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.
Laws for the liberal education of youth, especially of the lower class of people, are so extremely wise and useful, that, to a humane and generous mind, no expense for this purpose would be thought extravagant.
Educate a woman and you educate her family. Educate a girl and you change the future.
Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only the particular thing he is studying at the time.
The things that have been most valuable to me I did not learn in school. Traditional education is based on facts and figures and passing tests - not on a comprehension of the material and its application to your life.
Unlike television, reading does not swallow the senses or dictate thought. Reading stimulates the ecology of the imagination. Can you remember the wonder you felt when first reading The Jungle Book or Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn? Kipling’s world within a world; Twain’s slow river, the feel of freedom and sand on the secret island, and in the depths of the cave?
If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn't expecting it.
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