I have previously written about how I came to love soccer as more than just a sport I played as a kid. You can check out that prior post via this link
why-i-love-soccer.html However, truth be told, for the majority of the last 27 years, when I watched soccer games and heavens knows I've watched a ton in that time frame, I also watched them with the eye of a coach. I am not talking simply about games whether I might be watching some of my players participate with their clubs, or evaluating potential new players during the recruiting process or even when watching games involving upcoming opponents for the purpose of preparing a game plan. No, I am talking about pretty much every game I watched whether live, on video or on television. Yes, I would be watching the game, but I would also be analyzing, evaluating decision making, appreciating skills and looking for ideas about some tactical approach I might be interested in trying. Granted it's only been a a little over two months since my retirement from coaching and with the timing, club soccer in Europe has just recently started, I've watched a few of the Impact games and of course, get to see some fantastic games during this summer's World Cup ( Spain's disappointing, under performing aside). However, know I simply watch soccer with no vested interest as a coach but simply as a fan of the game and for the joy of the spectacle, like pretty much the majority of all soccer fans. For a significant part of my adulthood, I was an insider so to speak, someone very involved in the sport of soccer. Someone who put in a lot of time and effort with teams and athletes. So as I reflect on how I will watch soccer moving forward, I try and approach it with the eye of a simple soccer fan, someone looking to appreciate the game for what it is. Being a soccer fan is both a privilege and a burden. When you’re team is winning, it’s the best thing feeling, and when it's not, it’s the end of the world. And the thing about being a fan is, for a significant majority of those who truly follow the game, whichever way fortune swings, they’re stuck with the game and their team for life. Real fans have come to accept the great hold “the beautiful game” has on us. But how does this happen? How do people get so wrapped in the game, following their club or national teams. Watch soccer on television during international competitions or domestic league games and how often do we see images of fans going through the range of emotions, nerves, screaming with joy at success, crying uncontrollably after a failure. Sports fans are passionate but I think no sport truly engages its fans passion like soccer. Football is the most popular spectator sport in the world and for much of the world the experience of being a fan is a tradition that has been passed down through the generations. Here in North America, we are somewhat sheltered from the impact that soccer and its fandom can have on people. Soccer-supporting individuals embrace the game, develop affinities for individual clubs, chant and sing, and cultivate the fan culture that exists today. But the roots of fandom have existed long before the modern game came to prominence and definitively long before football came to be known as “soccer”. The British are considered the inventors of the game because they were the first to document the ' Laws of the Game" and structured leagues first seemed to take hold but let's be honest soccer is a world wide activity. It is a sport that can be played pretty much anywhere, an open space ( and not specifically grass, beach sand, parking lots, gravel pits) a ball and a couple of objects that can serve as goals and you're good to go for a game. Soccer fever really started among the British public around the 1880s, fueled by social changes that allowed working people the time and means to pursue new pastimes. Although their fanaticism was rapidly being established, these enthusiasts weren’t labelled as football “fans” until the early 20th century. Before that they were “spectators” and then “supporters”. The term “fan”, as a contraction of “fanatic”, has US origins. It was first used to describe keen baseball spectators in the sports columns of US newspapers. The term “soccer” originated in England in the 1880s, used by students at Oxford University as a slang abbreviation of “association” football. But it was adopted in the US as a useful shorthand to distinguish the association game from gridiron football. But North America was slow to embrace soccer. Since the turn of the century, there have been a number of attempts at organized professional going back as early as the 1920s. The growth of soccer as a spectator sport was driven by the working class, and in particular by immigrant workers. The most highly attended games in both Canada and the US tended to be where European teams would tour and play against local clubs. Women’s soccer also gained popularity, particularly during a 1922 tour of the US and Canada by the influential British side Dick, Kerr’s Ladies, who also attracted five-figure crowds. However lack of games during the Great Depression, saw soccer slide back into obscurity. In Europe, supporters ( as they label their fans) often choose clubs to follow based on religious, cultural and social-economics reasons. Think of the Glasgow Rangers - Celtic rivalry in Scotland, Barcelona - Real Madrid in Spain as two examples. They go far beyond just following and supporting your local team. I could write an entire blog post just on some the deep rooting reasons some individuals chose to support certain clubs, and I might at some point. Anyone who spends any kind of time following soccer has seen images over the years of showing crowds of fans passing flag-draped pubs, marching down the street towards their local ground ( what we call stadiums lol ) , the traditional fan, wearing hat and scarf in team’s colors, banging on make shift drums, blowing horns, carrying banners — and in later years wearing a replica shirt. They arrive at his local football ground and hand over a paper ticket stub before pushing through a mechanical turnstile, then make their way to the standing terrace. There, they sing and chat,riding an emotional roller coaster that would rise and fall with the ebb and flow of the match. And afterwards head home, his mood altered for better or worse by the result of the game. Soccer is a sport where there is usually one game a week. Where everything stops for the 90 minutes it lasts and fans live through the actions of their favorite players. This routine often baffled the non-fans, who failed to understand the vital importance of soccer in the everyday lives of many people. And fans were viewed with amusement and derision by certain segments of society. Initially there was a broad class divide. soccer was the