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A native of England who has resided in Canada for the last eight years, Omar Jbaihi is a soccer coach who brings an interesting viewpoint to discussions centering on the state of soccer in Canada and youth development in particular. A former player with the Preston North End FC Academy, as a coach Jbaihi holds a UEFA "B" License and works with players from many different age groups in his multiple positions as Technical Director for the Mustang Futbol Academy, Head Coach of Milltown FC and Head Coach of Men's Soccer for the University of Toronto, Mississauga.
Learn more about Omar Jbaihi and the Mustang Futbol Academy at http://www.mustangfa.com.
RedNation Online: Omar, in light of the manner in which the Canadian Men’s National Team was recently eliminated from World Cup qualifying, there has been a lot of recent discussion about long term player development here in Canada. Obviously, there are multiple variables that went into that defeat. That said, what did you make of Canada’s performance in Honduras last October?
Omar Jbaihi: Given that I’m not Canadian, from any outsider’s point of view, it was pretty shocking. It’s one thing to get beat by a technically superior team, but from an outsider’s view looking in, there was no effort, desire, passion or drive – all of the attributes that you look for when you are playing for your national team.
RNO: It’s now considered to be something of an end of an era for the Canadian National Team, with a number of the squad’s core players (Kevin McKenna, Julian de Guzman, Dwayne De Rosario, Patrice Bernier) not expected to be part of the next round of World Cup qualifying. Given what you have seen from the next generation of Canadian players, what are your thoughts on the next generation of Canadian players that are coming up and that will likely make up the core of the next World Cup qualifying teams?
Omar Jbaihi: To be honest with you, I think what is in the system today is more of the same. I know that people may not want to hear that, but I think it is going to be very hard for Canada to qualify for the 2018 World Cup. I think you are going to have to tear it down – which I hear that a lot of people are trying to do that – and really look at the U12 and U10s and academy programs. I think it is really going to be about 8-10 years before there is really fruition at the top with the national team program compared to what there is today.
RNO: That segues nicely into your newest initiative, the Mustang Football Academy. It starts off working with younger kids and goes all the way up to players who are sixteen years old. What is the vision for the Mustang Football Academy?
Omar Jbaihi: The overall vision for Mustang is centred on skill development and player education. What I have seen in my eight years in Canada is a lot of players who are very robotic and who occupy a space on the field, but who do not have an understanding why they are occupying that space. Or they are doing things on the field and not really understanding why they have been asked to do it or what the impact of them taking that action on the field will be.
What we are aiming to do is to start with them from the U6 age group. To be honest with you, with the U6 age group there really isn’t any coaching. It’s just about giving five and six year old children the freedom to play and to get comfortable with the ball. If they all want to run in a pack, so be it. They are children and they should be allowed to enjoy the game. Development will begin at the U8 age group, where it is all ball work and skill development. The players will always have a ball at their feet. As we move up through the age groups, the skill development becomes more advanced. Once the players get to the U14 age group, that’s when we start to educate them on the game and we will start do technical analysis and game breakdowns. Educating them on why they are in certain areas of the field and what impact their position on the pitch has on the game situations.
RNO: You started off by having some open house sessions and you have more scheduled. What are you looking for from players that want to become part of the Mustang Academy and what qualities are most important?
Omar Jbaihi: We’re looking for an enjoyment of the game. One person came to one of our Open House sessions and told us that their son had never played. And my response was that is perfect, because then there are no bad habits that they have picked up. It’s basically like learning to drive a car. A driving instructor usually prefers students that have never driven before and that have never received any instructions from anybody else. Then you are able to mold and instruct based on what you believe and according to your plan. So what we are basically looking for is players who enjoy the game.
For example, I recently went to a showcase tournament for a local club a couple of months ago. I was asked to go and do an evaluation of a player, so I went and I watched the tournament. This player was a U12 forward/winger. So I’m watching the game and see that the player never goes forward even though he is a winger. I spoke to him after the game and I asked him about why he didn’t attack when his team had the ball. He said that his coach told him that he should always be defending. And that there is the mentality of Canadian soccer. It is focused on eliminating mistakes. However, by focusing so much on eliminating mistakes, you are taking away the creativity from the game. And as you can see, a lot of Canadian players are very robotic and they don’t have much creativity. One or two have those skills, with Dwayne De Rosario being the most obvious example. But if you take De Ro out of the Canadian team, the whole dynamic of the team changes. Nobody else has the vision or the creative skill that he does.
