David Garcia
@IJaSport • 42,020 subscribers
Helping coaches read the game better and create joyful training environments that actually improves players and teams | UEFA A Licensed Coach
Shorts
Videos
Tuchel explaining exactly what was driving me bananas watching the game yesterday.
David Garcia661,521 views • 4 months ago
This World Cup has shown how Argentinian players are just built different, and it was interesting because, in the press conferences, both managers addressed this. First, Tuchel talks about the Argentinian value of the ball and how they protect the ball at all costs, how they manage those small spaces, and how they learn this from a young age. He references culture, and this is exactly it. A child playing in a certain environment leads to that. Not every Argentinian child is on the national team, but it raises the ceiling. It creates a certain type of style and a certain type of player. Then Scaloni also references his culture. He sees them play without fear of losing. It comes from playing in an environment where you are constantly faced with the potential of losing and being able to play with that pressure, right? They don’t fight against it. They play with it. They use it. And I think this is where youth football coaches should really take note. This does not mean we should copy and paste Argentinian culture into every training environment, because culture cannot just be copied. But the values within that culture can be inculcated in every training environment. The value of the ball. The courage to receive it in small spaces. The ability to protect it under pressure. The confidence to keep playing after a mistake. The willingness to play with the possibility of losing rather than constantly trying to avoid it. Those values can become part of the environment we create every day. They can be present in the games we design, in what we praise, in what we allow players to struggle with, and in how we respond when they lose the ball. If every mistake leads to the coach stopping the session, giving the answer, or taking the pressure away, then players never learn to play with that pressure. They learn to wait for the coach. It was cool to see how two managers, at such a big stage, reference culture and the environments that kids play in when they’re young. Because the players we see on the biggest stage were not only created by tactics or coaching information. They were created by environments that taught them what to value, how to relate to the ball, and how to play when there was something to lose.
David Garcia170,524 views • 4 months ago
If your players only know what to do because you taught them A → B → C, they probably don’t understand the game as well as you think they do. Hürzeler talks here about teaching the game through principles instead of fixed routes. Because the opponent changes, the space changes, the moment changes, the answer can’t always stay the same. The whole point is that players understand enough about what matters that they can find the solution themselves. Otherwise we’re not really teaching them football. We’re teaching them choreography.
David Garcia89,947 views • 2 months ago
This is what happens when two people don’t have a clear definition of a football term. It’s two people speaking past each other, two people not having an understanding of what the word means, or an agreement of what the word means. Therefore, they’re talking about two separate things. I thought Thomas Tuchel’s interview after England’s game was a prime example of this. The interviewer asks about mentality. I assume he’s asking whether the players’ mindset was right, whether the decision making was right, whether England lacked something mentally because they made technical mistakes, didn’t play fast enough, and made the game more difficult than it needed to be. Whereas Tuchel takes the word mentality somewhere else. He takes it back to commitment, to the drive, to the non-negotiables that the England team have to have in order to compete in a tournament like this one; Making recovery run, making tackles, making blocks, fighting through adversity. That is how I perceived Tuchel’s answer. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean my definition is correct either. That’s actually the point. I perceive mentality in one way, Tuchel potentially perceives it in a slightly different way. The interviewer potentially perceives it in another way, and suddenly one word has three different meanings. This happens all the time in football. We use these vague terms without clear definitions. There isn’t a clear, specific way to speak to each other about certain things, so conversations become really difficult. Take the word intensity. One coach means sprinting, another means pressing, another means concentration, another means speed of play. They all use exactly the same word, but they’re talking about completely different behaviours. The same thing happens with confidence, aggression, composure, quality, structure, control, even positional play. Sometimes we think we’re debating football, but we’re debating definitions. Jon Mackenzie put this really well: “Sometimes I feel like you can apply Wittgenstein’s maxim to the modern tactical conversation: There are no tactical problems, only linguistic problems. Most of the tactical debates of the present seem to swirl around a lack of clarity regarding the terms involved.” And I think this especially happens between coaches and players. A coach says, “We need more intensity.” The player hears, “Run more.” The coach might actually mean press earlier, arrive faster, recover with more urgency, play forward quicker, or compete harder in the next duel. That is where vague language becomes a coaching problem. The actionable tip is simple: give vague terms actionable language. If you want more intensity, tell the player what that looks like. Press when the pass travels. Recover inside the ball. Arrive before the receiver can turn. Play the next pass forward. Sprint beyond the ball after you release it. Now the player has something they can actually see, do, and repeat.
David Garcia134,910 views • 4 months ago
Gilberto Mora hasn’t just made Mexico’s attack better, he’s changed the feeling of it. Before him, too many possessions felt safe but stuck: Receive, feel pressure, play back, recycle, go long anyway. Mora gives them a different first thought: Face forward and make the opponent uncomfortable.
