Περίληψη

Just imagine a football coach wanting to learn HOW to best coach football players. He browses the Internet or goes to the bookstore and stumbles upon hundreds of books about management and coaching. The overlap between the different books is minimal, yet they all promise you the ‘holy grail’ of coaching. How on earth is a football coach supposed to separate relevant from irrelevant information in this jungle of flavours of the month?

HOW to coach football, depends on all kinds of external factors. Does the coach work with women or men, with adults or children, amateurs or professionals, does his team train two, three or more times a week, does he have access to a whole, half or quarter pitch to practise, etc.? It is, therefore, very difficult for outsiders to determine HOW a coach should manage a specific situation.

Many books present concepts based on the differences between people in, for example, personality and culture. In this book, Raymond Verheijen has taken not the differences but the similarities between people as the starting point. All players and coaches have to deal with the same game characteristics (WHAT) and evolutionary principles (HOW). Based on these similarities, universal coaching tools will be presented that give direction to HOW to coach football independent of subjective opinions, preferences, beliefs or experiences.

After a successful career both at club level (Manchester City, Chelsea, FC Barcelona, among other clubs) and national team level (Holland, South-Korea, Russia, among other countries) Raymond Verheijen (1971) has developed himself as one of the world-leading football philosophers who stand above all parties and can, therefore, develop football references and knowledge independent of external factors such as culture, history, personality, etc.