Play

Guest Author: Paul Cooper
Give Us Back Our Game

This chapter on play and children is an important one as this is usually where the journey begins for many in sport. It may simply be the thrill of throwing, kicking or hitting a ball for the first time, or running, jumping swimming. For many it starts through play and an informal version of a sport played in the garden, park or school playground. The circumstances, environment and experiences in these formative years can lead to a lifelong passion that has the potential to shape lives.

‘Children’s Song’
We live in our own world,
A world that is too small
For you to stoop and enter
Even on hands and knees,
The adult subterfuge.
And although you probe and pry
With analytic eye,
And eavesdrop all our talk
With an amused look,
You cannot find the centre
Where we dance, where we play...
R.S.Thomas

Paul Cooper is a grassroots football (soccer) coach from Gloucestershire, England who with American Rick Fenoglio, a senior lecturer in Exercise and Sport Science at Manchester Metropolitan University, founded the children’s sporting initiative Give Us Back Our Game in September 2006. It was a reaction to what Cooper had experienced in his time as a youth coach and how the children’s game he played for fun with his friends in the street, parks and playgrounds had been usurped by coaches who had a different agenda based on league tables, results and adult values. Although Give Us Back Our Game has mainly been tackling issues within children’s football it also has been involved with Rugby League, Rugby Union and Golf.

‘Give Us Back Our Game connects the dots between childhood, sport and play ‘
(Tim Gill)

The quote of the month for May on the Alliance for Childhood website was from Stephen Moss’s book, ‘Why Children Need Nature,’ on the subject of children playing in the great outdoors.

“Forty thousand generations of human beings have grown up doing this. And two generation’s haven’t.” (allianceforchildhood.org.uk)

It has recently become fashionable in the smarter villages of England to have an additional sign underneath the main one as you enter the village, which reads, Slow! Children Playing. Where? I would need to drive up the side of a house and plough through a bedroom wall to have any likelihood of endangering a child. And then explain to the local magistrate that I didn’t stand a chance as he stepped from behind his Playstation and out onto the carpet.

There are a number of reasons for the steep decline in outside play for children including;
The constant media attention on the subject and saturation of high profile incidents
The huge increase in traffic on our roads
The fear of stranger danger and the knowledge that if your child needs help, often adults will no longer come to their aid.

In 2007 research by the Children’s Society showed that 43% of parents in the UK thought that children should not play out until they were at least 14. In 2009 the charity Living Streets found that only half of 5-10 year olds in the UK had never played in their street, where as nine tenths of their grandparents had. It is also clear that parents are well aware of the need for outdoor play but feel boxed in by changes in society and an irrational fear that their children could be in danger as 87% of British parents surveyed by the National Trust wished that their children played out more.

A changing landscape
So the landscape for children’s play has changed dramatically and as a grassroots football coach I could always rely on getting my point across about the importance of play in children’s sport to parents. I would simply cast their minds back, twenty or thirty years to when they played out and the richness and variety of the games they played. The new generation of young parents however often fix you with a blank stare when the subject is brought up. Like an empty toothpaste tube the creativity and invention of children’s play has gradually been squeezed out of their lives, with children not allowed out for a number of reasons including the huge increase in traffic and the paranoia of stranger danger.

The opportunities for pre-school and primary school play have also diminished. In countries such as the US and UK there is a focus on measurement and results in early year’s education at the expense of play which is in total contrast to the Scandinavian countries that start the educational process at seven rather than 5, but catch up very quickly. The emphasis is placed firmly on play and the learning that goes with it. (Toxic Childhood – Sue Palmer 2006)

Give Us Back Our Game (GUBOG) carried out a survey of 100 primary schools in 2008 and found that a third of schools had banned ball games in the school playground on health and safety grounds. As well as ball games, many traditional games, played for generations, had been banned for being too rough, namely games such as British Bulldog. One young lad was so perplexed that he wrote to the GUBOG football campaign to share his story.
Although his primary school in Dundee had banned football in the playground, he could not resist the temptation to bring a tennis ball out of his pocket one December lunchtime and start an impromptu game with his friends. The kick about did not last long and his punishment for breaking school rules was to miss half of the school’s Christmas party.

Children can no longer even be trusted to manage their own space with many schools now opting to paint garish coloured zones in the playground to inform kids where to go and what to play in which zone.

