Everlasting Game
Tags: Football, Womens Soccer, Girls Soccer, Womens Football, Soccer

The purpose of playing football is… To enjoy the game that you love to play, to improve upon your football skills, to be better on the pitch and also to train yourself on being disciplined on and off the pitch so that you can grow personally and professionally so that you attain a better life outside of the footballing world, because you can’t play football forever.

“You can’t enjoy football if you lose.” Why? There are always things to takeaway, even if it’s through the hardship of loss and failure… No one has ever said, “I have learnt nothing from that loss.” You can always go away and improve on your football skills, build upon your relationships with teammates, gain the camaraderie in knowing that you are in it together, bit by bit, with patience, improvement and progress will come. Recognize that winning is hard, but, take it game by game and celebrate the small wins.

Most players think upside down, they prioritize on winning the game for their team. We need to be clear about what matters. Several players don’t care about the improvement of their football skills if they don’t win, they don’t care about personal growth. They are too caught up in the illusion of the status that comes with winning. Having the status of being better than the other teams. In the industry of professional football, players will do literally anything to win a game, whether it’s for monetary reasons or cheating with the trickery of deceiving the referee, pretending to be fouled (“diving”), insulting opponents to get them off of their game. There is only so much that FIFA can do to keep the integrity of the players in their behaviors to maintain the game that we love and the individuals that our youth look up to.

But we don’t need more rules; instead, we need to think of other strategies. Prioritizing player skill development, personal growth in our pursuit of our potential in doing what we love, gaining the holistic benefits that come from it, as opposed to chasing external results. The idea is that the competition between 2 teams in a football match has an underlying purpose of improvement for all teams participating. The specifics in battling tactics of two teams, their coaches and the individual players in their ability to execute the great ideas and systems established to get the upper hand on the match are what make for healthy competition, instead of trickery and cheating to put the game in your favor.

You can only wish to win every game. However, if you and your teammates actively, with intention, improve your footballing abilities, you can play better on the pitch, and with that the results will come. The point of improvement is not to be more superior compared with other great players, but to be a better version of you compared to yesterday. When you are on a string of losses and you are feeling hopeless and uncertain as to how you can improve individually and as a team during such chaos, doubt will creep in, the fear of questioning your own skills and if you are doing things right or not. But, the main point of pushing on and training is to create some order during the chaos and knowing that it won’t stop you in your pursuit of your long-term purpose.

When mastering the fundamental skills of football, you will feel more confident, with confidence comes joy and appreciation and that, “Feel good” aspect of enjoyment in your life is something that can be visibly noticed. If you can constantly pursue your own potential, you will see your skills improve massively overtime. But there will be distractions… You can’t just go from beginner to master of Football in one day (sorry… There isn’t a secret formula.), you will face challenges and distractions along your journey that’ll stop you from working and it’s up to you to pick the right path.

The problems majority will face from reaching their potential is not because they don’t have the talent, but it’s because they fail to deal with things outside that are related to football skills which is critical thinking. They don’t have the patience to deal with the fact that the learning process to improve your skill is a long process so you need to fully commit with yourself that you will keep on practicing every day to get better. Yes, many players give up when they realize this. Many players give up even before they try it because they can imagine the worst possibility of pain they will feel every time they train to get better.

You can start to prioritize critically thinking about how you can manage your football mindset, football related well-being and life outside of football. Having balance is a key factor in making sure that you can proactively deal with the physical and mental stresses outside of the game. You don’t want to be overworking yourself, so much so that you feel frustrated and burnt out and undoubtedly begin to hate the game.

Stress arises when you have 2 things in mind at the same time. Stress you get when you want to win but your team loses. Stress will come when you want to have fun during the game but you’re being pressured to win. Stress arrives to you when you want to be a great footballer without doing many hours of trainings. Conclusion: Stress is coming when you want 2 things that are contradicting each other at the same time.

Fully committing to one desire of what you want in life without any doubt is the way to handle stress. If you choose to be a great professional player then you have to be ready for all the hardships behind it without complaints. So if you’re fed up with the tiredness from many hours of training to improve your skill, all you need to do as a great pro player is to find out how to deal with tiredness. This is because you can’t be tired during trainings but you can try to manage your stress of tiredness so you can do better in trainings.

Your aim to play football is to keep playing more games/matches to get the experience on trying new skills in any situation with different levels of opponents and other distractions. So, it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose. What matters is that you keep learning how to deal with those wins and losses while also learning other things that you can get from football to benefit your skills & personal development.

Author: Zaya Mardika

Editor: Michelle Vinita

Editor: Mitchell Hines