Concrete voorstellen om het Nederlandse voetbal vooruit te helpen #3

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Op zaterdag 25 maart 2017 11:56 schreef Solstice1 het volgende:

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thomasrijsman twitterde op vrijdag 24-03-2017 om 12:52:53 Sportjournalist @PieterZwartNL vertelt op @villamedia over zijn vaste bijdrage in @Rondo. Oa over botsing der gener... https://t.co/tUSync6AH0 reageer retweet

Vond deze ook wel typerend. Hoe zorg ik dat hij zo zichtbaar wordt als bij jou Klopkoek?

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Op maandag 27 maart 2017 12:00 schreef Cultuur058 het volgende:
Nederland weet in een aantal takken van sport heel behoorlijk mee te komen door gebruik van inovatie. denk bijvoorbeeld aan het befaamde haaienpak, de klapschaats en ook in andere sporten zijn we niet te beroerd om onze kenniseconomie te gebruiken voor sportief voordeel. Voetbal doet hier echter liever niet aan mee. We hebben een tijd gehad dat we met totaalvoetbal alle tegenstanders konden verrassen, maar dat is nu gewoon alweer ouderwets en ieder team weet hoe wij spelen nu. Daarom, tijd voor iets nieuws. Ook bij de KNVB.

Tijd voor een 5-4-1, zonder opkomende backs.

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Johan Cruyff was, to put it mildly, successful. As a player, with Ajax he won the European Cup three times and the Dutch league on eight occasions. As a coach, he won La Liga four times with Barcelona, the Cup Winners' Cup in 1989 and the European Cup in 1992. That is the definition of success. Winning matches; winning trophies.

And yet there is a deep irony in Cruyff's life. He was not motivated primarily by winning. In an interview in 2011 with Matt Dickinson, my colleague, he said that what mattered most was the way a team played. He was interested in philosophy, expression. "Winning is just one day, a reputation can last a lifetime," Cruyff said. "Winning is an important thing, but to have your own style, to have people copy you, to admire you, that is the greatest gift."

It hardly needs stating that this is an inversion of the way we typically think about football, and life. In the conventional perspective, sport is about winning and everything else is subservient to that. In much the same way, business is about profit and all else must be shoehorned into this objective. This is what you might call instrumentalism: defining the bottom-line goal and then working towards it.

But Cruyff's success hints at a psychological truth that we overlook at our peril. Few of us, whether fans or athletes, are inspired solely by the bottom line. We want to embrace a wider ideal, a deeper meaning.

Let us move beyond football for a moment and consider a study by Teresa Amabile, a professor at Harvard Business School. She recruited a number of artists and selected ten of their works that had been commissioned (ie, created for money) and ten non-commissioned works (ie, created for love of the work itself, out of a desire for self-expression). She then asked a group of influential artists and curators to rate them.

"Our results were startling," Amabile wrote. "The commissioned works were significantly less creative than the non-commissioned works, yet were not rated as different in technical quality. Moreover, the artists reported feeling significantly more constrained when doing commissioned works than non-commissioned works."

In a different study, researchers interviewed art students to see if they wanted to become artists to earn money or to express themselves in some more vital way. Twenty years later, they caught up with them to see how they were getting on as full-time artists. They found that "those artists who pursued painting and sculpture more for the pleasure of the activity itself than for extrinsic rewards have produced art that has been socially recognised as superior".

This finding is now so familiar that it has its own expression; what the author Daniel Pink calls the "paradox of creativity". We find our deepest inspiration when we are motivated by something other than winning, but that, in turn, makes us more successful. As the researchers put it: "It is those who are least motivated to pursue extrinsic rewards who eventually receive them."

When you look at the teams masterminded by Cruyff, both as a player and coach, this truth shines through. Winning was a big thing; but it wasn't the only thing. And this is why their performances were infused with such imagination and flair. He regarded the pass not as a functional aspect of the game, but as a thing of beauty. Even at 37, he was altering the dimensions of the game, hitting "30-metre passes so surprising that the TV cameras of the day sometimes missed them", as Simon Kuper put it in the Financial Times.

This is about more than football, or even art. Businesses rarely inspire their people with an emphasis on profits, or beating the competition, or ever larger bonuses. Indeed, these carrots and sticks often drain us of inspiration and obscure the meaning we seek in our jobs and lives. Truly visionary leaders never forget the bottom line, or the importance of paying a fair amount, but they inspire precisely because they articulate an ambition that transcends the profit and loss.

When Steve Jobs, of Apple, tried to lure John Sculley away from an executive role at Pepsi, for example, he did so not with a fat pay cheque. "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?" he said. Jobs may not have always been admirable in his personal dealings (nor, incidentally, was Cruyff), but he made billions precisely because he was driven by something more than money.

And that is why Cruyff's greatest gift to football was to bequeath to Barcelona an understanding of this paradox. The "more than a club" tag sometimes grates on fans, but there can be no doubt that Barcelona believe that they are about more than winning matches. This idea of a mission, a way of playing, infuses the way they think and act, both in the first team and at the academy. And this is one crucial reason why they have become so successful.

"Cruyff painted the chapel, and Barcelona coaches since merely restore or improve it," said Pep Guardiola, who played under the Dutchman and learnt from him as a coach. Joan Laporta, a former president of the club, said: "As a player he turned football into an art form. Johan came along and revolutionised everything. The modern-day Barça started with him, he is the expression of our identity. He brought us a style of football we love."

After his death, I read many tributes to Cruyff, all deeply personal. But I was struck by one similarity: they articulated the importance of the Dutch master not in terms of his success, but in terms of how he made us feel. "This was football from another planet, football as reimagined by a master choreographer assigned to strip it down, discard the rusted and outmoded components and reconstruct it in a way that was not just more aesthetically pleasing but more lethally and unanswerably efficient," Richard Williams wrote in The Guardian.

In the FT, Kuper wrote: "It was as if he was the lightbulb and Thomas Edison in one." Dickinson, reflecting on speaking to the great man under the shade of a tree in the Catalan capital, wrote: "It felt like a religious sermon from the pope of football. Winning is not everything. Beauty matters. I had marvelled at Cruyff the player, admired the coach, but what I came to love most in Cruyff was the idealist, the self-proclaimed romantic. Football has so very few of them."

And that really is the point. Van Gogh, perhaps the most creative Dutchman of all, who earned not a cent while revolutionising art, said: "For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream." It was while reaching for the stars, for something beyond conventional success, that Cruyff became the most successful individual in football history.

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Op maandag 27 maart 2017 22:46 schreef polderturk het volgende:
Misschien een vergelijking die nergens op slaat.
We fokken de beste vleesstieren ter wereld. Nederlandse melkkoeien zijn over de hele wereld beroemd voor de hoeveelheid melk die ze leveren. Onze fokkers werken goed samen met de universiteit van Wageningen. Als het voetbal in Nederland samenwerkt met universiteiten dan moeten we zeker in staat zijn weer de beste voetballers ter wereld voort te brengen.