Peter and Iona Opie
The idea that children need to be shown how to play and where is laughable. Play is what children do, it is their language, and it is their lore. No one has studied play more than Peter and Iona Opie. They documented games, play, language, rhymes and jokes up and down the UK in a series of fascinating books. Iona Opie spent 15 minutes a week in the same primary school playground from 1960 to 1983 observing children and their play in her delightful book, The People in the Playground (1983). She describes succinctly why there is no need for adult lines and boundaries as the playground is the domain of children and there is in fact structure among the chaos.

“At first the playground seemed uncontrolled confusion. Balls whizzed by my head, bodies hurtled across my path, some boys were on the ground pummelling each other, and a dense black mob rushed across, apparently taking no notice of anyone else. Gradually, often with the aid of an interpreter, it became possible to sort out the intermingled games, the chasing games; the chasing games for instance, which was superimposed upon a diffuse game of Germans and English, both games being intersected by boys competing in running races. I soon realised that any child with a look of concentration on his face was likely to be part of a game.” (P2)

Iona also noted that when the children emerged from class at the top of the steps leading down to the playground they would stop and cheer before catapulting down into the throng below. Agreements were very important and children took responsibility to select teams, make up the rules and organise the games. They even played pre-game, games to select a chaser or team. At morning break, which is just 15 minutes long Iona noted the following.

“Speed is essential. If they argue about the rules they argue rapidly and agree without much delay, knowing that prolonged argument means that the game may not be played at all. More often ‘the boss of the game’ organizes it with force and authority. It is not necessarily the strongest or the oldest who become leaders, but those who have self-confidence and the ability to make decisions.” (P4)

Tommy Smith, the great Liverpool football legend, in his excellent autobiography – ‘Anfield Iron’, talks a great deal about his childhood and how important it was in his development as both man and footballer and the need for rules.

“I am sure those games instilled in me and my pals a sense of responsibility and a notion that one had to adhere to rules in life if you were not to spoil things for other people. We had no referee to apply the rules of the game. When a goal was scored we restarted the game with a kick off from what passed as a centre spot. When a foul was committed, a free kick was taken and no one took umbrage. We seemed to accept that if anyone did not play by the rules of football, the game would be spoiled for everyone. Those games played without supervision taught us that you can’t go about doing just what you wanted because there are others to think of. Of course it was not a conscious thought at the time, but these kick-abouts on the bomb site taught us the rules of society and prepared us for life.”

What do we do with talent?
We have never had such a plethora of places to learn stuff. Nowhere is that more evident than in football with academies sprouting up around the globe. Intensive places of learning, bursting with knowledge and able to analyse everything from a player’s running gate, to how many successful passes he makes in a game. How do we accommodate our top talents into these centres of learning?

In the last ten years academies have changed enormously with superb facilities and equipment. There are also many specialists, not just on the coaching front, but on fitness, nutrition, psychology and medical care. Academies are important institutions in producing players, but dealing with the very top talents is the real challenge as they may need a different approach from a squad player.

This culture is one that is borrowed from education and in John Holt’s thought provoking book, How Children Learn; he makes the following observation in an updated edition;

“This book did not change, as I hoped it might, the way schools deal with children. I said, trust them to learn. The schools would not trust them, and even if they had wanted to, the great majority of the public would not have let them. Their reasons boil down to these:
Children are no good; they won’t learn unless we make them.
The world is no good; children must be broken to it.
I had to put up with it; why shouldn’t they?

To people who think this way, I don’t know what to say. Telling them about the real learning of real children only makes them cling to their about the badness and stupidity of children more stubbornly and angrily than ever. Why do they do this? Because it gives them a license to act like tyrants and feel like saints. ‘Do what I tell you!’ roars the tyrant. ‘It’s for your own good, and one day you’ll be grateful,’ says the saint. Few people, feeling themselves powerless in a world turned upside down, can or even wish to resist the temptation to play this benevolent despot.” (P297)

A few Football Academies have grasped the importance of play and the essence of street football that is much more child and game orientated. I watched a Manchester United Academy under 10’s team play a game where the opposition were generally bigger than the United boys. The opposition played well but they played more of an adult game and passed it quickly, one and two touch. They did not experiment or dribble nearly as much as the United youngsters as they were under strict instructions and were given very little freedom in the way they played.

So when do children get the chance to be creative and run with the ball and take player’s on? United Academy coach, Tom Statham agreed.

