As anyone who’s ever watched a Premier League match knows, the most overused word in European soccer is also the hardest to define. Quality doesn’t just mean skill. It means creativity. It means emotion. Sometimes it even means beauty. It’s less effable than greatness and someone more substantial.
Lionel Messi is the GOAT. Dutch forward Dennis Bergkamp is the QOAT.
Bergkamp, who played for Arsenal in the late 1990s and early 2000s, was known for his eccentricity. He didn’t fly (thus a predictable nickname), and his heroes were architects — notably the Bauhaus chair guy Gerrit Rietveld — not athletes. In his autobiography Stillness and Speed, he described an atypical schooling in the Beautiful Game: “Coffee, conversation, and cigarettes. You’d talk about football — not tactics written on a board, but what you saw, what you felt.” Bergkamp cultivated his quality by thinking about what kinds of plays only he would make.
The best example: in the 1998 World Cup quarterfinal, a forty-yard pass from Frank de Boer dropped from the sky and Bergkamp stopped it with one foot, turned with another, and lifted it past the keeper with a third. Geometry. The Dutch announcer climaxing into the mic, shouting Bergkamp’s name in ecstasy, is a common ringtone in Amsterdam, but that name is barely known in America, where quality doesn’t seem to mean much at all.
If you’re reading this, there’s a 97.6% chance you’re American (I keep an eye on it), a 57% chance you grew up with at least one professional parent, and therefore at least a 78.5% chance (up from 60% for the general population) that you participated in the strangest sporting culture on earth: American Youth Soccer. AYS isn’t just a sport; it’s an upper middle operating system designed not to promote quality but to allow lazy (probably exhausted) parents to moralize exertion. What makes it unique — aside from a spectacular failure to produce elite talent — is that it’s a sport designed to teach kids to work, not to play.
The endless, pointless “participation-trophy” discourse gets the tension in youth sports wrong. The real tension isn’t between teaching kids to compete and building character. Because youth competition is inarguably irrelevant — history does not hinge on the results of a U10 coed Montessori derby — the real tension is between building character and developing skills. Most AYS parent coaches focus on the former not because it’s the right thing to do, but because they lack the knowledge or patience to teach skills1. The result is an athletic culture that fetishizes exertion (exertion trophy would be a more accurate term) over effectiveness. The products of this culture are admirable in a sense: We’re perpetually ready to work themselves to the bone for their teams and their coaches. But that doesn’t mean we’re good at soccer. Just that we’ve been coached to believe that the most important thing is leaving it all out there.
It isn’t.
Here’s the truth: Youth soccer — non-AYS soccer — is not a team sport. The goal for each individual player is development, and the goal for a good coach is the same. In Europe, this is treated as a given. As Arsène Wenger2, who trained Bergkamp at Arsenal, famously philosophized: “Young players need freedom of expression to develop as creative players. They should be encouraged to try skills without fear of falling.”
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[2] A wrinkle in the argument: Though being in great shape and running constantly and caring about teamwork won’t make you a great soccer player, if you’re already a great soccer player, it might make you a legend. Wenger stressed creativity for youth players, but fitness for pros. There’s an order of operations issue.
[3] A personal note: I played Olympic Development soccer as a kid and it created real problems when I went back and tried to play town soccer as well. The professional coaches I worked with encouraged entirely different behaviors than the parent coaches to the point that the parent coaches got furious when I did crazy stuff like pass backwards or push balls into open space or not hustle back when there was no need to do so. I was pretty good. One of my town teammates, who later went pro in Asia, was great. He was lambasted constantly for playing soccer rather than AYS.
[4] If you happen to be a parent and ever need guidance or encouragement, I strongly recommend going on YouTube and just watching Klopp videos. He’s like Mr. Rogers with oversized veneers and a faint German accent. It’s beautiful.
