It’s all about quality

In all official speeches, comments and articles regarding South African football there is a stereotype call for better ‘quality football’, ‘quality players’, ‘quality development’, ‘quality facilities’ and even ‘quality refereeing’. Amazingly and very strange is that no one calls for better quality coaching!!

Isn’t common knowledge that in modern football quality coaching is the number one factor? Instead, the talking is always that ‘we have over 9000 qualified coaches and we need more’.

In the current state of naivety and ignorance that affects the technical development of SA football it is still accepted that the quantity and not the quality of coaches would produce superior players and high standards football. How incredible is that technical people do not realise that Level 3, CAF and UEFA coaching licenses are not passports to success or high football performance! (see those thousands of unemployed coaches in Europe who have UEFA qualification).

The knowledge and new information in the coaching business is very useful and exciting but also very vast (in some cases larger than the qualification content!). It requires regular updating courses and non-stop individual studying – just to cover approx. 23 areas of precise/scientific coaching information. Without such additional sources of learning even the best coaching talent in SA would not succeed at the top of performance.

It could also explain why in SA technical directors, coach educators and national team coaches don’t know the difference between the styles of play and systems (!?). The sooner full acceptance is given to the need for high quality coaches the better for the future of the game in the country.

By Ted Dumitru