Goico Soccer

By Coach Jose Goico

The Player Development Approach proposed here is based on clinical observations and reflections of 15 years of coaching youth soccer players, both boys and girls from the ages of 5 to 19 at the recreational, town and premier levels. This approach is specifically designed to address a unique challenge that American players present to youth coaches in the area of technical/tactical training and development. The unique challenge stems from the well known and established fact that American players are one of the few players in the world who do not develop within a pre-established soccer culture and tradition.

What makes American players particularly unique even within this small set of players is that the overwhelming majority of coaches who train the equally overwhelming majority of youth soccer players never even watched much less played soccer themselves. In addition, while soccer players from the rest of the soccer-playing world develop in unsupervised, “street soccer” environments, the present American youth soccer phenomenon is a highly structured and supervised, invention of the American Suburbs. Consequently these players rarely chose to kick a soccer ball around rather than throw a baseball or football or shoot at a basket in the park or school yard. Thus the great majority of American soccer players develop in a soccer vacuum, devoid not only of the richness, depth and variety of soccer experiences that spontaneously and organically give each soccer-playing country its unmistakable signature, but more importantly and critically, they learn to play the game without any exposure to the very roots, the essential principles, the foundation that make soccer a fluid, dynamic, team phenomenon that makes it the number one game in the world.

As one Dutch coach put it, speaking of his American players, “They don’t know the game.” Without this foundation, without this essential understanding of the game, the players behave like ships without rudders in the open sea, and no matter how skilled and athletic the individuals may be, the sense of coherence or characteristic teamwork – that which gives the game of soccer its distinct identity as a team spectacle never comes to full fruition. As one National Youth Coach from Spain commented as he watched two American youth teams play, “American players are very skilled; they would probably be the best in the world if there were twenty two balls on the field. It is a pity that they are forced to play with just one ball in the game!”

The player development approach which will be described presently is an attempt to remedy this fundamental shortcoming in the development of American youth soccer players.