PFF Related News

[cjeagle]

The last Philippine Football Federation (PFF) Board of Governors (BOG) meeting held at the Quest Hotel yesterday afternoon ended with the approval of P105 million for next year’s budget which is P5 million more than this year’s budget.
PFF president Mariano “Nonong” Araneta said this will fund programs such as coaches seminars, referees courses and other development programs to further sustain football in the country. The budget may increase depending on the sponsors.
The budget, however, does not yet include funding for the Center for Football Excellence (CFE), which they plan to put up in five or six qualified provincial football associations (PFAs).
The CFE, wherein the players for the national junior teams will be picked, is one of PFF’s grassroots programs.
Araneta said that the PFF grassroots programs started this year such as the Kasibulan Football Grassroots Development Program will also be continued next year.
The numbers may not say it but the PFF has achieved its goal of introducing football to the rest of the Philippines via the Kasibulan program.
PFF technical director Aris Caslib said that only 70 percent of the targeted Grassroots Course Festival (GCF) was completed this year, which produced only 48 percent of targeted number of players and 68 percent of targeted number of grassroots coaches in the country.
Caslib said this is because some of the GCF were done before the signing of the agreement between PFF and the Department of Education (DepEd), climatic conditions, the failure of the grassroots development officer to coordinate with DepEd and the absence of qualified coaches.
However, Caslib said they have already identified points for improvement for the program which is one of the talent identifications of the PFF under its 2019 program wherein the product of the PFF grassroots will be playing in the world championships.
He said they will have to work again with the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) grassroots instructors.

newsinfo.inquirer.net/307454/national-football-body-okays-p105-m-budget

[juancho]

I think Aris Caslib forgot to mention that one of the reasons why only 70% of Kasibulan program was completed because of the fact that some FA's doesn't want to coordinate with the Grassroots development officers which could mean a failure to their Grassroots Course and Festival as the funds coming from PAGCOR to PFF will pass first to the FA presidents before it will arrive to them. Liquidations and budget for travelling expenses will always be a problem for every GDO as the PFF is always late in providing these coaches their allowances and salaries. It should be noted that some FA's are not working unless the PFF has some projects for their province. Some FA's had long term presidents for many years because no one would dare to run against him if they have an election due to their political status and rich clan..

[cjeagle]