“How are you going to create the next Christiano Ronaldo or the next Lionel Messi if you don’t give them the freedom to run at people, take risks and be creative. If you can’t do it at nine and ten when can you? ” Tom added, “They are going through the player and the ball stage, the other stuff comes later. At the end of the day we are trying to develop players for the Champions League.”

The problem with natural talent is that some coaches can see them as mavericks and a threat to ‘the team’ and his control over them. Often these types of players are not understood and need to be guided gently and not shoe horned into a ‘one size fits all’ philosophy.

Arsene Wenger once said of French star, Thierry Henry that he was convinced there were at least twenty English players playing in non league football as good as the French forward, but it is easier to break a player than make one. That is the challenge that faces clubs and coaches. How can the special talents flourish in a game that is based on being part of a team? It is often these talents that can provide a moment’s inspiration to win a match. They need to be left alone more so their creativity can prosper. These players however are the ones than can change a game and win you the league title and to some extent don’t fit the mould that clubs use to develop their players.

In Sir Matt Busby’s thoughtful 1973 autobiography, Soccer at the Top, he explains these thoughts further and also has some insightful thoughts on coaches.

“Great players are individuals. That’s what makes them great players. They do not conform readily. They do the unexpected. That is also why they are great players. If they did what was expected they would be ordinary players. It also happens that great players are also great passers of the ball. So the individual genius aids teamwork because HE gives ordinary players a ball that makes life easier for them. But coaching changed things. Coaching is for ordinary players. It makes them better players. That maybe is why most great coaches were themselves ordinary players. They know how to improve an ordinary player’s game because they had scope for improving themselves. Great players don’t understand why lesser men can’t do great things. They have difficulty in explaining to others what they themselves do by instinct.” (168)

Birthdates
We already know that there is a serious flaw in the recruitment of players for academies as the figures in England show that the vast majority of players entering academies are born in the first four months of the football year and only a handful come from the last third of the football year. Talent is of course spread through the calendar and there is an argument that the late developers eventually could be the talents as they have to constantly punch above their weight.

A recent study by David Palmer from the University of Gloucestershire (The relative age effect: are we wasting potential? –Dave Palmer July 2009) has found that the bias towards the September to December birthdates in children’s grassroots football leagues follow a very similar pattern to the Academies.

Give Us Back Our Game organise community sessions across the country where all children are welcome, whatever their ability. Looking at the birthdates for these children, they are spread evenly throughout the year and are totally different to the birth date bias that happens in structured football controlled by adults.

In an interview I did with John Allpress, who looks after player development at the FA and he comes up with some suggestions as to why this may happen.

“It’s the attitude of the people. It is certain because the facts bear it out. The statistics show that the minute adults get involved; some children get excluded from the programme. They are seen not to be effective in matches and therefore they are left out or become sub. The kids don’t get a game and there is a danger in that because what is the basis for excluding kids from the programme? When the kids decide, everyone is involved. There is no bias; people don’t get excluded from the programme.

It is a fact that 50%+ of players at an academy are born in September through to December and less than 10% are born in May to August. Why is that? They are exactly the same as the other children only they are a bit younger, so why does that discrepancy exist? It is not just the academies; it is all the way through football and grass roots football. The minute adults are involved the bias kicks in. The reason why the bias kicks in is because the adults have a team and they want their team to win so they pick the stronger kids. Your team got beat 4-0 so you are crap, our team won so I feel good and I can go to the tyre factory on a Monday morning and I can say my team wins every week. That is where people get their self-esteem and it is understandable and maybe even human nature but it is only there because people want to win games. When the kids decide, it’s not there and the players that could make it through are among the younger group.”

A more humanistic, child and player centred approach by coaches would change this as the emphasis would be on long term development and not just today’s match,
Creativity & inspiration

In Ed Smith’s wonderful book, ‘What sport tells us about life’, he makes a case for not interfering in the creative process.

“What do we mean when we talk of creativity and inspiration? Perhaps we can never fully understand the answer. Many of the most inspired sporting achievements, like great works of art or innovation, spring from parts of our personalities which resist rational analysis, let alone professional planning. There will be an element of self-awareness in all these processes – a management of talent, a regulation of originality – but also a good amount of instinct. Forces beyond rationality lead creative people to follow certain paths and not others. Like strikers with an instinct for where to be in the penalty area, something takes them into different (and better) creative territory.”(14)

With all that money spent on facilities, the coaching badges, the staff and wages; with all that technology at their finger tips, it is presumed they know all the answers and that is where the problems begin. Can you teach creativity by getting kids to copy ten tricks used by the top Brazilian players of all time? But who taught the Brazilians?

