Street football: the importance in the players long term development

It is a fact that football besides being a great passion is also one of the most practiced and watched sport in the world and why not one of the most popular. Such popularity is due to the fact that to play you only need one ball, of any size or material. Many children who start playing football on the streets, backyards, and open spaces in cities have a great dream of becoming professionals in the sport, which for many professors can be a great start. On “street football”, the important ex-Dutch coach Rinus Michels, who idealized and showed the world his theory of “total football”, known as “the most natural educational system that can be found”. If we analyze street football, we will conclude that its strength lies in the fact that it plays daily in a competitive way, with a preference for playing in any situation, normally doing it in small groups. Pelé considered the greatest player of all time and three times the
World Cup champion, once said that he stood out more than the others because his street had more holes. On the street, the children themselves are the athletes, coaches, and referees of the game, there are no players on the street practicing technical maneuver in isolation or in lines, they have the freedom to experiment and be creative. The street is their only coach. According to professor João Batista Freire, in his book Educação de Corpo Integral “whoever learned on the street continued to learn better than the ones in football schools/clubs. (…) ON the street everyone teaches everyone; child teaching child, the older teaching the youngest. The street has the pedagogy of freedom, creativity, challenge, and even cruelty.”
If we look at history, all the great football players started giving their first passes on the streets and on the dirt fields: Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Ronaldinho Gaúcho, Maradona and Pele have the streets in common. The advancement in studies of physical and technical training and technological development, as well as the high rates of violence and loss of social outside spaces, ended up in the reduction of these free spaces. Due to this, the street ends up losing its position as a great coach and the children come into contact with the systematized sport earlier in the football schools and training centers, starting the training process with someone telling them what to do all the time. The ludic contact in sports initiation is extremely important, free playing and learning while have fun makes players enjoy what they do and not only do it out of obligation, in addition to developing creativity, thinking, and independent decision making. The queuing methods and technical maneuver with specific objectives end up leaving the training conditioned and boring, curbing the spontaneity of future athletes, the pleasure, and the competitive character of the game so important for their development and learning. The big question we seek to answer here is: should football clubs and schools use street games in their training process, especially in the beginning? And how could this be done?
In response, Johan Cruyff's conclusion on the subject “Undoubtedly, one of the reasons for the lack of technical quality of many players, is the result of the place where these young people learned to play football. In my day, the most popular gym to discover the secrets of this sport was the street”.