2012 Review: Football back to marquee status

By Joaquin Henson (The Philippine Star) | Updated December 30, 2012 - 12:00am

PFF president Mariano (Nonong) Araneta
MANILA, Philippines - Philippine Football Federation (PFF) president Mariano (Nonong) Araneta never imagined the renaissance of the sport to come so soon when he took over the helm of the national sports association under tumultuous circumstances two years ago. Now, football is back in the media mainstream with the Azkals triggering a revival of mass interest that had not been as enthusiastic for decades.
Araneta, a former national footballer from Iloilo, stepped into the PFF picture, undaunted by the challenge of cleaning up the books that wreaked of anomalies. About P4 million was unaccounted for and Araneta led a purge that led to the filing of cases against suspected perpetrators. Araneta was swept into power as the PFF looked for a leader who could restore its credibility. He didn't disappoint.
Honestly, I wasn't sure what I was getting into, said Araneta. My wife (Eileen) knew where my heart was and encouraged me to take on the job. She called it my calling. There were lots of problems. But I got lucky. Right after I became president, the Azkals beat Vietnam and we made it to the Suzuki Cup semifinals. That was the start of good things to come.
As a priority, Araneta put the PFF finances and administration in order. Every year, FIFA and the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) deliver $500,000 to the PFF coffers. Araneta wanted to make sure of transparency in the usage of the funds. With the PFF slowly rebuilding public confidence, Araneta went full blast in laying out a grassroots program that is the anchor of a long-term development plan. He brought in sponsors and signed a memorandum of agreement with the Department of Education to promote football at the elementary level. At the same time, football got a boost with the Azkal's progress as a regional power and the United Football League (UFL) gaining more and more fan following.
Reviewing the PFF's achievements this year, Araneta singled out three milestones. First, we got our grassroots program going with support from Pagcor, he said. We created over 120 football festivals all over the country, reaching out to 48,000 kids in the 6-12 age bracket. With the DepEd, we're introducing football, five-a-side and seven-a-side, in the elementary level and FIFA will be our partner in financing this project. Second, we were given a clean bill of health by FIFA's auditor KPMG and our own auditor SGV. Our financial system is open to scrutiny, every centavo is accounted for. We wanted to strengthen the administration side and FIFA is assisting us in this respect, too. There are IT programs we are applying with FIFA's support. Auditors went over our books for two months and gave us a clean bill. Third, we're excited about the progress of the Azkals and the UFL. We won the Peace Cup, our first victory in an international tournament in nearly 100 years, took third in the Challenge Cup, losing 2-1 to Turkmenistan after giving up two goals in the last 10 minutes and made it back to the Suzuki Cup semifinals. And the UFL is clearly gaining ground. The grandstand was packed for the championship match between the Stallions and Global the other night. We are collaborating with the UFL which is under the NCR region. The referees are from the PFF pool. We are in close communication with the UFL particularly in synchronizing the schedules of our national players.
Araneta said the FIFA and AFC support is earmarked for particular projects. For FIFA, 15 percent of the funds must be used for women's football and there is no allocation for the national team, he explained. Funds are allocated for coaching courses, referees courses, grassroots clinics and administration costs. For the AFC, the focus is youth. With support from other sponsors, we were able to generate about P100 million this year. We can't thank our sponsors enough for their support : Pagcor, Kia, Suzuki, MVP Sports Foundation, Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process under Secretary (Teresita) Deles, DepEd Secretary Br. Armin Luistro, the PSC under chairman Richie Garcia, ABS-CBN, AKTV, Air 21 and BGC. Football also owes a lot to the PFF Board and the provincial associations for working so hard to promote the sport. The Cebu Football Association, for instance, did a fantastic job in hosting our friendly against Singapore.

Next year, Araneta said he's looking forward to even more landmark accomplishments. Internationally, his goals are to qualify for the Challenge Cup finals and barge into the Southeast Asian Games semifinals where the age limit is 23. We're hosting one bracket in the Challenge Cup and we'll play Brunei, Cambodia and Turkmenistan in March, said Araneta. If we top the bracket or rank one of two of the top second placers, we'll qualify for the eight-team finals in Maldives next year. We'll hold an Independence Day match in June since FIFA has set aside June 6-12 for friendlies. If we're invited to play in the Nehru Cup in India sometime in August, we plan to accept. We'll do another Peace Cup with stronger teams in September. In October, we could do a Middle East camp to prepare for the Challenge Cup finals if we make it like we did in Bahrain and Kuwait before.

Araneta said more Fil-foreigners are applying to join the Azkals and the PFF welcomes their addition. We're building depth because we're never sure who can play given international commitments, he said. One player we're hoping to enlist is Fil-Spanish Javier Patino, a striker from FC Cordova. If he can get his Philippine passport before the Jan. 31 deadline, we could line him up for the Challenge Cup qualifiers in March.

On the national level, Araneta said a goal is to stage more under-19 competitions. We're also planning to establish football elite centers in five areas which our technical committee is now identifying based on player potentials in our talent ID program, he said. We're excited about the growth of the UFL where a lot of the Azkals now play. We realize basketball is our No. 1 sport but if football comes in a close second, we'll be very happy. Winning a major tournament will kick off more interest in football. 2012 was a good year for Philippine football and if we keep working as a team, we expect 2013 to be even better.”

www.philstar.com/sports/2012/12/30/891451/2012-review-football-back-marquee-status

Aside from these developments, there have also been significant infrastructure developments in 2012 and in 2013 including plans for a couple of regulation field artificial pitches including one to be built with FIFA funds for a potential national training center specifically for PFF use only, another to replace the current grass field at the national stadium at the Rizal Memorial Stadium to make it available year round using private funds and a third FIFA regulation artificial pitch was also just finished and will serve as the main venue for UFL matches in Manila starting in 2013. They are also awaiting a new 30000 seater stadium that is currently being built in Bulacan and scheduled to be finished by 2014. These current and potential venues will give the PFF flexibility when they bid to host future events like the 2014 Suzuki Cup.

