S’pore kids under pressure to play football like adults: FAS technical director Sablon

The state of Singapore football has come under the microscope after a string of poor results posted by the Lions and under-23 SEA Games squad. In a wide-ranging interview with TODAY, Football Association of Singapore general secretary Winston Lee and technical director Michel Sablon were candid on what ails local football, but offer hope for its future. They say that although there are obstacles in the way, a new blueprint has been created that can lift the sport out of its current slump. There is light at the end of the tunnel but all stakeholders in the sport must get on board to make it work. This is what Mr Sablon has to say.

Question: You’ve been here slightly more than a month already? What, in the brief period of time, have you learnt about the pluses and minuses about football in Singapore and what is the way forward, especially for the development of youth football?

Answer: What has surprised me most is the way the kids are being coached. I’ve been to several events and school matches and I’ve seen kids being made to play football like adults. And they are under so much pressure to win. This cannot be the way.

Also, our top talents are already playing too many matches at such a young age. They play for their school, their club and for their national age-group team. That’s three games a week, Where is the time for them to learn how to play football?

Right now, our aim is to have as many children playing football as possible. There are 187 primary schools here, and you have 220,000 kids in them. So if we can get 5 to 10 percent of them playing, that’s 10,000 to 22,000 kids.

But it is not just about the number of children playing, but also what we teach them.

My job here is to create a new youth development plan that will develop all kids the same way, whether at grassroots levels, in schools or at the JCOEs (Junior Centre of Excellence) and FAS (Football Association of Singapore) COEs (Centre of Excellence). There are three pillars in a youth development programme: grassroots, youth development, and coach education.

My technical team and I have come up with a grassroots manual that differentiates how the various age groups should learn to play football.

So from six to seven years old, it should be about getting the kids to play fun games, to have fun with or without the football. At eight and nine, they start playing games that are a bit more technical, from one versus one, to three versus three, to develop their basic skills.

When the kids are between 10 and 13 years old, they are in what I call the “Golden Years”. That is when we teach them how to play football properly. That’s is also when they need a proper programme – I call it Progress through Elite Development (PED) – proper coaches and infrastructure. That’s when they go from 5 v 5, to 8 v 8, to 11 v 11, learn basic individual and team skills, and more importantly, to read the game.

In my opinion, two words should be banned in youth development – ‘winning’ and ‘selection’. If you only select the best, and focus only on the school team, then the rest of the kids – beyond the 6.9 percent – don’t get to play. And when you focus only on winning, the children don’t learn how to play football. The thing is, at youth level, results are not that important. What we are trying to achieve is a better football education for the players because the teams will become better when the players become better.

But to carry out the above, you need good coaches. And that is where coach education comes in.

Coaches’ education is one of the pillars of the FAS’ Strategic Plan and to me, it is the most important one. We are now in discussions with the AFC (Asian Football Confederation) because it will introduce a new coaches’ education system soon. The AFC is going to change the way coaches are trained, they are going the way of UEFA. I know this because Andy Roxburgh, the new AFC technical director is a good friend of mine and we started coaches’ education together in Europe back in 1994.

At the moment, I feel that we do not have enough coaches at grassroots level, and from what I have seen from schools and club matches, their quality of their knowledge needs to be raised. But with the workshops and courses that we will organise for them, they will improve. And we will continuously improve them.

Question: How long will it take for Singapore to develop a national set-up to rival the best in Asia and what are the key areas that must be looked into and improved?

Answer: In Belgium, it took 10 years. It should take the same time in Singapore. But the current 9-year-olds will be going into the PED programme in September or October. In two years. We should already start seeing the difference in their technical abilities by then.

However, for Singapore to succeed, we need support from the authorities like the Ministry of Education (MOE). Help us by giving us the financial support to educate the coaches, and the facilities and infrastructure to train the children. The courses, training programmes, the organizing of workshops and conferences, that’s our job and we can do it. We have the ideas. In FAS, there is a lot of cooperation in the technical department and we have the passion to carry out the ideas.

But we need support from the authorities. People – the MOE, coaches, schools and clubs - have to start asking themselves: ‘Do we want to have quality in our coaching programmes for the kids? Are we ready to change our mindset to achieve this?’

Let’s have the courage to change the current situation dramatically. If we go that way, we will be successful.