In the latest episode of the Green and Gold FC podcast, I expressed keen curiosity in an effort to understand the fuss when it came to the national curriculum. I remember football sessions as both a kid and a young adult, and nearly half the lessons were situps, pushups, sprints and burpees while we were told to "get the ball out of there" whenever the ball got anywhere near our goal. This was pretty good for getting fit, but the sample sessions in the national curriculum looked so much more fun. There were a series of small sided games where everyone gets lots of touches of the ball, and you learn skills in a fun and systematic way rather than turning us all into fitness robots that occasionally get within 10 feet of a football. I'm sure things were great for youth teams at NSL clubs, but for me in Rural Queensland, a technical focus implemented through small sided games seemed a breath of fresh air.

After a decade trying to figure out why a coaching manual for grassroots noobs created more drama, debate and even rage than American politics, I think I'm starting to get a clear picture in my head on what went wrong.



Some aspects that are levelled at the national curriculum - that it produces robots - seems to be a complaint of every fan culture in the world, and is probably just a result of modern sports. Other aspects seem to be fixable mistakes in the curriculum itself - technical development was introduced too late, goal keeping courses were and possibly still are remedial, and strength and conditioning is neglected leading to injury prone players. Early courses under emphasised defence and later courses under emphasised goal scoring.

But some aspects seem to be a result of the implementation of the national curriculum. The curriculum didn't have to be as rigid or doctrinaire, it didn't have to be as cerebral and it didn't have to be as expensive, not enough people were educated and it could have evolved more. These are the mistakes that interest me the most, because they tell me something fundamental is wrong.

Whenever I hear that there is no problem with a philosophy but a problem with the implementation, I tend to think that people in charge did not adequately take into account something about human nature. Humans are deeply fallible and society does not work very well without a carefully crafted system of incentives. The consensus approach to every major western political party apart from the tea party wing of the American GOP is the mixed economy. Government is consigned to fixing moral problems through laws, regulations and welfare spending whereas the private sector promotes innovation through competition. Markets do little to implement laws and equity as markets tend to be morally blind and ruthless making them a poor fit for the job. Similarly, governments tend to be inefficient, beaurocratic, rigid and lack innovation. The latter are precisely the sort of issues we see when people talk about the "implementation of the national curriculum" which indicates to me we have too much centralisation and not enough competition.

Make clubs in charge of coach training

It was interesting hearing from Danny Graystone about his experience at the Melbourne Victory academy. They managed to innovate their way out of some of the "fixable" problems in the curriculum and developed some of their own methodology. In fact, apparently all a league academies have in essence developed their own curriculum, each of them different to each other. I propose we introduce competition into the system, and give clubs a pathway to create and teach coaching licenses.

All of a sudden you have every club in an arms race to produce the best coaching methodology, teach in the most accessible way in order to get the most customers. This will also mean that our coaching methodology is constantly evolving as clubs have to compete to offer the best courses. Clubs will also have an incentive to cut the jargon and cut costs as they compete with each other for customers. Higher quality, less jargon, lower costs. With more coach education centres, there will be more teachers and more coaches in the system. This means that youth coaches will be cheaper and youth fees will in turn go down. Additionally, clubs have another revenue source which can be reinvested into youth.

Of course we cannot go to an extreme that ignores the role of governance, less we follow the path of a long line of politicians who spoke about the wonders of the private sector only to create just as big of a mess as what they started with. For the system I am suggesting to work, the FA needs to prevent collusion between clubs to stop price gouging. They need to avoid conflicts of interest - the NPL and A League licenses have minimum qualifications for coaches; it would be a conflict of interest for a coach to get their qualifications at the same club they will work at. They also need to provide a public option - something similar to the current set of coaching courses taught by the FA, to prevent a race to the bottom.

In my view, the current system will always have precisely the sort of "implementation problems" we currently see because these are the sort of issues that arise with too much centralisation. We see very similar problems in the education sector when governments try and introduce a top down national curriculum, and we have seen the same problems over and over again whenever the government tries to drive innovation using central planning. We are out of balance, and if we want to lead the world in both coach and youth development, balance must be restored.