How important is your football passion to be a football coach?

The passion for the game is many times referred as an essential requirement to be a successful head coach! We cannot deny that there is an amount of truth in that, but what kind of the passion is relevant for it?

Lets use an example to describe what we intend to: What has changed Portuguese football in the last decades was not the increasing passion for football. That is something we had long before the results boom from last few years.

The football game was always the main source of entertainment in the Portuguese society and people were playing it even more than what they do now. So the evidences suggest that the passion is not increasing and at maximum it’s the same as before. But we do believe that passion is essential without it you will never reach into a better level!

So if we had the passion already, and some other countries have it also very deep into their society, what kind of new passion made a difference?

The passion for the game is fundamental to play the game but to coach it you need something else; you need a passion for the game well played. Of course this is an abstract concept because the notion of a well played football game is different to all of us but there are some points that are similar and probably the most important one is organization!

In Portugal now there is a great passion for “organized football” and that brings a certain amount of results (and also some problems).

This does not mean that the football in Portugal is more beautiful than ever, it just means that all coaches, regardless of the training methods, are educated to value to notion of a true team.

That team notion is based on a group of individuals that not only play with the same colors but as a group of players that work together to achieve a specific goal!

The more and more frequent technical-tactical approach given to training reinforces this development of a collective intelligence and habits are created in an easier and deeper way. Those habits acquired thru action are the glue that will sustain the team when everything else is falling apart!

So the passion for the game can have many meanings but the one who endures in the Portuguese coaching system is the passion for a football played according to principles (ideas) and those ideas of play are the guidelines shaping the development of groups and individual players.

Football is not a natural / biological phenomenon it’s a game that was built and developed by man, so the development of the playing style must be something also built and based on foundations. Football is not a science but its playing should be studied and built like if it was!

Football coaching will always be an art because if it was a science everybody would just be doing the same nevertheless the way you implement a certain style of play must be based on certain assumptions and references.

The passion for football is something important, but if you are not just another fan, you need to be in love with something else….

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