So for me, it is about allowing players to focus on the attacking part of the game, allowing them to make mistakes and letting them use their imaginations. Then when they get to fourteen years of age it can become more structured. That’s when they start to become educated on the defensive side of the game.
RNO: Your background is as a player and an Academy coach in England. Talk about your background and also whether or not you will be leveraging your contacts in the United Kingdom with the Mustang Soccer Academy?
Omar Jbaihi: That’s already started. I’m leveraging my contacts in not only the UK, but also in Europe. I have contacts with people that I have played with and worked with who are now Academy coaches in England, Spain and Italy. Those relationships have already been engaged and we are already making inroads there. So the plan is not only to educate our players, but also our coaches. I think that is the biggest key to the development of soccer in Canada. The focus must be on professional coaches and on coaching as a profession and to eliminate the parent coach. The parent coach issue is a huge problem in this county. It’s not that the parent’s time is not appreciated, but when you are developing players you have to have the experience and knowledge to be able to educate, otherwise the education system fails, just like it would with any school.
As far as my background, I played at a pretty high level in England – I played for my primary school and my secondary school, I played for my county, which I would equate with the provincial level in Canada, and then I also played for the Preston North End Academy from age 12 to 15. I know a lot of people and I’m friends with people like Jonathan Woodgate and Stuart Downing. We all played for the same rep club. There is a little bit of an age difference. Jonathan was in my age bracket and we played county together.
Even in England the system is flawed. Six or seven years ago, England introduced what the CSA and OSA have now adopted with the LTPD. That comes from England, where they put it in place in 2003 or 2004. And now with their Premier League, they have now gone to an Academy Development type league, which I believe is a U18 and U21 league. As much as Canadian soccer has failed, English soccer has not been much better. There have been many failures and shortcomings and we’re not producing the same quality of players that we did in the late eighties and early nineties.
RNO: In addition to Mustang, you are also a coach with the University of Toronto. How does the CIS fit into the overall soccer development picture in Canada and do you think there are good players coming out of that system?
Omar Jbaihi: I think there are. I know a couple of players who have been for trials with TFC and didn’t make it with Toronto FC for whatever reasons. They aren’t all soccer-related. I think once you get to the CIS level you are looking at players – especially later on with the sophomores and seniors – where it should no longer be about development. That’s the problem that the Canadian National Team coach has. When you are getting players who are 23, 24 or 25, it’s no longer really about development. It is about man management, systems and x’s and o’s. You have what you have and you have to work with what you have. The development side of the game has to start at the younger age groups. When I coach with the University, I’m not coaching development. If somebody can’t hit a thirty yard pass on a dime when they are 24, the likelihood is that they are never going to be able to. And I can’t spend time coaching that because the season is so short. I can’t spare the time to work with the player one on one to show them how to shoot from 35 yards out and hit the top corner. We can practice, practice and practice, but if you are 24 or 25 years old, you should have really been taught those things when you were 16 or 17 or even younger.
The problem here is that there is no identity for the soccer or, if there is an identity, it is very much kick and chase. It’s about being big, strong and fast. Just size, strength and speed – those are what are identified at the youth level at least as key markers. The district program starts at eleven years old and you might have a child there who is undersized, but the ball never leaves his feet. And he is classed as too small. But what people don’t recognize is – and this doesn’t apply to everybody because there are some very good coaches at the youth levels – that when that boy is sixteen or seventeen, he is going to be as big, strong and fast as everybody else. So what happens is when you pick someone that is big strong and fast, when he is eighteen he is no longer bigger, stronger or faster than anyone else and then they start to look at the technical side. By then it is too late. You should have focused on the technical side when he was 11-12 years old and realized that the physical side of his game could be developed later. You have to recognize what is important at certain timeframes in a player’s development, and that when you are 11, 12 and 13, being big, strong and fast is not important.