David Garcia71,596 views • 4 months ago
I think I’ve finally figured out how to coach “tempo” to young players. And I don’t mean telling them to “play quicker” or “slow the game down,” because I’ve said those things for years and I’m increasingly convinced they don’t teach players very much. I’ve worked with some of these players for three years now, and tempo has probably been one of the hardest things to help them understand, when do we go forward, when do we keep the ball, when do we deliberately bait the opposition with it, and most importantly, when they finally bite, can we recognize where the advantage has appeared and change the speed of the game? Watch the first clip. CB to goalkeeper, goalkeeper to CB, into the 6, back out again, back through the goalkeeper, forward, back, across. For a long time with young players, this kind of possession can feel almost uncomfortable, because they feel like somebody has to 'make the game happen'. Somebody needs to force the forward pass, somebody needs to dribble, somebody needs to create something. What I’ve been trying to help them understand is that sometimes the ball 'makes the game for you.' Move the ball and the opposition moves, move it again and they adjust, keep probing and eventually somebody steps a little too far, somebody gets attracted toward the ball, a relationship changes somewhere else on the field, and now there is an advantage to exploit. That’s what happens here. We don’t progress because somebody finally gets impatient and forces the game forward, we progress because the circulation eventually creates a positional advantage behind them for our outside back, and once that advantage appears, the tempo changes. A few minutes later, almost the exact same idea appears again. We probe, we circulate, we make them move, our left back eventually gains the positional advantage, and this time we recognize it and immediately change the speed of the attack, he goes down the wide channel, we play across the face of goal, goal. For me, that is tempo. It isn’t playing fast. It isn’t playing slow. It’s recognizing that there are two very different moments in possession, moments where the ball needs to probe and manipulate the opposition, and moments where the opposition has finally given you something and you need to exploit it before it disappears. I think the breakthrough for me has been realizing that I can’t really teach this by constantly shouting “faster” and “be patient.” I have to repeatedly put the players into experiences where they feel both moments, the probing and the exploitation, over and over, until they begin to recognize for themselves when the game has changed. Young players often think they need to make the game. I’m trying to teach them to move the ball, watch what the opposition gives them, and let the ball make the game.
David Garcia27,681 views • 1 month ago
After the Spain and France game, I tweeted this: “Collective quality outperformed individual quality.” This was just a sense. It was a feeling after the game that I quickly put into words, but I didn’t have any evidence for it. I didn’t have anything other than the feeling that I got from watching the game. So I decided to go into FIFA’s Training Centre and look up the match reports to see if I could find anything that would lead to the conclusion I had: that Spain were collectively better than France. At a glance, the answer was no. Other than expected goals, pretty much everything was around the same: complete passes, pass completion, possession percentage and ball progressions. If you look at the line breaks, you’ll see that France were actually a little bit higher, which makes sense because France typically like to play a little bit more vertically. However, there is one statistic that does show what I felt: offering to receive. France had 329 total offers made, distributed fairly evenly throughout the field, and 114 total offers received. Spain, on the other hand, had 438 total offers made. They made 236 offers in the middle third and 275 offers inside the shape. That is where the numbers really begin to differ. As FIFA defines it, an offer to receive is an off-ball movement that shows intent to support the player on the ball, either to maintain possession or progress the ball. Spain were constantly providing their teammates, through proximity, through closeness, and through angles and lines of support, an option to continue playing. That shows that, in moments when Spain have the ball, there are constantly three, four or five players moving and providing an option to continue to maintain possession. Spain play together. The player on the ball is rarely left alone to solve the moment through their individual quality while everyone else watches. There is an option, an exit plan, some way out in case they need it. Secondly, when we think about this Spanish style, we often think about one touch, two touch, pass, pass, pass. What we often fail to realize is that these players have so much ability on the ball. Even a right back has the quality to beat a player, get out of a press and continue the attack. Playing collectively does not mean removing individual quality. Their individual quality allows the collective to continue playing. Then there are the speed-up moments. Spain can maintain possession, move France, slow the game down and continue offering support, but when the moment to go forward appears, it is time to go forward. They recognize that moment of verticality and they accelerate. Then, if the possibility disappears, they slow down again and continue playing. There is another element of Spain. Once they have moved France back into their final third, they create these structures where they basically suffocate you. Any time the ball pops out, there are players ready to defend and ready to win the next ball in order to keep it going. The structure, the organization and the roles allow them to stay pressing, keep playing together and keep having the ball. Lastly, there is this type of football that I call football from the plaza, fútbol de plaza, where you learn to attack, dribble, pass and play in tight spaces. You learn these interactions and these one-two combinations, but you don’t learn them through the repetition of patterns. You learn them through doing it for your entire childhood in these tight areas. It is play, pass and go, play and go, constantly finding the next interaction and then finding that moment of verticality. That whole sequence shows exactly why Spain are Spain. To summarize, they are constantly offering their teammates support. My initial feeling that collective quality outperformed individual quality came from watching Spain play together, always offering options to the player on the ball rather than watching the player on the ball do something with their individual quality. They offer an option, an exit plan, some way out in case it is needed. The players are also able to escape individually when the collective solution is not immediately available. They recognize the speed-up moments and, when they find themselves in moments where they can go forward, they go vertical. Then they suffocate you through the structure and organization that allow them to win the ball again and keep playing together. And that last piece—the forward pass, play and go—is the kind of thing you get a lot from 3v3, 4v4 and 2v2 games. All in all, fantastic. So much fun to watch the Spanish team and so much fun to see all of their style essentially culminate into one match and, in this case, into one goal.
