football is hard to watch.

and not because it's ugly.

Good morning! I want to talk about why I don’t like watching soccer anymore.

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Neat Reads

Neat Reads is a segment where I share an article or post that interests me and relates to our weekly theme.

“When Passion Leads to Burnout” talks about the myth “if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life.”

It explores why people who enjoy their work find it hard to do their work and how employers and workers can work together to mitigate stress.

Twenty-two men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the same clubs always win.

It’s hard to watch football now for a number of reasons. 

For starters, I no longer feel connected to the club I grew up watching because I have a moral conflict between enjoying my teams’ success and wondering how many human rights violations the owners had to commit to get where they are. 

I’ve been able to separate the artist from the art for other forms of entertainment before, but it isn’t quite the same with football. 

Football clubs embody a sense of community, belonging and a shared mutual interest - clubs care for fans and vice-versa. 

However, as modern football becomes more and more global with a goal of making as much money as possible, i can’t help but feel further removed from the sport I loved to watch.

Coaching hasn’t helped my level of enjoyment either. When all I do is think about the next training session, research, spend hours on grass, etc. the last thing I want to do is watch a mega club beat a slightly less mega club.

Performance analysis has turned watching football into a chore. Automatically I find myself looking for what the teams are doing. I can’t turn that part of my brain off - it’s constant. The only times I’ve been able to manage this behavior is when watching a game live.

I no longer find mainstream tactics interesting. All the best tactics/analytics people on Twitter got snapped up by clubs.

There is a massive quality vacuum. Many people share what they see and not what they think.

There’s a few outliers, like Jamie Hamilton (@stirling_j) who writes some very neat stuff. Otherwise, there simply isn’t much to be learned from Twitter anymore. It’s a big reason why I’m looking at courses for new things to learn. 

There is a silver-lining to this. I’m good at my job because of how invested I am into bettering myself, my game understanding and my players. My job is football. The best moments happen more often and are better than the worst moments. 

I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.

… but sometimes I’d like to watch football how I used to - as a fan.

Coaches Corner

Coaches Corner is a segment where I ramble about training this week and answer some questions I get from Substack or Twitter.

Ramblings

I forget how hard it was to be a teenager. As coaches, I feel that sometimes we put too much “load” on our players. We expect them to be great athletes and great thinkers despite both being very hard.

I’m confident our physical workload at Ascent Soccer is fine. It’s demanding, but they’re fantastic athletes who have their load managed correctly by us, the coaches. 

I don’t know enough about their classroom workload to form a strong opinion, but I can speak about our youngest age groups just from working with them closely on the football pitch and in the chess class I teach at our school/.

Our players have a very limited educational background. They simply chose to play football instead of going to school (in most cases.) So, when they first enter our home school they struggle to focus, understand and retain the information being taught to them.

It took six hours (across multiple chess classes) for me to teach our youngest players how the chess pieces move. This isn’t because they’re bad chess players, it’s because they couldn’t remember what we learned previously and build from that. 

It’s absolutely interesting. Seeing this has completely changed how I coach. It is no longer about the best exercises, rather how to best layer the learning process. 

The point of this is that I wonder if the school workload is too much and that’s why they can’t retain what they learn well. Alternatively, the school workload is enough and our players simply just need to get up to speed with how we learn now - even if they don’t get the same start as their competitors around the globe.

Q&A 

Nothing this week! Questions can be asked directly through Substack (see the button below) or via Twitter DMs!

Exercise of the Week

Exercise of the Week is a segment where I share some of my favorite relevant exercises I have used in training before.

Hard to find an exercise that fits with this theme. The closest I can get to is an exercise I like to use when my players are in a “funk.” 

Two goals

Two even teams - best experienced by playing 7v7 or below.

Normal FIFA game rules

Conditions:

Each team must pick a player whose goals/points are worth double (but don’t tell the other team!)

Weak foot finish = 2 points

Rebound finish = 2 points 

Volley/half-volley = 3 points

1st touch finish = Conceding team goes back to 0 points 

I’ve found that the best way to get players out of a funk is to create a collaborative environment that can also reward individual success. The conditions keep the game exciting because the teams have to figure out who the “double points player” is.

I’ve seen some teams get it massively wrong and end up marking the wrong person the whole game. It’s great fun, good for some laughs and encourages different kinds of finishing.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading this week!

I love football and the life I have because of it. Now I just need to learn how to keep myself from getting into a funk of my own. I may not ever watch football the way I used to and that might be okay with me. 

I need to reflect a bit more. Perhaps changing the way I view football has given me a different level of appreciation for it that I couldn’t have had when I watched as a fan.

I’m always interested to hear your thoughts and ideas so please feel free to send me a message on Twitter or leave a comment above in the Q&A section.

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See you next week! 

Where to find me:

Medium: https://medium.com/@cameron-herbert

Twitter: https://twitter.com/CamH___

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cameron-herbert-football-coach/