Recently, our famous goalkeeper Chuliang expressed his views on the country's youth soccer training system on his social media platforms.
Chuliang said that as a soccer player, his life is always closely related to soccer. During the National Day holiday, he chatted with two youth coaches about the performance of the National Junior Team in the Invitational Tournament in Shanghai, where some criticized the team's poor performance, even losing to a local team, and blamed it on the coaches. Although Chu Liang knew the abilities of the two coaches, he couldn't help but wonder why they minded so much. Then, he also retweeted a self media blurb.
Talking about the current domestic youth training environment, Chuliang emphasized that the ultimate goal of youth training is to cultivate children's interest and passion, so that they can love soccer for life; secondly, it is to shape the correct values and outlook on life; and lastly, it is to lay the foundation for the children to become professional players in the future. In his opinion, this is the real meaning of youth training.
However, Chuliang found that the current evaluation system tends to focus too much on a child's performance in competitions, such as championships won and best player titles. And when evaluating coaches, they focus more on their achievements in local competitions. Chuliang is positive about the achievements and honors his children have received, but do they matter? What we really need is a child to be able to compete with and beat other adult players on the professional field after the age of sixteen; a child to keep challenging himself for his ultimate goal, not just for money; and we need someone who can play soccer, not just someone who can play soccer.
Unfortunately, the grass-roots coaches he talked to were generally under tremendous pressure to perform, even from the elementary school level. In such an environment, how can coaches still have the energy to pay attention to other aspects of their children's education? They can only think all day long about how to go to great lengths to win matches and keep their jobs. Of course, there are a few who choose to lie flat, regardless of education, as long as they are comfortable.
In this environment, children's enthusiasm for soccer is fading, and parents are caught up in it. Recently, the country has been promoting a policy of reducing the burden, perhaps soccer youth training should also reduce the pressure. The pursuit of victory with all one's might is the essence of sports, but youth competition results are only a way to test the effectiveness of training, and such results will change with age. The only people who really need to focus on results are the coaches and athletes of professional teams, that's all.