David Garcia42,406 views • 3 months ago
I think one of the biggest problems in coaching right now is that we’ve created a completely false choice. Either you’re the coach who is constantly stopping the session, giving players answers and telling them exactly what to do, or you’re the coach who steps back, says “the game is the teacher,” and lets everything happen. I don’t think either of those is really useful. In the first session of How To Unlock Player Potential this week, I showed a really simple training activity, two attacking players trying to solve two consecutive 2v1 situations and get into an end zone. I had a very clear idea in my head of how I thought they would solve it, but I didn’t give them that solution, I gave them the problem, the objective and the opposition, then watched what happened. One player solved it almost exactly as I had imagined, it was basically textbook, he committed the defender, used his teammate, received again and progressed. A few seconds later another player solved the exact same problem completely differently, instead of using his teammate in the way I expected, he used the teammate’s movement to disguise his own action, faked the pass and dribbled through himself. Then another player struggled, his first solution didn’t work, but when he experienced almost the same situation again, he changed what he did and found a different answer. This is the kind of thing I want coaches to become really good at seeing. Because if I had shown them the “correct” solution before the activity started, I probably would have got cleaner repetitions, the session might even have looked more organized, but I also would have lost all of that information about what the players were actually capable of seeing, deciding and inventing for themselves. But, my job wasn’t to disappear either. The coaching comes in understanding the problem well enough to design the experience, watching how the players respond, recognizing when they genuinely need help, then giving them as much guidance as necessary without immediately taking the problem away from them. I said something during the session that probably summarizes the whole approach better than I had planned: Explicitly coach as little as possible, as much as necessary, implicitly coach as much as possible, as much as necessary. The environment can do a huge amount of coaching for you, the opposition can create the problem, the space can direct attention, the objective can give the actions purpose, and then your words become far more useful because you and the player are actually reflecting on something they have just experienced together. I use the metaphor of standing next to a river, if I’m trying to explain the river to you while you’ve never seen it, I’m going to need a lot of words, but if we’re standing beside it together, looking at the same thing, I can simply direct your attention towards something you hadn’t noticed yet. The better the experience we create, the better the reflection can become, and the more useful our coaching becomes. And underneath all of this is something even more fundamental, before I design anything, before I decide what feedback to give, before I choose an activity, I need to be able to describe the actual football problem. What are the players trying to achieve, and what is stopping them from achieving it? If I can’t answer those two questions clearly, I’m probably not ready to coach the solution yet. This is a huge part of what How To Unlock Player Potential is about, not giving coaches another collection of exercises, but helping you become better at seeing the game, designing the experience your players actually need, and knowing when to step in and when to let the football do more of the work. If that sounds like the kind of coach you’re trying to become, you can join us here:
David Garcia12,886 views • 1 month ago
I used to think possession games naturally taught players when to attack. Then I noticed the opposite: players could keep the ball, but they couldn’t recognize when the game opened up. This video explains why direction creates the “speed up moments” rondos often miss.
David Garcia17,777 views • 3 months ago
As a part of a Game Model Development course I created a few years ago, I did a case study on Liverpool's signing of Klopp, and it's brilliance. This is another perfect example of club and coach values perfectly aligned Reply me if you want me to send you the short case study
David Garcia24,065 views • 5 months ago
Too many coaches still rehearse patterns. Train the game moment instead. Try this instead: 3v2 → 2v1 → Goal • Win the 3v2 with quick passes • Break lines into the striker • Arrive to create 2v1 • Attack at full speed Stop rehearsing football. Start training it. Save it for your next session.
David Garcia27,599 views • 9 months ago
