Four-corner folly?

Separation and separatist approaches are strongly engendered into society.

As coaches, it can be challenging for us to commit to, embody and further develop an integrated approach to both the development of our players and our own growth with such strong, historical and prevailing constraints upon our practice.

Academia can perpetuate this problem,  when assessing its students’ ability to break down whatever is going to be explored into smaller, more examinable elements to enable a conclusion to be derived.

This can lead coaches who aspire to study coaching and sporting performance eliminating elements of any particular environment to enable a smaller part of that system to be studied and measured.

Possibly, this promotes and sustains the notion that separating a soccer team and its players into smaller parts enables us to effectively understand the wider eco-system. 

This is problematic. As soon as we cut particular elements out of a tapestry, we create edges and seams that didn’t originally exist. When we attempt to piece them back together, we replace a connected, fluid, living body with a patchwork quilt of pieces.

For example, we can study physical output and measures how far a player has run, how much of that distance travelled was sprinting and what their fastest speed was. Physical trainers can pursue more distance, covered faster with greater top speeds.
 

"Separating human beings into the ’four-corner model’ is deeply divisive..."

  
These kind of performance enhancements can be alluring, seductive and perhaps even influential of behaviour.

But this kind of information requires contextualising. For example, a centre forward who manoeuvres opponents with physical contact - even small, subtle movements - may challenge opponents in ways that basic physical metrics may not identify.

In this situation, there is still a significant ‘load’ placed on the striker’s human systems to generate and manage the physical contact while outwitting opponents with clever movement, which perhaps aren’t considered in the separatist nature of data collection.

The same principle carries into what might be considered psychological challenges.

Being brave in possession, consistent from game to game, stoic when things are challenging and resilient when individual personality is not a natural social fit are all expensive investments that should be considered with all players and the environment each are a part of.

These are the reasons why separating human beings into ideas like English soccer’s ‘four-corner model’ - the technical, physical, social and psychological - is deeply divisive.

Developing players’ characteristics in these areas in isolation, or educating coaches for a distinct period (e.g. the psychological part of the curriculum), presents problems.

It is no better, as some prominent psychologists perpetuate, to imply that human beings are underpinned psychologically - i.e. that one element of our human system is more important than another - with our brain acting as ’CEO’, controlling our systems from the top down.

Humans are integrated, both within our own personal, individual system and within a wider social system - and soccer is a dynamic game which draws on all of our human systems and their connection to other human beings that exist within the environment. 

Superficial separation and siloes should be superseded by synchronisation. This requires a different methodology, one which removes itself from the strong social conventions we have been educated within and rewarded for conforming to; where success in life is achieved through aligning ourselves with educational dogma, enabling us to navigate our way to a productive life.

Breaking from these conventions can be challenging, socially isolating and uncomfortable. However, uncovering and embracing alternative, novel and human-responsive approaches to player and coach development can be the significant (not marginal) gain, particularly in contexts where constraints on our resources relative to our competitors make it difficult to beat better-equipped peers at their own game.

Methodology is different from method. A method might be a pre-set syllabus or coaching tactic; methodology is perhaps more of an integration of everything we’ve come to understand about our people and what they value in their soccer environment.

There is utility in investing every pore of our being into drawing this understanding together into coherent coaching methods.

We aren’t a collection of corners conveniently colour co-ordinated. Our curriculum isn’t our environment; our environment and the people in it are our curriculum.

While practices and game days aren’t the only important elements of the experience we can build and share together, they are useful ways to articulate how this integrated approach can be considered.

The three examples that follow on these pages can be perceived as being training practices - but every element of youth development is practice, even gameday. Hence, we can organise some variety into the games programme rather than follow a competition structure constrained with conventions created by committees.

These three examples could be organised across a number of consecutive training sessions, like a curriculum, and/or included as the competition formats for game day.

They have different numbers of players, a variety of pitch shapes and sizes, different types of goals and various ways to score.

Each of them is considerate of the entire human system, collectively. They intend to encapsulate what ‘four-corner’ aficionados might call the ‘red corner’ (technical and tactical), ‘yellow corner’ (physical), ‘green corner’ (psychological) and the ‘blue corner’ (social). 

Additionally, these different games could be set up on a game-day. 

Approach opponents and ask if they are interested in mixed game formats on certain days and challenge parents to referee the different types of games and conditions that the players are experiencing. This can aid their involvement, interest and depth of understanding.

The other adults in the environment are a key part of the technicolour that paints and enlivens our soccer landscape.

Parents, players and us coaches all sense, feel and are affected by the wonder and emotion that soccer brings to us all – the experiences we build and share can awaken the entirety of our nature, generating a reciprocity and connectedness between our enjoyment and our learning. 

Practice 1 - In detail