"I don't believe there is such a thing as a born soccer player. Perhaps you are born with certain skills and talents, but quite frankly it seems impossible to me that one is actually born to be an ace soccer player"

- Pele

“It is in free time that the special player develops, not in the competitive expedience of games, in hour-long practices once a week, in mechanical devotion to packaged, processed, coaching manual skills. For while skills are necessary, setting out as they do the limits of anything, more is needed to transform those skills into something special. Mostly it is time - unencumbered, unhurried, time of a different quality, more time, time to find wrong answers to find a few that are right; time to find your own right answers; time for skills to be practised to set higher limits, to settle and assimilate and become fully and completely yours, to organise and combine with other skills comfortably and easily in some uniquely personal way, then to be set loose, trusted, to find new instinctive directions to take, to create...The great player, having seen and done more things, has in his muscles the memory of more notes, more combinations and patterns of notes, played in more different ways. Faced with a situation, his body responds. Faced with something more, something new, it finds an answer he didn’t know was there. He invents the game.”

- from 'The Game' by Ken Dryden, ex Canadian Ice Hockey Goalkeeper

 

 

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LEARNING IS A VITAL COMPONENT IN EVERYTHING WE DO AT MINISTRY OF FOOTBALL. THE MOST OBVIOUS LEARNING THAT TAKES PLACE IS WHEN CHILDREN LEARN NEW SKILLS WITH A BALL, AND MAKE NEW AND BETTER DECISIONS IN GAME-RELATED ACTIVITIES. BUT IT'S NOT JUST THE PLAYERS WHO ARE LEARNING - COACHES TOO CAN IMPROVE THEIR EFFECTIVENESS, WIDEN THEIR RANGE OF ACTVITIES, AND PRACTICE THEIR COMMUNICATION SKILLS AT MoF SESSIONS.

LEARNING ALSO TAKES PLACE ON THE SIDELINES. MINISTRY OF FOOTBALL PARENTS CAN LEARN FROM THE WAY THE COACHES RUN ACTIVITIES AND CAN STEAL BALL MASTERY TASKS FOR PRACTICE WITH THEIR CHILD AT HOME.

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PLAYER DEVELOPMENT

 

Ministry of Football believes in letting players set their own limits on what they want to achieve and how good they can become. We recognise that it may take many mistakes before a player achieves success, and we encourage all players to experiment with different solutions in order to find answers that they are comfortable with.

Many other coaching programmes teach players text-book packaged techniques, and restrict the players to using only these solutions to problems they face in games. On these programmes, coaches provide constant information to their players on what to do next (Push up! Pass! Shoot! etc). In doing this, they produce players who are dependant on the coach, and whose level of development cannot surpass that of the coach who is instructing them.

 

Ministry of Football does not believe in restricting players to a set of particular answers. We do not scream instructions at the players (they can’t hear us anyway because of the music!). And we do not tell players off for making mistakes, for taking risks, or for trying new things. We want to help to produce players who are better than we are, players who take the game beyond its current limits, we want to be amazed by what our players can do.

 

"Practising in the narrow sense of repitition makes skills more reliable, but not necessarily more efficient and more adaptable. Once we are able consistently to 'get it right', it may be worth trying out different ways of getting it wrong, to see what happens. There are two reasons why this is a good idea.

First, such a precautionary move may anticipate problems that could occur during the 'real-life' execution of the skill. and develop ways of meeting them. Having secured the ability to build a tower of blocks, young children learn more by seeing how insecure they can make it before it topples over. When they are in 'practising mode' the collapse of the tower signals failure, and may cause distress. When they are in 'playing mode' a similar event may be construed as interesting and informative, and even greeted with glee rather than frustration.

The second function of play has to do with the way know-how is stored in the mind. Children have an innate tendancy to seek greater flexibility and coherence within what they have already learned. After they have achieved adequate mastery they will go on through play to explore and even undo what they have just learnt, searching for anything that links this new ability with other pockets of expertise within the brainscape. Children spontaneously indulge in a kind of 'learning beyond success', in which the mind rewrites what it has learnt, segmenting out and rendering explicit concepts and skills that are common to different domains of expertise.

One might say that in general, this is the difference between proficiency and virtuosity: The expert has achieved a level of mastery that permits playfulness - the ability to respond, or even to 'break the rules', while staying within the domain. A Picasso or a Pele are able to do things with brush or ball that the journeyman artist or footballer can neither concieve ot nor carry off."

- from Wise Up: Learning to Live the Learning Life by Guy Claxton

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PARENT EDUCATION

"Learning is what you do when you don't know what to do." After all, if you knew what to do, you wouldn't be learning anything would you?

The above quote is taken from Guy Claxton's excellent book 'Wise Up'. It hints at what Ministry of Football is all about, and why Ministry of Football is different to most other football programmes. We believe that it is important that parents understand why we are different, and what our beliefs are about child learning and player development. Recent feedback from a Ministry of Football parent described a situation at their child's school, where the parent - cooncerned that their child was not doing as well as they might be - had asked the teacher how they thought the child was learning. The teacher did not have an answer. We find it astonishing that anyone involved in a child's development does not have an answer to this question.

For many parents, Ministry of Football may be the first football programme they come to, and for others it may be one of a handful they have attended. We want all parents to recognise what the differences are between one programme and the next in terms of how children are learning. We want parents to question - how is my child learning? We want them to notice how many times their child touches the ball, how involved and included they are in each activity, how often they find themselves in situations they don't have an easy answer for, and how many opportunities they have to make mistakes and also to succeed.

Far too often football coaches are guilty of standing players in queues, or of lecturing or demonstrating something for too long. No player will learn to their maximum by standing in a queue waiting for their turn. An activity that lasts 5 minutes needs to actively include each player for at least 4 of them. We want to challenge parents at Ministry of Football to question the activities they see at all the football programmes they attend, to ask themselves how involved and included their child is.  

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COACH DEVELOPMENT

In the same way that Ministry of Football will develop skilful, confident, creative players - it will also help develop coaches who are skilful and innovative. The Ministry of Football coaching programme is not rigid. We purposefully do not use tests or examinations in our programmes, and this means we are free from the shackles of having to coach to a set test-oriented syllabus. Instead, MoF coaches are encouraged to try new things and to input into making the football learning experience completely unique. In this way the range and variety of activities used at Ministry of Football will grow and expand.

All coaches at Ministry of Football also coach elsewhere - whether that be as full-time professionals at clubs, as PE teachers in schools or as coaches of junior or adult teams. We often get together to share new ideas, we "team-teach" sessions together regularly, and we evaluate activities and sessions on a weekly basis.