“Why isn’t anybody picking him up? He’s right there!”
Somewhere on a touchline this weekend, a parent will shout that. A player has lost the ball, an opponent has sneaked in behind, and the verdict arrives straight away: nobody on this team talks. If your child is a quiet football player, that sentence can land close to home. Maybe a coach has said it about your child. Maybe you’ve thought it yourself.
I’d like to suggest a different question. Not “why isn’t anybody talking?” but “how come he didn’t already know that player was there?”
What most people mean by communication
When parents and some coaches say communication, they usually mean noise. Eleven players constantly shouting instructions at each other, telling each other what to do. That’s what looks like communication from the touchline.
It isn’t what I’m after. One or two vocal players in a team is fine, and it can keep the others on their toes. But I don’t need eleven players barking orders, and I don’t think it’s essential, especially when most of the team make good decisions and can communicate in other ways.
Meaningful communication, for me, is a shared football language. Players recognise the same cues and use them without thinking.
Why a quiet football player is not a communication problem
A football language is a small set of words the whole team knows. When a player is about to press someone, he can call “squeeze”. When he’s about to play the ball back to a teammate, he calls “set”. When the team needs to reset and go again, it’s “start again”.
Notice what those words do. They prompt the player himself, and they tell his teammates what he is about to do, so they can get ready for the next action. They are short, they are used when they are needed, and they mean something. That is purposeful communication, and a quiet child can use it as well as a loud one.
We practise these in training and use them in games on a regular basis, so they become normal. And this is coaching, not silence. We teach the cues, we teach the habit of searching, and we step in when a player needs help. What we don’t need is a running commentary on every touch.
The under 14s who lost every game
I’ll tell you about a JPL team I coached at under 14s. They had lost every game for a good couple of years before I joined. They weren’t a vocal group during matches. Together, as young boys, they were noisy enough. But in games, maybe one or two of them were shouters, and most of the others were quiet.
As the season went on they got used to the methods, including the football language. That became the way they communicated with each other. About six games into the season they got their first draw, against a side from the top half of the table. That was the game where it all seemed to click.
For a team that had lost every game for a couple of years, that draw was a big deal. They had become a much more unified unit. They understood each other and what each other was about to do, which prepared them for their next action. And that is what improved their decision making.
Nobody got louder. They got clearer.
“How come he didn’t know he was there?”
Back to that touchline moment. When parents say “why isn’t anybody picking him up?”, my answer is always the same. How come he never knew the opponent was there himself?
If a player searches before the ball arrives, he already knows who is around him. That is why I encourage players to scan, or as I say it to them, to search. Then in future they can make those decisions for themselves, without waiting for a teammate to tell them.
Researchers have looked at this in the top flight. A study of 27 players from one Premier League club across 21 matches found that the more a player scanned, the more likely he was to complete a pass, although the effect was small. It’s a good reminder that looking is part of playing. You can read the Jordet study on scanning in Premier League footballers yourself.
I’d rather my players learn to see it than be told about it. A shout solves one moment. A habit of searching solves the next hundred.
The quietest boy was the standard setter
I can think of one lad on that team who was very quiet. He also had the most tenacity of any of them. When he was on the pitch he was everywhere, flying into tackles, full of effort and enthusiasm.
He never said much, but his actions communicated plenty. To the others it said, this is the standard, can you match it? It got them hyped up to show more. A quiet child can become one of the most influential players in a team, just through what he does.
Think about professional football too. There are plenty of players who aren’t vocal and are still very effective. You don’t need to be a vocal player to be an effective one.
What to look for in your quiet football player
Watch his head, not his mouth. Is he looking around before the ball arrives? Does he use the team’s cues when they matter? Does his effort lift the players around him? Those are the things that show how he communicates.
If you aren’t sure what cues his team uses, ask his coach. If the answer is that there aren’t any, that tells you something too.
And if your worry is about minutes on the pitch rather than noise, I wrote about that recently in my post on a child who isn’t getting game time.
What words does your child’s team use on the pitch? Tell me in the comments. I’d love to hear them.