working-class game, and those of a higher standing who did not feel its popular appeal were wary of noisy groups of football fans, who were at best boisterous, and at worst hooligans. In England, in the 1970s and 1980s, high-profile incidents of disorder and violence led to the general vilification of football fans. The contempt with which fans came to be regarded would have tragic consequences, leading to a series of wholly-preventable disasters, starting with the Heysel Stadium disaster in 1985 when Liverpool and Juventus fans clashed and culminating at Hillsborough in 1989, when 96 fans were killed. Things did change, and the reputation and treatment of football fans improved over the 1990s and 2000s, during what some call the gentrification of the game. But, while few mourned the gradual disappearance of the hooligan, the traditional football fan was also disappearing. As cash was pumped into the game — largely via global TV rights deals, and world side viewership of domestic leagues grew — the traditional working-class fan was increasingly priced out. While British football fans suffered in the doldrums of the late 1970s and 1980s, US fans were enjoying the glamour and razzmatazz of the North American Soccer League (NASL). Pele, Franz Beckenbauer and George Best were among the big name draws, with crowds of more than 70,000 attending some of the biggest games. Interest in soccer dwindled during the 1980s, but was revived again in 1994, when the US hosted the World Cup. The tournament was watched by a cumulative US TV audience of 145 million, over 50 million more than that year’s Super Bowl. Two decades later, the US TV audience for the 2014 World Cup tournament, in Brazil, had doubled to 291 million. In 2015, when the US women’s national team reached the Women’s World Cup Final, 26.7 million US viewers watched their team defeat Japan. The new millennium’s surge in soccer fandom in the US was initially driven by the increased visibility and impact of European soccer leagues, particularly the English Premier League and Spain’s La Liga, in addition to Mexico’s Liga MX. Prominent TV coverage allowed soccer to muscle in alongside more traditional US sports, and allowed fans to adopt foreign clubs — and to adopt aspects of the fan culture present in soccer-mad Europe, and in much of the rest of the world. Another driving factor has been the improved quality of Major League Soccer (MLS), which launched in 1993, but only really emerged as a competitive and noteworthy world soccer league in the late 2000s, around the time that global superstar David Beckham joined LA Galaxy. Now US soccer fans had clubs worthy of their support, and were able to introduce soccer fan culture — the chants, the scarves, to US sport. However the primary fan base of US teams remains somewhat cultural with 2nd and 3rd generation descendants of immigrants carrying on family tradition. Now that MLS is almost a quarter of a century old, the US has a new generation of soccer fans who have grown up watching the game. Knowledge and awareness have increased, and the appetite for top-quality soccer has grown. The league still gets some European players towards the end of the careers coming to play in North America but their quality of play is by far more legitimate than when for example Lothar Mattheus came to New York. It is now entirely possible to be a soccer fan without ever attending soccer matches. This has been enabled by expanding media coverage of football, which has made it easy to follow the game and watch matches from our homes, in bars, or on the go, virtually anywhere in the world, via TV or the internet. The media has long been an enabler of the football fan. In the early days of the game newspapers nurtured and promoted football, increasing the game’s popularity, and football fans bought newspapers to read their coverage, expanding newspaper readerships. Then along came radio and TV, and it became increasingly possible to follow football from afar. Further technological advances, notably the internet and social media, have expanded football coverage and extended the game’s reach. What it means to be a football fan has evolved and shifted to such an extent that a 19th century fan might struggle to recognize a 21st century fan as a fellow round-ball enthusiast. In the modern era, the vast majority of football fans never go to games. Take Manchester United’s claim, based on a market research survey, to have 659 million supporters. Old Trafford’s capacity is 75,731. So, according to a back-of-an-envelope calculation, only 0.01% of the club’s fans can fit into their ground. While the average attendance for English Premier League matches in 2015–16 was just under 36,500, the average UK TV audience for those matches was 800,000. And that was just the UK audience. The Premier League says its worldwide TV audience is three billion. And then there’s social media. Real Madrid have more than 100 million fans on Facebook. The capacity at the Bernabéu is 81,044. Those fans who do go to matches are part of a vastly-outnumbered minority. But fans do still pass through the turnstiles. The modern fan is still more likely to be male than female, although research shows that a third of football fans are now women. They may still wear a replica shirt, but the woolen hat and scarf have fallen out of fashion. (The rosette and rattle are now football museum pieces.) The turnstile they pass through may be electronic, with a plastic smart card placed into a scanner rather than a paper ticket handed to an operator. Most likely they will sit rather than stand, in plastic flip-up seats that clatter when a passage of play brings fans to their feet. There is still singing, and the ebb and flow of emotion. And the result still matters, and affects the mood, until overtaken by anticipation for the next match. There is always the next match. Some things never change, and the connection our ancestors had with football in Britain 150 years ago, or in Europe or Latin America over the past century, or in the US, from the ALPF, through the ASL and the NASL, to present day MLS, remains constant. This history of soccer fans is a social history, a political history, a history of the media, and a history of the game itself. Primarily, though, it’s a history of people going out to watch their teams, win or lose, then going back again and again. So moving forward, I go from membership in the fraternity of coaches to being one among the hordes of fans who follow their sport week in, week out with passion and excitement.
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AuthorAfter many years of coaching at various levels and with different teams, I thought I would share some of my experiences and thoughts about coaching. Archives
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