One of the biggest improvements from the past is the financial oversight being provided by reputable accounting firms like KPMG and SGV, to ensure that funds provided to the PFF will go towards football development instead of private individuals as has been the case in the past in the Philippines, and other countries that has the marred reputation of both the PFF and FIFA.

Hopefully this will continue as the Philippines have a lot of catching up to do in terms of football development compared to other countries and it is important that they retain the confidence of their sponsors, both past, present and future to ensure that these programs will be fully funded. Vigilance will be necessary in the future though as sooner or later, it will eventually rear its ugly head again especially with all the money increasingly being directed into the sport locally including at the professional level.

[stellarboy]

Well, in this age of modern technology - the Internet, social media, mobile gadgets, CCTV, you name it, corrupt officials in football will not stand a chance; at least the Filipino masses are already aware about the sport and many, including us who regularly visit this forum, are increasingly aware of their activity, like everyone elsewhere in the world should be doing.

I am thankful enough that the Araneta administration, in terms of the "daang matuwid" (straight paths) program of the Philippine government under President Noynoy Aquino, got their heads together and cleaned up what mess was left of the previous administrations (and I specified it in plural, it was not just the immediate previous admin). I'm in good hope that in the administrations to follow, the PFF will be one of the role models of a clean, honest, and professional football governing body in a national context.

BTW, I'm a little curious about the IT programs Araneta mentioned with the FIFA. I heard they are building up a localised version of FIFA's information systems for national associations. All they need now, though, is an official website of the PFF, so everyone will be aware of the football activities happening across the country, and not just the men's team.

[cjeagle]

Don't be so naive stellarboy. Sport like anything else is a reflection of the society we live in. The Philippines like many other third world countries is rife with corruption and eventually what is status quo behavior in the society as a whole will find its way to most of its institutions including sports. That is why it is quite important that the press remain vigilant in rooting out such behavior no matter how dangerous such activities might be to their well being.

[stellarboy]

I'm not taking my naivete all-out here, cj. I'm aware of the resistance of some officials on the changes that FIFA suggests to implement. This I feel is coincidental to local politicians perhaps resisting the calls of the current Aquino administration to change the way of governance starting at barangay level. This is a painstaking process that would take years, even a generation to be set in order.

That's why the media must be aware of what's happening that may affect the state of affairs of the sport, and of the society in the future. However, with citizen journalism and social media on the rise, the public must also be involved as well.

Local elections are drawing near, so these rosy words coming out will flourish to attract the masses' sentiments. However, I see that the positives outweigh the negatives right now. But we musn't be complacent.

[xyz1000]

Reviewing the PFF’s achievements this year, Araneta singled out three milestones.
1) “First, we got our grassroots program going with support from Pagcor,” he said. “We created over 120 football festivals all over the country, reaching out to 48,000 kids in the 6-12 age bracket. With the DepEd, we’re introducing football, five-a-side and seven-a-side, in the elementary level and FIFA will be our partner in financing this project.

2) Second, we were given a clean bill of health by FIFA’s auditor KPMG and our own auditor SGV. Our financial system is open to scrutiny, every centavo is accounted for. We wanted to strengthen the administration side and FIFA is assisting us in this respect, too. There are IT programs we are applying with FIFA’s support. Auditors went over our books for two months and gave us a clean bill.

3) Third, we’re excited about the progress of the Azkals and the UFL. We won the Peace Cup, our first victory in an international tournament in nearly 100 years, took third in the Challenge Cup, losing 2-1 to Turkmenistan after giving up two goals in the last 10 minutes and made it back to the Suzuki Cup semifinals. And the UFL is clearly gaining ground. The grandstand was packed for the championship match between the Stallions and Global the other night. We are collaborating with the UFL which is under the NCR region. The referees are from the PFF pool. We are in close communication with the UFL particularly in synchronizing the schedules of our national players.”


