Why does Brazil produce so many good soccer players?
Fred, Ronaldinho, and Nemar are among the active elite players from Brazil. Perhaps the greatest player of all time, Pele, was Brazilian. So how did Brazil manage to produce such great players? There is a formula that is often used to explain how one becomes an elite professional. The formula involves practice. Experts say that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to reach the professional elite status. For example, a doctor goes to medical school for 4 years averaging 8 hours a day, five days a week. Assuming breaks for vacation and holiday time that translates to 7,040 hours in medical school followed by a residency of 3 years minimum (another 8,640 hours). Thus, your pediatrician, internist or family doctor spends a minimum of 15,680 hours training before they are allowed to practice independently.
At Fluminese, soccer players start training young. If you take the average 5 year old, they train twice a week till they turn 12 years old then they train 3 times a week till they turn 15 when they join the residency program and train 5 days a week. All players train 40 weeks a year, on average, taking time off in the winter (July/August) and some holidays. By the time they are 12 years old they’ve trained 1,120 hours with the club. From 13-14 years of age they train 480 hours. Between ages 15-18 years, they train 5 days a week for 3 hours a day, totaling 1,800 hours. So, from the time they are young, players train for about 3,400 hours with their club. They play typically 1 game per week and then they play soccer all the time at home for fun. So, count it all up and this translates to 4,800 hours of soccer playing with friends over a 10 year period; 3,400 hours training with their club and a minimum of 600 hours of games from age 5-18 years. This all adds up to 8,800 hours of soccer. And the player who reaches the professional level, often plays more getting well over the magic 10,000 hours level that predicts excellence.
So, what about players in the United States? We often begin soccer at age 5 training 1-2 hours per week until players reach 9 years of age when we train about 3 hours a week. After the age of 11 years, at higher level clubs like Ohio Elite, players will train about 4-5 hours per week. Soccer training is from August-November and then February-June, roughly 36 weeks per year. If you do the same calculations, the average player from the United States has 1,772 of training hours with their club. Assuming that we average 10-15 games a season early on and 20-30 games per season at the older ages, this translates into another 620 hours. If you add the time that the average kid plays at home with friends (not very much) or in other indoor leagues, most United States players have 2,992 hours by the time they reach 18 years of age. In other words, Brazilians have 2.9 times more soccer experience than the best of players in the United States.
The gap is not really in games but in the training by clubs and playing soccer for fun. Soccer is a way of life in Brazil. It is an experience and part of their culture. And the development of players is designed to expose them to enough hours of soccer to help that become expert. This is one of the important things we learned on our trip to Fluminese. So if the United States wants to begin producing more elite players, it will require more time training and playing.