Teenagers have had a bad press of late in the UK and in football we are perceived worldwide to lack creative, intelligent players. But the country is stacked with talent, but maybe it is not always being found and nurtured properly. For nearly fifty years the youth of this country have been the most creative force across the globe in popular music. Starting in the 1960s with the Beatles and Rolling Stones then moving on through the age of rock with Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin; then came the punk era with groups like the Clash and Sex Pistols and laterally groups such as the Libertines, Coldplay and Arctic Monkeys. This is a playground where you can do what you want. You learn from listening and watching your heroes; learn from your friends and trial and error. They are largely self taught and wholly responsible for the creative process in writing and performing their songs.

Would this process be enhanced by an Academy of Pop or would the spontaneity, intuition and creative process be diluted or lost? The environment for the young musicians is still there in the bedrooms, garages and small halls up and down the land, but the original university for football, the streets, parks and playgrounds has all but disappeared as we have never properly addressed the decline in street football which still exists in the countries that produce the best technical players.

An interesting theory in the Journal of Sport Sciences looks at how more responsibility should be given to the player.

“While prescriptive instructional approaches are likely to produce faster performance gains initially, they may result in less efficient and reliable performance in the long term. The emphasis when learning through guided discovery is on players taking responsibility for their own development, finding unique solutions to movement problems, exploration and discovery. This ‘hands off’ approach may be more effective in developing ‘smart’ learners who are able to apply their skills in a variety of performance situations (i.e. what has been termed ‘adaptive’ rather than ’routine’ expertise: ee Dr.J.Holyoak, 1991)
J

ournal of Sport Sciences, June 2005; 23 (6): 637-650. Practice, Instruction and skill acquisition

The games we played
Children are creative and informal sport is a perfect example of this. The less structure, equipment, and players there are the more creative they have to be. Worldwide this could be beach football in Rio de Janeiro, a pickup game of basketball in a Chicago schoolyard or street hockey in Toronto.

My brother and I lived in the family house in an idyllic location; with a wonderful view of the river Torridge. The setting came at a price as the lane was full of elderly people who are not prime candidates to play in goal or keep wicket. With just the two of us we had to be inventive when playing cricket , so devised a game where we were joined by ten fieldsmen who were a mixture of trees, bushes, telegraph poles, as well as jumpers and coats laid out for a cordon of slips. (Cricket is a sport invented in England and played throughout the British Commonwealth – India, Pakistan, Australia etc – There are similarities with Baseball in that you have one team batting and one team fielding)

We now had a full team each and could play a whole test. When batting if you hit the ball in the air and it hit or landed on one of these static fielders, you were out caught. If you were batting, 9, 10 or 11; you could be out caught even if the ball went along the floor and hit a fielder. We would play a whole Ashes series, England v Australia, and had to bat or bowl left handed if the player we were at the time played that way. We also had to use their bowling, batting technique so they might be a stone wall right hander or a swashbuckling left hander or when bowling; a quickie or a leg break bowler. There was a lot of learning going on but to us we were just having fun.

A friend of mine had a similar experience with his brother in their small garden where they devised more than twenty different football games for two players. They would write all the names of the games on pieces of paper and draw them out at random and play the games one after the other. There was a great deal of creativity and inventiveness which was duplicated in most families and gardens across the country.

Simple conditioned cricket games that everyone played such as ‘Tip and Run’ where you had to run if you hit the ball with your bat, which made for greater fun with more run out situations and a higher turnover of batsman; ideal for the playground when time was limited. Also six and out which restrained the best shot of all, not something children would normally chose, but too many sixes could mean too many lost balls and no game.

In How Children Learn, Holt describes how the loss of most of the playground for building and a reduction in sports playing time did not deter the school softball team from competing.