When I read these three items, I can't help but be impressed by what PFF has done. Mr. Araneta mentions the grassroots program as the first item, and it's great that it makes it as one of the top three achievements for the year. The grassroots program is a long term project. The impact won't be felt for years to come. It's not the type of thing that normally attracts a politician or short term head of an organization. Achieving a reach to 48,000 kids is great, but it's not the sexy type of achievement that normally makes it to the front pages. I hope the grassroots continue and that the reach makes it to even more kids.

As for #2 above, again a fantastic achievement. The transparency is very good and again I hope this continues.

#1 and #2 are really what the PFF has the most direct impact with. That's what the office is expected to do and what they can achieve. #3 is like icing on the cake since their direct involvement is in creating an environment where the team, players, coach, and managers can do the best that they ever can.

It's difficult for me to think what more the PFF could have done. Sure, more advertisers, more funding would always be better, but we also have to be realistic with expectations. They attacked GMA and Clavio's racist attitude. Perhaps the investigation on sexual harassment could've done faster, but that was still resolved.

I'd like to think I'm a harsh grader, but from my viewpoint,

Grade for 2012: A- to A

[teddyandtimmysdad]

xyz : a very fair assessment I think and I'm with you on the grading. I think that CJ's cautions must really be paid attention to as well. We must all be vigilant when anomalies arise and always be ready to question what is going on. I believe that this is what has brought us this far, has been at the root of the improvements with the PFF (especially on the financial side), and as such must be continually emphasized now and in the future. There are a lot of powerful interests starting to circle around Philippine football, we must all watch carefully to ensure that the progress is not impeded but rather strengthened by the help of these fine organizations moving to assist the progress of the sport here.

[stellarboy]

Managers, coaches summit planned
Cebu Daily News
7:37 am | Monday, January 7th, 2013

THE PHILIPPINE Football Federation (PFF) will give focus to the future of all Philippine national football teams with PFF national teams committee chair Dan Palami calling a summit this month of all managers and coaches of currently existing age-group national teams as well as those interested in the position.

The summit will be in line with one of PFF’s program to come up with a sustainable program with centralized and homogenous system of play that will be implemented in all age-group levels, said Palami.

He said having a sustainable program and establishing a centralized system of coaching from the players 8 to the senior men’s and women’s team is what Philippine football is missing.

“As someone who have been with the national team, I have observed that one thing we have been missing is a basic sustainable program for the national teams, kaya nawawala, they do not go up to the next level,” Palami said.

“We want to rationalize the system wherein right from the start—players 8, the system of play that we want everybody to follow will already be instilled.”

Palami, who is also the Philippine Azkals team manager, further explained that what they at the PFF want is that from players 8, the seniors’ system of play will already be introduced and followed so they will already be familiar with how the system works.

The summit will not just focus on the basic style of coaching and system of play but will also discuss the role and accountability of managers.

newsinfo.inquirer.net/336339/managers-coaches-summit-planned

[mike fil montz]

Kudos DP... good job!.

[cjeagle]

PFF announces AFC coaching courses for 2014. for details contact Ms. Margz Laman at 09162367222, [phone] or e mail: [e-mail]

[cjeagle]

Please be informed of the final schedule of AFC Coaching Courses 2015 in the Philippines.

[FromSulu]

The Azkals have reached a ceiling, and why grassroots are the only answer
By ROY MOORE

"The formula is the same across the world; you don't need the best league to produce a good national team, but you do need to be producing your own quality talents capable of playing in the European leagues. A quality grassroots program is the foundation for everything.

In Part Two, we’ll look at the state of grassroots football in the Philippines, and see what we can learn from the J-League."


www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/417228/sports/football/analysis-the-azkals-have-reached-a-ceiling-and-why-grassroots-are-the-only-answer

[cjeagle]

Beyond the Azkals, lessons for developing grassroots football

Building grassroots, infrastructure, and facilities are all very long-term projects. That’s why it’s important to keep context in mind, as Philippine Football Federation (PFF) general secretary Ed Gastanes notes: "Football was not in the national consciousness." Indeed, before the Azkals' rise, it was virtually anonymous.

