If you take golf, you have a teacher for the drive, a teacher for the approach play, and a teacher for the putt. That's three specialist coaches for one player. In football, one coach looks after 25 players.
Interpretation
Specialization in coaching can enhance performance in individual sports compared to team sports.
Johan Cruyff's quote highlights the contrast between coaching practices in individual sports, like golf, where specialized coaches can focus on different aspects of a player's performance, versus team sports, such as football, where a single coach is responsible for a larger group of players. This reflects the differences in training methodologies and the potential for tailored instruction to improve skill levels in individual sports.
In practice
A sports conference discussing the benefits of specialized coaching in athletics.
Ajax is a multicultural club, and we have found that many talented immigrant players quit when they reach puberty. So we wanted to tackle this problem with someone from the same background who had come through it. And that was Edgar Davids. During one of our fights, I pointed that out to him. But it had nothing to do with his skin colour.
It's disappointing to see how football, the world's No. 1 sport, is not No. 1 when it comes to development. It seems to me that a wealth of practical football knowledge is being squandered.
Football is not about suffering. It's about enjoyment. Control the ball, be friendly with it, try to attack, try to score goals. Of course defending is part of it, but you can defend in a lot of ways.
If you look at other countries, you see they have different values: defend more, pass the ball out more, winning is holy. In England, you could say that sport itself is holy. They say, 'Look, guys, it's about more than just winning.'
The most important part are the fans, that people going home are happy. It's their time off, and you should give them something to enjoy.
Football is about having the best offensive play possible. I always like to play offensive football, and nobody will convince me otherwise.
When kids know that you refuse to let them fail ... they don't give up as easy. So sometimes they don't have it inside, [but] they're like,'You know, I don't want to do this, but I know my mother's going to be mad.'That matters to kids, and it helps get them through.
As a little girl, I didn't like stories about little girls. I liked stories about dragons and beasts and princes and princesses and fear and terror and the Four Musketeers and almost anything other than nice little girls making moral decisions about whether to tell the teacher about what the other little girl did or did not do.
Being considerate of others will take your children further in life than any college degree.
There's something missing about how we're informing the youngsters coming along about what matters in the world. We teach them the numbers and the letters, but we fail to communicate the importance of our connection to the living world.
Just once in a while let us exalt the importance of ideas and information.
You can't really be scientifically literate if you don't understand evolution. And you can't be an educated member of society if you don't understand science.
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