“With such limited time and space for practice we did not expect to get much of a softball team, all the more so as the boys in the school were not outstandingly athletic to begin with. Yet, year after year, we were able to field a competent softball team that could hold its own against boys of the same age. How did these kids manage to learn this very complicated game? David and I certainly didn’t teach them. There was no time, or room, for anything that could be called instruction. No they learned by watching each other, and imitating. Year after year we would see the same thing happen. Here would be a boy in the third or fourth grade who seemed so hopelessly clumsy, unathletic, and ignorant of all the rules and skills of baseball that it looked as if he could never learn to play. Two years later that same boy would be a competent and often an expert player-and many of them did almost all of their playing at school. They learned, as I say, by watching the older boys who did it best, and trying to do what they did.”(188)

Holt went on to explain that he had previously taught at a much bigger school with large playing fields and more time for sports lessons, but they never achieved what the pupils in the small school with little time and space for sport did. Holt also makes a confession about what kind of coach he was previously which he feels made a negative impact.

“The boys in this school spent a good deal of their sports time standing around watching while someone ‘explained’ something to them. I was then still under the spell of the idea that if you are determined enough you can teach anybody anything. I remember a couple of boys that I was trying to teach to bat and throw. I can still see their sullen but resigned faces, feel their limp, uncooperating muscles, and practically hear their thoughts. Here was school brought right out into the play yard, where they were supposed to be having fun, or at least a moment’s respite from school. Small wonder we did not get far. If, instead, they had had a chance to play with, and see, and imitate bigger boys, how much better things might have gone.” (189)

In football we had practical conditioned games such as ‘Three and in’, a football game played with one goal where every third goal brought a change in keeper. This meant everyone had a turn and was fair for all. Most kids would prefer to not be in goal, so ‘Three and in’ was a simple and sensible solution.

The key is no one ever told us the importance of these types of games and play. It is just what we did as kids. A good example of this is comparing the proper game which has all the proper equipment and field markings, including goals with nets to the informal ‘jumpers for goalposts’ game. (‘Jumpers for goalposts’ is an English saying for an informal game of football. All you need is a ball and players. The players take off their jumpers (pullovers) or coats and use those as the goals)

If the England and Manchester United forward Wayne Rooney was on the edge of the penalty area and the ball bounced up nicely he would volley it high into the roof of the net without a second thought as he does not have to retrieve the ball and his only focus is to score a goal. It is a lot more complicated down the park with a pile of coats or jumpers for goalposts. If you kicked into the imaginary net where Rooney had scored, some players would have said it would have gone over the bar or around the post or both! So you first had to both bring it in and down a bit. Those in the know would also give the keeper hope and the perfect goal was not hit too hard so that the keeper still had a 30% chance to get a finger tip to it and decide that goalkeeping was fun and would stay in goal for the game and not take your precious position out on the pitch. It also meant the ball would not go too far a distance to be retrieved.

If you blasted the ball and you had no nets, the beaten keeper - hands on hips, would extract some revenge by looking at where the ball had landed, some 100 yards away and then look at you and spit out; “You can get that!” You always had to give him hope so that he would not trudge off disconsolate with his ball. This was an incredible skill to master – technique, psychology, and diplomacy, all in one volley.

Children’s sport today
Sport is very different today and firmly in the hands of adults. That can be a pleasurable experience, but nevertheless it is a lottery, dependent on the philosophy of the coach. The expectations are those of an adult and have very little to do with how children organised and played their own games.

In grassroots football in England most football is played in junior clubs. Leagues start at U7s and becomes competitive at U9s (i.e. results and league tables are published) There is a great deal of structure and organisation with leagues insisting on certain formats and maximum squad sizes. Too often the same children are omitted from the team or are always on the bench as the coach selects what they consider to be the strongest team each week. In the children’s game there are no substitutes and everyone plays.
How does a six year old fall in love with the beautiful game stood on the sideline on a freezing cold January morning? It comes as no great surprise when the stats for a junior football league in Essex showed that only 54% of players signed on at clubs start a league game each week. The coaching is often very prescriptive with adult structures and an over emphasis on fitness and training without the ball. A short match at the end is seen as a treat.
Another negative about adult organised children’s football are some of the score lines. I watched an U10s game which finished 25-1 with the coach of the winning team berating his players for letting in a goal. As with substitutes, children controlling their own game would never let this happen. Usually the two best players picked the sides and went down the ability levels until everyone was chosen. You may be the last to be picked but you played every minute of the game. The games had to be fun and by picking even teams made it both fair and competitive. If the score line say went to 5-0, the kids stop the game, swap over a couple of players and start back at 0-0. Simple, children’s logic at play.