So what is the PFF doing to build grassroots? Kasibulan is the flagship project. On Day 1, they train teachers, Day 2 the teachers coach kids, Day 3 the kids play in a festival. The unpublished report for the second half of 2014 says 1,654 teachers joined the training, to coach 10,271 kids, through 44 festivals. As Gastanes says, “The idea is to give the kids a real tournament to play… in addition to the local tournaments”.

Kasibulan is a short-term project primarily about raising awareness and interest. It’s not long-term because festivals are one day events, and because it’s funded by PAGCOR, so once PAGCOR funding ends presumably so does Kasibulan.

The PFF therefore also do coaching courses. These have been very successful in raising the number of licensed coaches across the Philippines. The PFF's rationale is "to have quality players you must have quality coaches." This increase will cause a ripple effect, graduates from provinces can hold coaching courses in those provinces. "If we localise we will cut the expense, so we can do more courses," says Gastanes.

The increase in licensed coaches is tangible, useful, and somewhat long-term, because the coaches will always be licensed. Though as Atty. Ed bemoaned, many of these coaches are hired by schools.

Nowhere to play

The big edge for the schools? Facilities. These schools have a budget for sports, and typically have their own pitches. And that underlines the deeper problem with grassroots football today. In the typical barangay right now, if a kid wants to play football he can’t. Basketballers fill the local court, the streets are crowded and unsafe, and to join a team on a football pitch costs roughly P500 per session — plus kits, spikes, and other equipment. To their credit, some academies have taken in kids from poor communities, but there’s still nowhere for the typical kid to play in their own barangay.

This is also why the Kasibulan numbers don’t say everything. It may reach 10,271 kids, but that’s for one day. How many of those kids have anywhere to play tomorrow? One wonders if investing in facilities would be a better way to go.

If you built a futsal court for 100 kids — one percent of the Kasibulan’s figures — it would take 102 days for them to play as much football as every one of the 10,271 did. But a single futsal court in an area where kids want to play football can be more effective than the entire festival scene in that respect.

On facilities, though, the PFF is clear. "We don’t really have funds to be building facilities like that," says Gastanes. "The position of the PFF right now is to encourage private individuals to build mini-pitches and football pitches… as a business proposition”. He suggested the return on investment for a pitch is three years.

So if it’s such a quick return on investment, why wouldn’t the PFF jump at the chance to build their own facilities? It would create annual funds for the PFF while simultaneously developing footballers.

The answer is that all funding is tied to facilities for the Azkals.

"For the PFF, we are focused on the national team’s training center," Gastanes says, adding that the Azkals previously did "not even own its own training pitch."

The national team training center will be in San Lazaro, Carmona, Cavite, while another full size artificial pitch for the national team will be in Tacloban via FIFA’s GOAL project.

From grassroots to national

To be fair, projects like Kasibulan, the coaching courses, and the planned facilities are better than what came before.

But long term, the PFF are looking to the national league.

"You have to link [grassroots] to the national league. You cannot have sustained youth development without the national league," says Gastanes. To him, the national league is the answer to all of my questions about long-term development, and to a degree serious grassroots development is delayed until then.

While a national league would be amazing, and I certainly hope it works out, I have to respectfully disagree with the PFF here. It’s not that the national league will build grassroots, it’s that grassroots will build the national league. A national league sits at the top of the pyramid, and you can’t support the top without the foundations. A young generation of footballers creates the players and the market; they become the fans who understand football, watch the games, and buy the merchandise.

Bottom-up approaches take longer, though, and that’s why everything right now is top-down.

This is why the loss to Thailand in the 2014 Suzuki Cup is a wakeup call. It showed how the vision for Philippine football needs to really be long term, and how much work still needs to be done.

Model league

With all the talk about the national league, the Philippines can learn much from Japan's experience with the J-League. From the very start, the focus was on the youth, as Scott McIntyre documented in his series on the rise of Japanese football.

When the J-League kicked off in 1993, the groundwork had been completed, which included how clubs had to have youth teams. "Players were dispatched into schools en-masse to spread the message," wrote McIntyre, underlining the league's emphasis on the youth.

