Simon Cooper
speaker
334 appearances
5 recordings
4 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 10 Jul
Simon Cooper’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 4.
Appearances
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.
And so you have to learn it as a kind of mental discipline
And that works in countries like Holland or Germany, now Spain and France, where everyone around you understands the game.
It's probably similar for, it was probably similar for basketball in US intercities 40 years ago.
The level's really high.
Everyone knows what they should be doing.
And so you kind of laughed out of class if you don't understand those basic things.
And I saw this as a kid.
I lived in the US when I was 11.
And I realized these kids, they don't understand how to play football, played in a soccer team there.
And when I moved back to England at 16, I was a midfielder.
Showing 81–100 of 334 · page 5 of 17
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