Courtesy: FAI Futsal Portal


An extract from The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle (2009)

Wednesday, 17 June 2009

“No time plus no space equals better skills. Futebol de Salao (Futsal) is our national laboratory of improvisation.” Brazilian Football Coach.

Trying to describe the collective talent of Brazilian soccer players is like trying to describe the law of gravity. You can measure it—the five World Cup victories, the nine hundred or so young talents signed each year by professional European clubs. Or you can name it—the procession of transcendent stars like Pelé, Zico, Socrates, Romário, Ronaldo, Juninho, Robinho, Ronaldinho, Kaká, and others who have deservedly worn the crown of “world’s best player.” But in the end you can’t capture the power of Brazilian talent in numbers andnames. It has to be felt.

Every day soccer fans around the world witness the quintessential scene: a group of enemy players surround a Brazilian, leaving him no options, no space, no hope. Then there’s a dancelike blur of motion—a feint, a flick, a burst of speed—and suddenly the Brazilian player is in the clear, moving away from his now-tangled opponents with the casual aplomb of a person stepping off a crowded bus.
Each day, Brazil accomplishes something extremely difficult and unlikely: in a game at which the entire world is feverishly competing, it continues to produce an unusually high percentage of the most skilled players. The conventional way to explain this kind of concentrated talent is to attribute it to a combination of genes and environment a.k.a. nature and nurture. In this way of thinking, Brazil is great because it possesses a unique confluence of factors: a friendly climate, a deep passion for soccer, and a genetically diverse population of 190 million, 40 percent of whom are desperately poor and long to escape through “the beautiful game.” Add up all the factors and—voilà!—you have the ideal factory for soccer greatness.
But there ’s a slight problem with this explanation: Brazil wasn’t always a great producer of soccer players. In the 1940sand 1950s, with its trifecta of climate, passion, and poverty already firmly in place, the ideal factory produced unspectacular results, never winning a World Cup, failing to defeat then-world-power Hungary in four tries, showing few of the dazzling improvisational skills for which it would later become known. It wasn’t until 1958 that the Brazil the world now recognizes truly arrived, in the form of a brilliant team featuring seventeen-year-old Pelé, at the World Cup in Sweden.* If sometime during the next decade Brazil should shockingly lose its lofty place in the sport (as Hungary so shockingly did), then the Brazil-is-unique argument leaves us with no conceivable response except to shrug and celebrate the new champion, which undoubtedly will also possess a set of characteristics all its own.
So how does Brazil produce so many great players? The surprising answer is that Brazil produces great players because since the 1950s Brazilian players have trained in a particular way, with a particular tool that improves ball-handling skill faster than anywhere else in the world. They have found a way to increase their learning* Soccer historians trace the moment to the opening three minutes of Brazil’s 1958 World Cup semifinal victory against the heavily favored Soviet Union. The Soviets, who were regarded as the pinnacle of modern technique, were overrun by the ballhandling skills of Pelé, Garrincha, and Vavá. As commentator Luis Mendes said, “The scientific systems of the Soviet Union died a death right there. They put the first man in space, but they couldn’t mark Garrincha.”

BRAZIL’S SECRET WEAPON
Like many sports fans around the world, soccer coach Simon Clifford was fascinated by the supernatural skills of Brazilian soccer players. Unlike most fans, however, he decided to go to Brazil to see if he could find out how they developed those. This was an unusually ambitious initiative on Clifford’s part, considering that he had gained all his coaching experience at a Catholic elementary school in the soccer non-hotbed of Leeds, England. ...
In the summer of 1997, when he was twenty-six, Clifford borrowed $8,000 from his teachers’ union and set out for Brazil toting a backpack, a video camera, and a notebook full of phone numbers he ’d cajoled from a Brazilian player he ’d met (Juninho). Once there, Clifford spent most of his time exploring the thronging expanse of São Paolo, sleeping in roach-infested dormitories by night, scribbling notes by day.
He saw many things he ’d expected to find: the passion, the tradition, the highly organized training centers, the long practice sessions. (Teenage players at Brazilian soccer academies log twenty hours per week, compared with five hours per week for their British counterparts.) He saw the towering poverty of the favelas, and the desperation in the players’ eyes.
But Clifford also saw something he didn’t expect: a strange game. It resembled soccer, if soccer were played inside a phone booth and dosed with amphetamines. The ball was less than half the size but weighed twice as much; it hardly bounced at all. The players trained, not on a vast expanse of grass field, but on basketball-court-size patches of concrete, wooden floor, and dirt. Each side, instead of having eleven players, had five. In its rhythm and blinding speed, the game resembled basketball or hockey more than soccer: it consisted of anintricate series of quick, controlled passes and nonstop end to-end action. The game was called Futebol de Salão,

