O futebol infantil e juvenil não precisa de treinadores?

We Don't Need Soccer Moms—or Dads, or Coaches, por Lenore Skenazy (Reason):

Between the two of them, Carlo Celli and Nathan Richardson—both language professors at Bowling Green State University in Ohio—have coached youth soccer for about 30 years.

Sweet, right? Actually, they say they were doing it all wrong. The problem isn't that they were coaching improperly. It's that they were coaching, period.

All kids really need to learn the game, Richardson says now, is "a ball, a place to play and some older kids to play with them." Instead, we have delivered them into the soccer-industrial complex—a top-down, adult-run, structured, supervised system that drains all the joy out of the game and, not coincidentally, all the creative genius. Celli and Richardson submit that the reason the U.S. men's professional team was knocked out of World Cup contention so early is that we're raising "soccer robots." (...)

And that, they realized, is the key. To get good at a game, kids need to play it, and adults need to get out of the way. So they stopped interfering and saw their players improve week by week. Their new book, Shoeless Soccer: Fixing the System and Winning the World Cup (Carlo Celli), is inspired by that experience, and by Pelé, the greatest soccer player of all time, who was known as "The Shoeless One." He grew up so poor in Brazil that he played in the street without footwear or even a ball—he used a sock filled with rags.

A mim parece-me que a autora teve um bocado o complexo de, perante algumas diferenças culturais (neste caso entre os EUA e os outros países, como muitos costumam fazer com alguma tribo longínqua), assumir que a cultura do Outro é radicalmente diferente. Sim, o futebol infantil e juvenil europeu e sul-americano pode ser muito mais "de rua" e menos de equipas formais com treinadores que o futebol nos EUA (ou se calhar mesmo os outro desportos nos EUA, tirando talvez o basquetebol, que também é muito "de rua"); mas hoje em dia os grandes jogadores andaram todos em equipas formais e treinos a sério desde a adolescência.