This focus is shown in the example of one particular coaching session. With the likes of Zinedine Zidane on the field, the crowd were cheering for ‘Tom-san’, Tom Byer, an American coach who helped revolutionize Japanese football.

As Matthew Hernon wrote in the Tokyo Weekender, Byer appeared regularly on the top children’s TV show in the country to do a skill’s segment, and appeared monthly in the Manga CoroCoro, which had a circulation of 1.2 million. He helped launch the football video game Inazuma Eleven, wrote plenty of articles for the media, and his Football Technics was the number one selling DVD in the country. Through focus on technical development at a young age, Byer got kids hooked on football

As the kids developed, Japan’s organization made sure they made use of every talent. "Japan is the most organised federation anywhere in the world. Such is the strata they have in place that it’s almost impossible for a good player not to get seen," wrote Byer. "It has a bit to do with the demographics in that it’s an island country, there’s 47 prefectures and all these players whether it’s Kagawa or Honda… are almost guaranteed to have been playing in the national training centers for years."

Japan recognized that the youth were the foundation for a sustainable league. The result? Japan won their first Asian Cup in 1992 as J-League preparations took hold and they qualified for their first World Cup in 1998. They’ve qualified for every World Cup since and won three of four Asian Cups leading into the 2015 tournament — where they just suffered a surprise penalty loss to United Arab Emirates in the quarterfinals. Nonetheless, Japanese talents such as Shinji Kagawa, Kaisuke Honda, and Shinji Okasaki remain some of the top players in Asia, and there’s plenty more coming through the youth ranks.

Of course, there are some things in all this that the Philippines can’t copy. The marketing budget for the Philippine national league (P-League anyone?) will be nowhere close to what Japan poured in. Likewise, there are plenty of other lessons on offer which I don't have space to discuss.

Most relevant for Philippine football, though, are two underlying points to all the success stories around the football world: community identity as the basis for clubs, and youth as the target audience.

The first, community, is shaping up well with provincial rivalries touted as the identity behind the national league. The second, youth development, is worryingly sparse. Should we choose not to make youth the target audience for the national league, its future will be in real peril before it’s even begun. — JST, GMA News

www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/425593/sports/football/analysis-beyond-the-azkals-lessons-for-developing-grassroots-football

I totally agree with Roy Moore that youth development is the key to developing a strong national team and league.

[mike fil montz]

An interesting fact about Tom Byer.

In 2009, Zinedine Zidane, the legendary soccer player, participated in a coaching clinic in Ajinomoto Stadium in Tokyo, Japan. Children and parents filled the stands. The mood was jovial. Zidane was a once-in-a-generation sort of player, a kind of mad genius remembered today as much for his ball skills as for the infamous 2006 World Cup headbutt. The parents in attendance hoped some of those skills, like his signature pirouette (not the headbutt), would rub off on their children. But as Zidane and the gathered coaches began their lessons, something strange happened. The children in the audience began to chant. They weren’t chanting “Zidane,” although people occasionally shouted for his autograph. The children chanted “Tomsan,” the nickname of a 52-year-old retired player from upstate New York who never won a Champions League title, a World Cup Golden Ball, or a FIFA World Player of the Year award: Tom Byer.

Byer played briefly in Japan in the late 1980s, before retiring to work as a youth coach. Today, many in Japan see him as a major catalyst behind the country’s rising status as a global soccer power, responsible for increasing soccer’s popularity and teaching fundamental skills to hundreds of thousands of children, including many of the nation’s most celebrated players. In 1988, the year Byer hung up his cleats, the Japanese men’s and women’s national teams weren’t even successful regionally. In 2011, the Japanese men took home the Asian Cup for a record fourth time, and the Japanese women’s national team won its first World Cup title.

Although what Byer achieved is notable, how he did it is the fascinating part. He started off running a no-name, grass-roots soccer clinic and within a decade, he’d become a fixture in Japan’s most popular children’s comic book and a character in the country’s leading morning kids’ show. Tom Byer is the Mr. Rogers of Japanese soccer. There’s nothing in America like him, and as both the Japanese and American men’s squads prepare for World Cup qualifying matches next month*, it’s worth thinking about what the U.S. program could learn from Byer’s Japanese success.

