Opinion

In under-nines soccer, as in life, winning is everything

Sport, like everything else in society, should be run like a business

“If your son’s not out there, it’s because he’s not good enough,” the coach explained. Photograph: iStockphoto

Ed O'Loughlin
Fri Dec 16 2016 - 05:55

A midweek evening on Dublin’s northside, and a group of players has just finished training at a well-known soccer club. As they prepare to leave, the coach makes an announcement.

Those selected to play in the next match will be notified later by text message. Those who don’t get a message will not be in the squad. They should not bother turning up.

This is a non-league football club. The boys in the squad are seven years old.

In Dublin, underage soccer aspires to professional standards.

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I have heard of another northside club that will not allow young children to play if they show up with the wrong colour socks.

At yet another club, a father asked a coach why his young son could not get a run-out.

The reply: “If your son’s not out there, it’s because he’s not good enough.”

It’s not about the players, the coach explained. It’s about the results.

Wider ecosystem

Does this seem harsh to you? It shouldn’t.

The fact is that Irish soccer is part of a wider ecosystem, a globalised pyramid that funnels promising players onwards and upwards towards full-time professionalism.

Very few players will make it all the way to the top, but the point is to climb as high as you can. It’s about looking for more, about striving for excellence. It’s about the results.

In contrast to this clarity of purpose, some other sporting bodies have a very woolly view of their place in the scheme of things.

I know someone – let’s call them a close associate – who plays under-nines Gaelic football and camogie for a northside Dublin GAA club.

To be fair to them, the team’s mentors do make considerable effort to train the players in the skills of the games. But when it comes to actual matches the results can be underwhelming.

Rather than competing for the ball, some of the girls tend to cluster in the corners of the pitch, gossiping with their teammates, or worse, the enemy.

While the more committed players scramble for the ball in centre field, other teammates drift away from the action, performing spontaneous cartwheels.

This frivolity is indulged not only by the watching parents, who really ought to expect more from their daughters, but by the mentors as well.

Even the most unfocused, unskilled player is sure of getting a game.

And yes, there are medals for everyone at the end of the year.

Pursuit of excellence

What kind of message is the GAA, or underage rugby, or the Community Games, or the Special Olympics, or Comhaltas Ceolteórí, sending to our children?

For there to be winners there must also be losers. It’s like that in sport, in war and, above all, in business.

If these organisations were businesses, they would go bust.

The clear-sighted pursuit of excellence and advancement is opposed, and even subordinated, to the kind of snowflake Social/Christian Democracy that led the world astray between 1945 and the rise of Reagan and Thatcher.

And who would want to go back to that failed experiment?

Soccer (to use it’s more globally marketable brand name) understands that sport, like everything else in society, including government, should be run like a business.

We need to understand this, too.

When successful businessmen such as Michael O'Leary or Donald Trump speak out on public affairs, we do well to listen carefully.

Waste incarnate

These are men who understand that life is about advancement, about profit, and that increasing your profit involves cutting your costs, eliminating waste.

Those children goal-hanging at the wrong end of the pitch, wearing tracksuit bottoms, instead of the correct socks and shorts, playing tag instead of hurling – they are waste incarnate.

So, for example, are those greedy pensioners we hear bleating in some, but not all, of our national media, insisting on their “right” to skim corporate funds that would otherwise be available for investment in our future.

All around us, we see that future being slowly poisoned by our society’s own waste products – by the demanding, entitled patients swamping our tax-funded health system, by the special needs children clogging our classrooms, by young people without the gumption or skills to find themselves the kind of well-paid, full-time, mortgage-paying job that came so easily to the older, tougher people who preceded them.

For us to move on as a country, as a planet, a new place will have to be found for such wastage. And it won’t be on the pitch. [Statutory warning in accordance with the Online Allergens Act of 2016. Article may contain: subtext, irony, parable]

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