You may be fluent in the art of football talk, but you’re not going to influence young players by telling them to ‘press the ball high’ and ‘play between lines’

Most observers of football in this country could probably supply a dissertation-length analysis of the effect of Sky Sports’ influence on the game. To my mind, the most damaging part of this has been the explosion of vacuous opinion and the impact it has had on children’s football.

Everybody with the wherewithal for a monthly direct debit now believes they are a football expert. While on the face of it people are better informed, this has in fact contributed to a massive dumbing down. Those familiar with the minutiae of football are completely blind to the wider point of how to actually play the game and enjoy it.

Pubs have always been full of football bores but for many of them this is no longer enough. Now these people feel the need to impose jargon gleaned from TV, tablet or laptop on to their children’s age-group teams. Go to a park on a Sunday and you will see these berks with their club-crested beanies battering on to a bunch of uninterested, slightly chubby children about the need to “press the ball high”. “Pressing” is this season’s thing, heard on Match of the Day then repeated the following morning.

Left to their own devices most groups of small boys will run after the ball like a shoal of fish. The dope who manages them can name Barcelona’s first-team squad by heart and tell you which ones he “doesn’t fancy”. He will proudly watch his shoal and congratulate himself on a “press” that Pep and Jürgen, the Godfathers of Press, would be proud of.

A PE teacher friend told me that, if you stick a bunch of boys on a football pitch with some footballs and their mates, you have a maximum of 60 seconds to make your point before their attention wanders. And yet, when you walk past the team groups on a Sunday morning, you overhear the near endless streams of consciousness that the junior teams are subjected to.

Some way into these senseless monologues, many coaches realise they are not having the impact they would like and begin to shout. Apparently when you yell at boys they generally switch off in less than the minute you would have had if you were talking. Often the managers realise someone isn’t listening and start berating them. Generally, when one boy is being shouted at, the others stop listening.

The terrible thing is that almost everyone in football does it. We all know too much and yet we know nothing. We are subjected to all these facts and phrases but we can’t condense them into simple sentences that our children can understand, or that help them to improve and enjoy football more.

I used to play football and was OK. My son’s team needed help and I volunteered but decided to keep my counsel and concentrate on balls, bibs, cones, poles and laces. But it just creeps up on you. At an under-14 game, after one of his talks, the manager asked if I had anything to add. He had already been talking for five minutes and no one had been listening for four. The correct answer was of course “no”. But that didn’t stop me. “Desire ... purpose, pace and penetration ... decision making ... precise execution under pressure [no, hold on, that’s rugby] ... two banks of four ... pockets of space ... body shape defending a corner ... whip and bend ... eliminate the first defender ... tactical foul ... play on the half turn ... 11 one-on-one competitions.”

And then I remembered the Andy Gray line that usually the game was decided by the direction of travel of the ball. So if you head it and kick it towards their goal more than they head it and kick it towards yours you will probably win. In a rare moment of clarity I realised that if you can rely on children to do one thing unbidden it is kick it towards their opponent’s goal.

So I took four minutes to say: “Do what you were going to do anyway.” To a group of children who weren’t listening.

I suspect England won’t win a World Cup or a European Championship in my lifetime and poor coaching will be one of many reasons. I would prefer us to win but I don’t really mind. What I do care about is that when I’m in my 70s and taking the dog for a walk in the park there won’t be three or four kids’ games and two or three men’s games for me to engage with. I suspect no one will play any more because they were put off as youngsters.

I love to watch people playing football, enjoying the comradeship, the exercise and the outdoors, winning and losing and the thrill of the game itself. I like to think that the game will give them all the things it has given me. When my generation was growing up there was hardly any football and we craved more games on TV and greater access to what it was really like. The changes that came about have now given us everything we could have wished for and more. And we’re using them to ruin it for everyone else.

• This article appeared first in When Saturday Comes

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