Simon Cooper

It's not like basketball rowing where you pick the biggest kids with the biggest parents and you put top coaches on them.

football obviously physical build doesn't really signify much look at messy so the way to produce a really good football team is to get all the six-year-olds in your country playing football and then when they're 18 you find out who's good and that means that football has to be available to everyone it has to be cheap and you have to have trained coaches so that's what my children in france have the same experience france is now the leading football country in the world

And that's why Western Europe has dominated World Cups for the last 20 years, only one country on Earth.

So Western Europe's 5% of the world's population.

The whole rest of humanity has produced one team in the last 20 years that's reached the top three of World Cups, Leo Messi's Argentina.

So you need Messi to be as good as Croatia, Portugal, Holland, Belgium.

So social democracy is crucial.

I grew up, like most Dutch boys at the time, girls didn't play then, they do now, playing on a field that was kept by the local council, you know, watered and mown.

Membership was very cheap.

Our coaches all had diplomas from, you know, national coaching courses.

And that's why this tiny country was better and still is better than, you know, the US, China, Japan, and so on.

Yeah, absolutely.

It's about that.

And it's about understanding how to play football.

Johan Cruyff, who's the father of Dutch football, said football is a game you play with your head, which is exactly right, because the average player doesn't have the ball for 88 or 89 minutes of the game.

So the average player is asking himself all the time, where should I be?

That's the basic question of football.

So it's a thinking game.

It's about increasing space when your team has the ball, diminishing space when you don't.

So football is geometry.