RNO: You have touched on not letting players fall through the cracks based on a very slim classification of what will make a player successful at the youth levels. What do you think is the key to bringing out the best in young and developing players?
Omar Jbaihi: I think when they are young you have to make it enjoyable for them. They have to enjoy the game. I think for a lot of players in this country, by the time they are fourteen or fifteen, they lose the love for the game because everything is so competitive. There is a time to develop and there is a time for competitiveness. There is a marker for when competitive soccer should be identified and that should be somewhere around the 14, 15, 16 year age ranges, when they take the next step onto a collegiate career. When they are 9, 10, 11 and 12, that is a key development stage and that is when the best coaches should be coaching the players. What I have found is that a lot of the best coaches want to coach at the top levels – they want to be CIS coaches and Ontario provincial coaches – but their skills as very good coaches are not being best utilized in coaching younger players.
RNO: There is an ongoing debate on winning vs fun. It’s not even limited to the sport of soccer. Where do you stand on that debate? It doesn’t seem like something that is completely black and white.
Omar Jbaihi: There is no real standardization. The difference is that some people say competitiveness kicks in at fourteen, some say at sixteen. I believe that – and it will be a focus for the Mustang Academy – to get players ready for the competitive side of the game when they are fourteen or fifteen. That’s my personal opinion. But I can say that the U12 level is not the time for it to be competitive. The years between twelve and fourteen are key years for development because they have been educated to a degree, but they are not too old to keep taking in new information.
When you have a twenty year old player, the attitude starts to come and they have other things in their life (girlfriends, work, school, etc.). And they have been told all their lives that they are great players by their rep coaches. So they don’t believe that they can improve. But you can see flaws in their game and, if they had been identified when they were thirteen, fourteen or fifteen, there would not been flaws in their game anymore.
It’s about educating players the right way. If you tell a young player that he is wrong or shouldn’t do something, it makes him cautious and not adventurous because he doesn’t want to make mistakes. So with young players I am always very cautious to tell them “no” or “don’t do that”. I try to phrase it as “let’s try to do it this way” and tell them that they can do it their way, but that they should also try to do it my way. In my mind, I don’t agree with what they are doing, but I won’t tell them not to do something, because then they will just become cautious and try to avoid making mistakes. Soccer is a creative game and it should be about using your imagination.
Granted, we are all aware of the defensive side of the game, but the defensive side isn’t the only side of the game. Coaches in this country focus far too much on the defensive side and not enough on the attacking side. When you look at the U23 team last year when they beat the USA, it was a great result and a great defensive performance in which they were able to hit the U.S. on the counter attack. But when they came up against a team like Mexico, where they had to be able to attack, they looked like didn’t know what to do with the ball when they had it. They weren’t creative going forward.
For me unfortunately, I think the next six years is going to be more of the same. When I look at the U14 and U16 programs and the local clubs and national program teams, I don’t see it changing in time for Canada to qualify for 2018. It’s an objective to qualify, but for me the more realistic objective is 2022.
When you listen to people like Jason de Vos talking – and Jason has a great philosophy on the game and I believe that he makes a lot of sense when he speaks and has the best interests of the grassroots game at heart – it’s clear that the target should be 2022. By 2022 you will have the current U12’s coming through the system, where hopefully there will have been enough time to have been taught the new ways via the LTPD and different aspects of the game will be more of a priority than just the defensive side.
RNO: In terms of developing offensive skills and creativity, one of the most famous Canadian athletes of all time is Wayne Gretzky and there is the whole story of him developing his skills playing unstructured hockey for hours and hours on a backyard skating rink. We’ve also heard about a great player like Robin Van Persie developing his skills while playing pickup soccer on the streets of Rotterdam. Do we need more unstructured soccer and kids just being creative and competitive on their own?
Omar Jbaihi: I believe we do. I was in rep programs when I was younger, but we were also always taking jugs of water and meeting our friends at the field and we just started playing without any adult supervision. I’m from the Northeast and even in the winter we would play on icy streets all day long. In fact, with the ice on the street, it allowed you to slide tackle on the road. We used play every day in the summer and in the winter. I’d also go on my own and kick a ball against a wall, practicing to control it when it came back. That was the love of the game and because you wanted to be like players such as Mark Hughes, Paul Gascoigne and Gary Lineker. Brian Robson was my hero. You wanted to be like them and there was no reason to think that you couldn’t become like them. The dream was there and I went on to the Preston North End and I was in the professional system.
