware of conversation on the car journey home. Try not to interrogate
him and concentrate on positive feedback.
— Emphasising “personal bests” – quality crosses, long
passes, etc – is the way to build self-confidence.
— The first question back at home should not be “Did you win?” but “Did
you have a good time?”
— When looking for a club for your child, go to a game and watch the
body language and conduct of players, parents and the coach. Ask about
substitution and rotation policies – will everyone in the side get a game?
— Don’t try to live out thwarted ambitions through your child.
This is first class, I have never been that comfortable with football as a womens domain; however, having read this it is clear that the level of understanding is far greater than 90% of men. Maybe there is a big place for womens involvement in the future development of our national game afterall. Well done.
Lindsay Tideswell, Tibshelf, England
I have to say that those awful attitudes are alive and well in most children's sport!
Caroline, windsor,
While I appreciate that there are more boys than girls who play football, it might have been a bit less sexist to actually allow for that possibility in the article. In particular in "how to encourage your football playing child", it is clear that the suggestions made refer only to boys. With attititudes like this, how do you expect girls to grow up to aspire to have the same opportunities open to them as boys do?
Chris, London,