A games and play approach where children are able to breathe and explore is important. John Holt in How Children Learn states;

“A very common pattern in children’s learning. First, a great bold leap forward into exciting new territory. Then, for a short while, a retreat back into what is comfortable, familiar, and secure. But we can’t predict much less control. This rhythm of advance and retreat, exploration and consolidation, and this is one of the main reasons why the learning of children can’t, or at least shouldn’t, be scheduled. (187)”

Rick Fenoglio, senior lecturer in exercise and sport science at Manchester Metropolitan University and co-founder of Give Us back Our Game stated in his article, A Neuro-physiological basis for developing future skilful players (2007) published in Total Youth Football (April 2008 Page 48), he gives some pointers to youth football coaches

Use the Give Us Back Our Game 80/20 rule for training and match play (if possible 80% or more of the training time should be spent with the children playing adapted small-sided games.

The remaining 20% can be used for warming-up, instruction and other fun non-football games that develop multilateral co-ordination.)

Small-sided games are a more effective and more match play-specific method for learning skills than drills. Drills are too far removed from actual play to be highly effective;

Mistakes are good! Mistakes allow the player to recognise and, in time, discard unsuccessful strategies. Praise the bravery that goes into trying! Studies show that children either take no notice of criticism or play worse as a result;

Evidence shows that the first coach a young player has is vital for instilling a love of the game by creating a safe, non-threatening and enjoyable environment in which children can learn. By giving some ownership of training to the boys and girls themselves and by letting them make some decisions, you foster empowerment, independent learning and their own personal love of the game;

Training should be variable so that learners can explore and discover their own solutions to football problems. Remember that history shows that the best players developed their own way of playing skilfully and achieving success on the pitch.

‘Instruction’ from coaches can be used – but this should be in the form of ‘nuggets of information’ that the player can quickly and repeatedly attempt in a small-sided game.

Demonstrate only briefly then let players experiment and try to find their own way of performing a movement or skill.

Use guided discovery and question-and-answer techniques rather than prescriptive coaching.
In the Give Us Back Our Game approach, coaches shape and guide rather than direct; and know that game intelligence and skill can be more quickly and more effectively developed by the use of adapted, game-related activities.

Summary
“Play is the universal language of children’
Anon

As society changes there is an increasing lack of unstructured outdoor play. This play also covered many different sports that were in the main organised, played and controlled by children. There are a number of reasons for the lack of play including the huge increase in traffic on our roads and a perceived danger from strangers. This has been fuelled by the media and has become a hot topic.
The alternatives are normally adult led and structured. Children often have very little input into what happens and who plays. Even at early ages sport can mirror an education system that is target driven by results, points and league tables. This culture discriminates against children born later in the sporting and academic year who have a much reduced chance of participating in this structured environment. It is also harder for children to learn at their own space and have plenty of trial and error experiences with children of different abilities and ages.

Creativity and inspiration can be a victim of the very structured approach, no matter what level a child is at. A games approach is recommended to substitute for the lack of free outdoor play. This allows for more exploration, decision making and allows for mistakes, which is a key part of learning as well as a more child and player centred environment. Games, both free play and conditioned can make up to 80% of a session to allow for a more holistic rounded approach to children’s sport. We really need to give children the opportunity to just play and have fun and not impose our will on them.

References:
Children’s Song R.S. Thomas - Collected Poems 1945-1990 (1993)
Orion Books ISBN: 0753811057.

The People in the Playground – Iona Opie (1993)
Oxford University Press ISBN: 0198112653

Toxic Childhood – Sue Palmer (2006)
Orion Books ISBN: 9780752873596

Anfield Iron – Tommy Smith (2009)
Bantam Press ISBN: 0553819259

Paul Cooper – Creating the right environment - Soccer Coaching International Magazine (2007)

Soccer at the top – Sir Matt Busby (1974)
Sphere Books ISBN: 0772120965

David Palmer – The relative age effect: are we wasting potential
Give Us Back Our Game Magazine - issue 2 (2009)

John Allpress – interview with Paul Cooper (2007)

What Sport Tells Us About Life – Ed Smith (2009)
Penguin ISBN: 0141031859

How Children Learn – John Holt (1967)
Penguin ISBN: 0140136002

Dr.J.Holyoak -Journal of Sport Sciences, June 2005; 23 (6): 637-650. Practice, Instruction and skill acquisition

Fenoglio, R. (2007), Developing Skilful Players (A Neuro-physiological Basis for Developing
Future Skilful Players) Why the Give Us Back Our Game approach is THE best way to produce
Young Gifted Players
Total Youth Football Magazine (April 2008)