Byer’s playing career started in 1983, the worst possible time for an aspiring American pro. The North American Soccer League was on the verge of collapse and MLS was more than a decade away. Things weren’t much better in Europe, where the sport, scandalized by hooligans, had begun a kind of low ebb, punctuated by a series of stadium disasters. But Byer’s short, nomadic career brought him to Japan, a country he fell in love with.

“Back in those days, if you were a good juggler of the soccer ball, you could entertain,” he said. So after retiring, he started a traveling youth soccer clinic based as much around his ability to “catch people’s eyes” with juggling tricks as his coaching chops. He didn’t speak much Japanese, and in order to set up gigs, he cold-called English-speaking institutions around Tokyo, like U.S. military bases and international schools.

In 1989, during a clinic at a Canadian school, Byer learned that one of his students, a young boy, was the son of a Nestlé employee. Byer needed outside funding to expand his business, and about a week after the clinic, out of ideas, he decided to take a chance and call the boy’s father. He scoured the phone book, and dialed what he guessed was the right number. To his relief, the boy answered. Byer asked to speak to the boy’s father but first asked what his dad did at Nestlé. The boy said, “He’s the president.” A week later, Byer signed an agreement with Nestlé to sponsor 50 clinics in a yearlong, nationwide tour. During each clinic, Byer had to give out samples of Milo, an Ovaltine-like chocolate drink, but it was a small price to pay for his first big break.

Although he now had financial backers (Nestlé sponsored him for the next 11 years), Byer did not consolidate his coaching philosophy until 1993, when he opened his first soccer school, which has since expanded to 100 campuses with roughly 20,000 pupils nationwide. That year, Paul Mariner, the former head coach of Toronto FC, introduced Byer to a technique-based approach to youth development called the “Coerver Method.” It changed the way Byer viewed coaching.

Created by Wiel Coerver, a Dutch coach, the method is a quasi-academic system based on specific skill acquisition. Rather than putting kids on a field and having them chase the ball around—which is how most young kids practice across the United States—it teaches close ball control and situational, one-on-one moves: stopovers, feints, various ways to manipulate the ball with the sole of the foot. Tactics and passing come later, once the kids master ball control.

In 1998, Japanese broadcasters seized upon the upcoming World Cup as the perfect moment to begin promoting the 2002 tournament, which would be held in Japan for the first time ever. Executives at Tokyo TV and ShoPro, a production company, added a two-minute soccer spot to Oha Suta, the top-rated children’s morning show, and they asked Byer to host. Suddenly, instead of standing in front of a few hundred young soccer players a couple times a week, Byer was teaching his skills in a green screen studio, backed by animated stadiums and fans. From 3 million to 5 million children saw him every single day.

At the same time, executives from the affiliated Shogakukan publishing company offered him a two-page panel in KoroKoro Komikku, Japan’s biggest children’s comic book. The United States has no equal to the cultural giant that is KoroKoro. The monthly comic book has an enormous circulation—Byer puts it at about 1.2 million (for comparison, in 1977, during its heyday, Mad magazine circulated 2,132,655 copies in the entire year, in a country that’s more than double the population of Japan) and a readership in the neighborhood of 3 million Japanese preteens. The magazine is hundreds of pages long and shares storylines with Japanese video games. It played a big role in transforming Kirby and Pokémon in to global media juggernauts.

“The comic book was to promote soccer, to inform people about the technical side, it was to highlight the stars and try to inspire and motivate kids,” Byer said.

It worked.

The print and TV programs were a kind of tag team that helped ignite excitement for soccer in Japanese culture. (According to a recent survey by NHK, a Japanese toymaker, soccer is now more popular among Japanese boys than baseball). Oha Suta aired every day, right before school, perfect for motivating playground training sessions. KoroKoro, meanwhile, put soccer practice on the same level as the country’s most esteemed cartoons and superheroes.

www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2013/02/tom_byer_the_man_who_made_japanese_soccer_a_player_on_the_world_football.html


I wonder who will be our own version of "TOM" here.