I think a lot of people in Canada take sports for granted and take the programs for granted. I think the players who will make it to the top will be the players who go home and always have the ball at their feet in their yard and just play on their own. That’s how you develop your skills. The more touches you have with the ball, the more comfortable you are with the ball and the better you will be as a player.
RNO: You have a UEFA B Coaching Certification. How important is it for kids to be training with coaches who are certified?
Omar Jbaihi: It is extremely important. It is probably the most important area that has been highlighted by certain people that I have spoken to. If you don’t have good educators, you don’t have good players. But it’s also not enough to say that have a UEFA A or a UEFA Pro certification, you have to be able to connect with players. At the youth level it is a different way of coaching. When I coach players at the University level it is completely different than the way I coach young players at the U8 and U10 levels. It’s more about being demanding with older players and more about being comforting with younger players.
You have to have a level of knowledge and experience to be a coach. I know that the OSA and SAC have formed an alliance where the OSA is going to govern SAC and allow SAC academies to come into the OSA. But the OSA is very demanding in their criteria for coaches, which is great because they are trying to bring up the level of coaching, which will in turn bring up the level of the players produced. But what a lot of SAC academies are doing is that they are going and hiring ex-professional or semi-professional players as coaches. Just because you were a good player or a better than average player, it doesn’t mean you are going to be a good coach. There are not many legendary players who have gone on to have success in coaching. It’s usually the average to below average players who become coaches because they are more studious and have to work harder. Players who are average or below average usually know they aren’t going to make it to the top as a player, so they look at their coaches, learn from their coaches and then decide that maybe they can be a coach. People like Arsene Wenger and Jose Mourinho, they were never top players, but they are two of the top coaches in the world.
So it’s not just about the coaching certification, it is about the body of work. Somebody can go and get the UEFA B and that’s great. But what else have you done? Have you coached for 5-10 years? If not, then they aren’t really the people that you want either. You want people with a proven track record, the certifications and a body of work.
RNO: One of the coaches on your stuff that comes with a very impressive pedigree is Serhiy Zayets. What does he bring to Mustang Futbol Academy?
Omar Jbaihi: He brings a lot of qualities. His English isn’t the greatest, but he brings a lot of expertise. He is an ex-pro player who is going to be getting his UEFA B license I believe early in the spring. He played for Dynamo Kyiv, which is the top club in the Ukraine. You will come across people who will say they played professionally in Russia or elsewhere, but this guy is the real deal. He was also involved with the Dynamo Kyiv Academy, so he has coached at a fairly high level. And at least five players who are now playing for the Ukraine National Team came from his Academy.
RNO: One of the big developments in Canadian soccer in recent years has been the establishment of the Canadian MLS and NASL teams and their Academy programs. Only so many players from those academies will be able to move on to those professional teams. How do organizations like Mustang need to work with the pro teams in terms of the overall picture with respect to youth player development?
Omar Jbaihi: It’s something that we are working on. We’d like to have an affiliation with one MLS team, one NASL team and one NPSL team. We don’t want to be a meat market. We want to partner with programs that we trust and people that we know to further the soccer development and education of the players. Once they are sixteen or eighteen and they graduate from Mustang Futbol Academy, we want to place them in good programs, if they are good enough. We are already in conversation with one team from each tier. I think it is important that everybody works together and that, in general, as a country that we are all pulling in the same direction. Ultimately, in the big picture it shouldn’t be how many Ontario Cups you win or how many trophies you are winning as a club, you success should be gauged on how many players that came through your system then go on to play for the Canadian National Team and that go on to have professional careers. Too few clubs have that focus. Instead, their focus is on winning now and that once the players are eighteen they aren’t their problems anymore. That seems to be the mentality of a lot of clubs. For me, every club should be focused on being feeder clubs for the national program.
