The era of Li Xiaopeng of the national football team officially arrived after the release of the first training list. Compared with the 52-man player roster that has not been seen for a long time, the huge management team of 41 people is indeed more remarkable.
There is no doubt that the new "assistant coaches" in this huge management team have had a successful career as a player and are among the best football players in the country in the past 10-20 years. But the question is, are they the best coaches?
The first question worth asking is what qualifications these coaches have in the field of coaching.
There is no controversy about the two foreign teachers. Jose Pep was Li Xiaopeng's assistant coach during his time in Shandong and holds a UEFA professional certificate – although the translation of the name Jose Pep is too strange, because Pep is Jose's nickname, the coach's big name is actually Jose Mu oz, which is the second from the right picture below.
Another foreign teacher is Shenhua's physical coach Irving Wilk, who holds an A-class certificate from the Brazilian Football Association, and before Shenhua, he has also worked as a physical coach in a series of Asian teams such as Dalian Renren (Dalian Yifang), Pohang Iron and Al Hilal, and his experience is very rich.
In the assistant coach column, the rest of the coaches have some meaning.
Chen Yang, Yu Genwei and Li Jinyu, who are at the top of the list, are all head coaches of this season's Chinese Super League teams, which means that although the length of time they have led the team in the first line is very different, they all hold AFC professional certificates.
After Li Jinyu, Gao Yao also holds an AFC professional certificate, having previously coached for more than 2 seasons in the Chinese League One Team Kunshan. Although Zheng Zhi has become the "executive head coach" of the Guangzhou team, he actually only has a B-level certificate, so he ranks in the lower position.
Behind Gao Yao, there are some differences. Zhao Junzhe should have obtained the AFC professional coach certificate earlier than Gao Yao, but he has no first-line coaching experience except for the Liaoning team that has been firefighting, and even will not sit on the team's bench until recent years. It can be said that for a long time, Zhao Junzhe has played a management role, which is why he encountered such a big resistance and controversy when he competed for the head coach of the Chinese women's national football team last year.
The situation is similar between Sun Jihai and Sun Xiang.
Sun Jihai and Zhao Junzhe should be classmates of the same professional coaching training class, but they have also been engaged in more management positions since then, and have served as vice presidents of the Xinjiang Football Association for a long time. Except for a short experience of leading the team with Shao Jiayi in the U20 National Youth League, there is no first-line coaching experience. However, at the end of last year, he was hired as the "honorary head coach" of the Chongqing University football team, and he had to train 5 times a year...
Sun Xiang has not been able to find a name in the professional coaching admission notice in recent years, and public information shows that the last coach certificate level he obtained should be A-level, and it was obtained in 2009, and it may have expired. After retiring in recent years, Sun Xiang is also engaged in club management, and it is rare to sit on the team bench and is not the identity of the coaching staff.
The rest are not so many questions: Ou Chuliang, who has followed the national team for many years, and Wang Liang and Li Leilei, who have followed Li Xiaopeng for many years, are old acquaintances who have been coaching or serving as assistant coaches in the front line for a long time after retiring.
Many people say that the tolerance of Chinese football for domestic coaches is too low, and there have been few domestic coaches in both national teams and professional leagues for a long time.
That's actually true. But if you look at it from another point of view, in the current Chinese football world, domestic "professional" coaches are really too scarce.
Two or three years ago, I wrote a combing article about what the generation of internationals who made it to the World Cup in 2002 are doing today. At that time, there were still 6 people who could be reluctantly assigned to the front-line coaching, and now after Sun Jihai transferred to the management post and Fan Zhiyi returned to the Genbao base, the remaining celebrities who coached in the front-line have become less and less.
This question actually needs to be viewed from two perspectives.
On the one hand, the fate of retired players in domestic football has always been a very interesting topic.
For most of the domestic first-class players who are about to retire, they basically have an A-level or professional-level coaching certificate, but they are not all in the coaching position. In Chinese football, which is not professional enough, the demarcation between coaching posts and management posts is not so clear.
As a result, some coaches with professional coaching certificates, after spending some time in the management posts of clubs or national teams at all levels, seem to have first-line coaching experience. Zhao Junzhe is like this, and so is Sun Xiang. On the contrary, Sun Xiang's older brother Sun Ji, who is also the holder of a professional-level certificate, is now deeply cultivating youth training, popularizing and improving it.
So it comes down to another aspect: what is the gold content of professional coaches?
Xu Liang has complained that the AFC professional coach training class is not very transparent about the admission of students. Especially under the influence of the current epidemic, the number of classes has decreased, and it is entirely decided within a committee which students who have submitted application materials will be admitted.
And how seriously do the participants in the training course study? This is also a question worth exploring. Based on my observation and understanding of domestic retired players as coaches in recent years, many people in this part of the domestic group have a clear tendency, that is, their willingness to learn is not high. Or to put it another way, they rely on their status as domestic first-line professional players, and they tacitly accept that they are also domestic first-class among professional coaches.
They are indeed first-class footballers in the country, so such confidence is understandable. But at the same time, they have become accustomed to mechanized training within the professional system, resulting in most of the athletes of that generation no longer have the so-called normal learning ability and willingness. Coaching courses for them, just to get a qualification.
Therefore, on the contrary, some professional players who retired earlier for various reasons, and even some players who did not have too rich professional experience, received more praise in coaching posts.
Of course, there is only one problem they encounter, that is, the domestic sports circle is always a circle game, and they quit too early as professional players. Going back to the first aspect of the past, the reason why retired "celebrities" can switch management and coaching roles so freely is precisely because the role is irrelevant to them, as long as they continue to stay in this circle is the most important significance.
What many people did not expect is that the so-called professionals do professional things, and these retired players play football professionally, but management is not, and even many people are not professional in coaching.
Back to the "luxurious" assistant coaching staff of this national team.
In fact, from a practical point of view, such a team is not a luxury. Except for the top few coaches who have led the first-line teams in the Chinese Super League, most of them have almost no first-line team leadership, or even experience in the coaching staff. What many fans do not understand is that in fact, there is a special role in the national Olympic and below multi-level national teams, called trainers. Personal judgment, there may be many "assistant coaches" in this national team, in fact, just a "trainer" role.
And if they're not trainers, real assistant coaches, the problem is even bigger.
We can't know how much power a celebrity like Zhao Junzhe, who is loved by some leaders, has the right to speak in the coaching staff of this national team. Especially in the case of a slightly weaker head coach like Li Xiaopeng, if too many people have the power to even "make suggestions", it is not necessarily a good thing.
What's more, Chen Yang and Yu Genwei are all head coaches with first-line coaching experience and may have played with Li Xiaopeng many times in the past one or two years.
A good coaching staff, in addition to the head coach, the rest of the role space is limited. In addition to goalkeeper coaches and physical coaches, there is not much need for assistant coaches to assist the head coach in the design and tactical design of training sessions. No matter how many players attend the training session, they should participate in the training session as a whole. But judging from the size of today's assistant coaching team, it seems that the 52 selected players are divided into several groups to carry out training.
In the final analysis, the assistant coaching team of this national football team is a team that does not conform to the objective laws of football. Of course, in Chinese football, the model of domestic retired players repeatedly jumping in coaching posts and management posts is also inconsistent with the objective laws of football...
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