“It was clear to me that this was where Brazilian skills were born,” Clifford said. “It was like finding the missing link.”
Futebol de Salao had been invented in 1930 as a rainy-day training option by a Uruguayan coach. Brazilians quickly seized upon it and codified the first rules in 1936. Since then the game had spread like a virus, especially in Brazil’s crowded cities, and it quickly came to occupy a unique place in Brazilian sporting culture. Brazil became uniquely obsessed with it, in part because the game could be played anywhere (no small advantage in a nation where grass fields are rare). Futebol de Salao grew to command the passions of Brazilian kids in the same way that pickup basketball commands the passions of inner-city American kids.
As Alex Bellos, author of Futebol: Soccer, the Brazilian Way, wrote, Futebol de Salao “is regarded as the incubator of the Brazilian soul.” The incubation is reflected in players’ biographies. From Pelé onward virtually every great Brazilian player played Futebol de Salao as a kid, first in the neighborhood and later at Brazil’s soccer academies, where from ages seven to around twelve they typically devoted three days a week to Futebol de Salao. A top Brazilian player spends thousands of hours at the game. The great Juninho, for instance, said he never kicked a full-size ball on grass until he was fourteen. Until he was twelve, Robinho spent half his training time playing Futebol de Salao.*
Like a vintner identifying a lovely strain of grape, a cognoscente like Prof. Emilio Miranda, professor of soccer at the University of São Paolo, can identify the Futebol de Salao wiring within famous Brazilian soccer tricks. That elastico move that Ronaldinho popularized, drawing the ball in and out like a yoyo? It originated in Futebol de Salao. The toe-poke goal that Ronaldo scored in the 2002 World Cup? Again, Futebol de Salao. Moves like the d’espero, el barret, and vaselina? All came from Futebol de Salao. When I told Miranda that I’d imagined Brazilians built skills by playing soccer on the beach, he laughed. “Journalists fly here, go to the beach, they take pictures and write stories. But great players don’t come from the beach. They come from the Futebol de Salao court.”
One reason lies in the math. Futebol de Salao players touch the ball far more often than soccer players—six times more often per minute, according to a Liverpool University study. The smaller, heavier ball demands and rewards more precise handling—as coaches point out, you can’t get out of a tight spot simply by booting the ball downfield. Sharp passing is paramount: the game is all about looking for angles and spaces and working quick combinations with other players. Ball control and vision are crucial, so that when Futebol de Salao players play the full-size game, they feel as if they have acres of free space in which to operate. When I watched professional outdoor games in São Paulo sitting with Prof. Miranda, he would point out players who had played Futebol de Salao: he could tell by the way they held the ball. They didn’t care how close their opponent came. As Prof. Miranda summed up, “No time plus no space equals better skills. Futebol de Salao is our national laboratory of improvisation.”

In other words, Brazilian soccer is different from the rest of the world’s because Brazil employs the sporting equivalent of a Link trainer. Futebol de Salao compresses soccer’s essential skills into a small box; it places players inside the deep practice zone, making and correcting errors, constantly generating solutions to vivid problems. Players touching the ball 600 percent more often learn far faster, without realizing it, than they would in the vast, bouncy expanse of the outdoor game. To be clear: Futebol de Salao is not the only reason Brazilian soccer is great. The other factors so often cited—climate, passion, and poverty—really do matter. But Futebol de Salao is the lever through which those other factors transfer their force.







Posted by Luca Ranocchiari --> luca.ranocchiari@futsalplanet.com