RNO: Your background is in England, but I’m wondering about your thoughts on what Canada can learn from how the United States has developed and had success as a soccer nation over the last twenty years.
Omar Jbaihi: They are very driven. I have a lot of friends who coach in the United States. One of the coaches on my staff came through the U.S. youth system and played for the United States U17 level. If they are not good at something, their focus is on being the best at what they are good at. Obviously, they did not want to fall on their faces at 1994 World Cup in the United States and so they invested a lot of money into their program.
Now they have a brand new curriculum which Claudio Reyna was a part of putting together. Their curriculum is superb. When you look at their curriculum – and it can be found online – it focuses on everything that should be done to make their players better. I believe their youth systems play 4-3-3 or 4-4-2 with a diamond in the midfield. So as the players move up through the age groups, they are familiar and comfortable with the system and how it should be played.
There has to be a template for clubs to follow. And clubs probably won’t adopt it because it will be hard to change the mentality that their success is more important than the success of the country. But there has to be a standardization where we have a national system in which these are the systems we are going to be play for the next twenty years and this is the style that we are going to play. Are we going to be a long ball country? If that is what your attributes are, there is nothing wrong with being a long ball country. Not every country can be Spain. As beautiful as it is to watch Spain play, if you don’t have the players to play that system, it is like putting square pegs in round holes. You have to be aware of where your talent is and the attributes of your players. That’s what good coaches do. They see what they have and they pick a system that suits what they have. Bad coaches say this is my system and the players are going to play my system.
RNO: You come from England where the dream of every kid is to be a football player and an England International. That’s not the case here, where kids play hockey, football, baseball, basketball and soccer and often have to choose a primary sport to focus on. How do we attract our best athletes to focus on soccer?
Omar Jbaihi: I think it has already started to happen, especially because soccer is a relatively inexpensive sport to play. I know that in the last few years, soccer enrolment in Canada has been higher than it has been in a sport like hockey. I’m sure the CSA has many challenges, but I think they have to be more proactive in raising awareness of the game in Canada. It’s hard to change the focus and mentality of the country away from hockey and I don’t know if that will ever happen or if Canada will ever be a soccer country. But I do think soccer can displace baseball, basketball and American football and be the number two sport. I think when soccer becomes the number two sport in the country, it will mark a success. If you talk to a lot of people across the country, they don’t even know what the CSA is. In Ontario we do, because we are very soccer oriented, especially in the GTA. But if you go to Winnipeg or British Columbia and talk to a regular person on the street and ask them if they know what the CSA is, they will probably tell you that they think it is a shipping company or something. So I think they have to do more to raise awareness and grow the game across the country.
RNO: In addition to your involvement with Mustang Futbol Academy and the University of Toronto, you are also a Head Coach with Milltown FC., which is a club that is well known to many in the Canadian soccer community. How did you get involved with Milltown FC and are there many synergies between the three hats that you wear?
Omar Jbaihi: I think the philosophy of how the game should be played is the same across all three and that is how (Milltown FC President) Dino Rossi and I first got together, talking about our philosophy of the game and how it should be played and how it should be evolved. We first started talking on Twitter and then met face to face. I then met with Rafa Carbajal and they ultimately asked me to become the coach of Milltown. Working with Milltown has been a good experience and it has been a lot of fun. Dino is a great guy and what I call a real soccer guy. He genuinely wants the game of soccer to succeed in Ontario and Canada and he is not afraid to express his views. He is very passionate about the game and he believes that his philosophy is the right one.
There are a lot of people who you can say are soccer people and it is lip service and then there are others who are real soccer people in guys like Dino Rossi, Jason de Vos and Rafa Carbajal. They are real soccer guys who truly know and understand the game. They have a vision that won’t necessarily fix Canadian soccer, but that will certainly aid the process of improving Canadian soccer. And I think that more people need to listen to voices like that.
For me, working with Milltown has been a blast – working with high level players, winning the Peel Halton Cup and having an overall good year. There is no true affiliation between Mustang Futbol Academy and Milltown, but I’m sure at some point we may put players in the Milltown program, as well as other programs. I think it is important that you know the coaches of the clubs that you will send your players to.
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