Local Constraints on a Global Game

After playing college soccer in New York, I began my career coaching in nearby Northern New Jersey. It’s a fast-paced, densely-populated, affluent, and diverse area located close to New York City. I was fortunate enough to begin coaching alongside some excellent coaches and mentors, and had a very positive experience helping develop a thriving club and several regionally-recognized teams. After several years, I relocated to South Florida and began coaching at a club there. 

Everything was different in Florida. The intensity of the tri-state area gave way to beach-induced relaxation. The kids thought differently, spoke differently, and moved differently. Often I missed the pace and intensity of New Jersey but over time I adapted my practice to this new context. A few years later I moved again to the north of England to begin my PhD at Sheffield Hallam University and again found a local club to coach at. Unsurprisingly, the differences were even greater in a new country. The regional differences between New Jersey and Florida now melted into national similarities to be contrasted with the new context in Yorkshire. After three years in Sheffield, I’m now back in the US and located just south of Chicago in the midwest of the country (yes, I move around a lot). As I look for a new club and community to invest in here, I can’t help but reflect on the global nature of the sport and the meaning of local constraints for coaching practice. 

One of the things that starts to become apparent when you’ve moved around a lot is that it’s possible people are more insightfully characterized by their propensity to move around the world than by their place of origin. By middle age, a person who has been entirely shaped by the local culture of Yorkshire will speak, think, and act very differently to someone who has been formed by the local culture of the midwestern United States, but they are both local people. There are also people from every country that have a propensity to move around the world. A Uruguayan chef who studied in Italy and works in Portugal. A Nigerian data scientist who speaks four languages and plies their trade in Finland. A Japanese artist who teaches at a Canadian university before retiring in Australia. I find it likely that these three fictional characters have more in common with each other (and may find it easier to relate to each other) than with local people from their place of origin. 

It is in this way that I think soccer is a global sport. It’s not just that it’s played all around the world, it’s also very often played and coached by global people. What this means practically is that if you find a soccer game almost anywhere in the world, it’s quite likely that the ethnic backgrounds of the people involved will be more diverse than a random sample of the surrounding community. This trend seems to increase as the level goes up. For example, Sheffield was quite a diverse community, but the football community I interacted with was even more of a melting pot. Of course, this likely holds to different degrees in different locations and I haven’t been everywhere, but I’ve traveled enough to suspect that soccer is always a bit of a foreigner’s game even in nations with historical ties to the game. For example, over 60% of England’s Euros squad were eligible to represent other nations. I do not know what percentage of the general English population would meet this criteria but it seems doubtful the figure would reach 60%.    

But as much as soccer may attract “global citizens” its local expressions are still bound by factors such as the availability of playing fields, population density, modes of transportation, economics, history, and many cultural values. Youth coaches wade in developmental streams that flow through these steep and often rigid banks. As many have pointed out before me, coaching is a culturally embedded practice. One of the key consequences of this multi-layered meshwork of constraints is that it can be hard for coaches to figure out what works and what just works here. As an aside, this is a great strength of the constraints-led approach -- the universal physical laws governing dynamic energy flows are complemented by nested constraints that define the specific local contexts coaches work in but more on this later. 

American soccer presents a fascinating case of the confusion that can arise from the interaction between a global game and local constraints. “What’s wrong with soccer in America” is an ever popular genre with many well-worn myths and cliches about pay-to-play, “best athletes”, and lack of soccer culture. Foreign influence is often considered the antidote. Brands like Dutch total soccer, or UK elite succeed based on the pervasive assumption that “they know how the game works over there”. A dilemma arises due to the fact that American soccer has been pervasively shaped by coaches from around the world, yet the nation is still characterized by mediocrity with promises of untapped potential on the world stage. 

It is tempting for coaches from abroad to assign the blame to some negative aspect of American culture. I distinctly remember a coach at a college ID clinic offering the analysis, “the problem with soccer in America is that you lot won’t shut up off the pitch and you won’t communicate on it.” He thought it was very clever. Statements such as these serve to create distance between the coach and a situation they deem themselves to be superior to, but they hardly build trust or respect with players. The set of things people intuitively “get” is different in different places and coaching in an unfamiliar location often exposes deep assumptions we are frustratingly unable to explain or justify. “This is what I did in my country, and my country is better at soccer so it must be right” is a limiting attitude that some coaches can struggle to let go of. 

In response to these dismissive attitudes, there is a strand of US soccer (perhaps epitomized by a certain national team defender-turned-commentator) that eschews foreign influence and prescribes a double dose of murica! that can bleed into cringey nationalism.This doesn’t work either. Entitlement and American exceptionalism are simply not sufficient to develop a competitive player pool in the world’s game. Creating counterfactual scenarios in which NFL or NBA stars played soccer and dominated at the highest level is also absurd and gets us nowhere. So where do we go from here? 

American soccer needs to get serious about skill acquisition research. The CLA provides a framework that allows coaches to simultaneously leverage universal physical laws that govern the self-organization of new skills and adapt to the unique constraints at the level of American culture, regional culture, or the values and history of a specific club without contradiction. Nested constraints range from the surface of the pitch to the regional climate to the evolution of bipedality but movement still flows through these layers like a stream carved into a canyon. By understanding these nesting relationships and actively and humbly participating in a community, we can fine-tune the context-dependent nature of the constraints we use in our coaching practice to suit the needs of our players.