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What could Ireland do to emulate Croatia's success
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Ferris_Bueller wrote: »
Croatia also seem to rely very little on the granny rule and the majority of their squad has come through the Croatian league, by comparison we usually have almost half a squad who are born in England or Scotland.
Only four in the Croatian squad were born overseas:
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Croatians arent going to their league by the millions either:
Take Hadjuk out of that and it looks pretty similar to LOI attendances.
Cork, Rovers, Dundalk, Derry, Bohs, Waterford all average above 2000. Only 4 teams manage that in Croatia.
It's pretty typical in these sorts of threads, posters throw out these comments that sound reasonable on the face of it, but they're actually not backed up with evidence whatsoever. "Croatian football is better than Irish because nobody goes to LOI games" - rubbish.0 -
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This was written in 2015. You can buy his full footballing curriculum online. I've had a sneak peak and I really want to buy it but it would cost me €60 with shipping.
Romeo Jozak is Technical Director of the Croatian Football Federation. Previously he was the Academy Director of Dinamo Zagreb – recently ranked third best out of all academies in Europe. Romeo oversaw the development Luka Modrić, Eduardo da Silva, Vedran Ćorluka, Niko Kranjčar and Dejan Lovren. At age 41, he has already turned down offers from Arsenal to become their academy director and the Irish FA to become their technical director. Romeo’s opinions on the game represent those of a soccer scientist with a Ph.D. education and extensive practical experience. He has become a regular and highly recommended practitioner at the NSCAA Convention.
QUESTION: A youth coach here in the U.S. recently asked you for tactical advice coaching a 4-4-2 formation for his U9 team. What do you think the youth teaching development model should look like?
Unfortunately quite a few countries are rushing in too much. I know at the age of 9 we want to compete, and maybe with a tall or fast kid at that age you want to adapt the tactics to win the game. Maybe he shouldn’t be there – in the future he will play somewhere else – but you keep him there to score goals, then you are getting tactical as opposed to focusing on technique to help players develop.
People who volunteer a few hours at the end of the day to teach players aren’t automatically good coaches and their actions will have serious consequences on the future of that player. In Europe we don’t have as many volunteers and I appreciate the volunteer movement, but qualified people should be dealing with kids, if we are talking about the higher levels. At that level you need to make sacrifices – I might not like to get up early or to be pushed that hard – but to succeed at that level it will be required. Academies should be the heart of football and the most educated people should working at them.
QUESTION: In the US we don’t mandate on a national level the size of games or a specific style of play. Is it different in Croatia?
Yes we do, however we are talking about 4 million people and I know every academy director personally. This means it is way easier for me than it would be here. I’m convinced that if someone manages to do a similar direction in the US with hours, topics, demands and so on, you will be a great soccer country because the talent that I have seen here is great at the age of 11-13. It gets less at 14, then less at 15 and so on – the older they go they become less talented here. What that means is that we haven’t done enough throughout the education process because if anything they should be looking better at the older ages.
QUESTION: Does Croatia have a certain style or brand of soccer that is different from other countries?
The culture has always prioritized football so everyone is kicking the ball and follows the game. In the modern game this isn’t enough though: in the average 90 minute game players have it for less than 2 minutes each, so they are playing for 88 minutes without it. As Spain and Germany raise the level of the game we have to catch up, but with only 4.5 million people we don’t have a huge base to do that. But we have a great base of kids and good academies, with strong leadership from the federation, which gives as an overall equilibrium that looks ok. In the last twenty years we have been around the top ten teams in the world, which is a serious achievement for our size. What makes me happier is that, yes you know about Luka Modrić and Ivan Rakitić, but you don’t know these young guys at the 15-17 year age who will be our future. I watch them and am confident that the Croatian team of the future will be even better than it is now because we started with a development model that the whole country is working together to achieve.
QUESTION: How often should academy level teams be training at the U9-10 age group in order to get to the highest levels of technical competency?
They should be training 4-5 times each week :eek: and playing a game. Generally there are specific demands and parameters that should be in place to allow coaches to sleep at night knowing that they have done everything they can to help the players develop. They can’t control everything, but they will at least have tried to do everything they can within that time.
QUESTION: How do you prioritize what they should be learning when there are so many different elements of the game?
Up until the age of 10 you should be focusing only on individual technique, with a lot of playing time but with individual technique as a base. From 10-14 they should be mastering individual technique, meaning you should be able to detect what are your deficiencies, your strengths so we can take advantage of them. At 12 you should quite seriously implement dynamic and functional technique into the process of the game – functionally applying my individual technique; how to make something happen within the game. Then slowly from 12-15 you should be looking at more complicated passing actions, slowly taking away the number of touches they can take and working on individual solution-making. Tactically you can start to implement thinking forwards and backwards with three players, moving towards group thinking.
Once they have the individual tools taken care of, together with combination plays, then you look at decision-making from 14 onwards, because that can’t be done unless you have the tools first. At this age they can go from group to team thinking in regards to tactics. From 16 you are then beginning to experience serious competition because the game until that age is only for development. From then on one of the priorities should be winning and getting points.
QUESTION: Some coaches appear to prioritize physical development through the ages – with fitness, strength and speed training. Should that be factored into the model?
Physicality only affects games if teams are equal technically and tactically. If we are a better team implementing the principles of the game, physicality will not be much of a factor. Here in the US you focus a lot on the physical demands, which can be important, but personally I would take that time and put it towards technical development.0 -
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