Total Football Club

So why did we make total football club?

How will the site develop?

What was the motivation behind it and what is it that we are trying to achieve?

• To help facilitate the easy communication between teams and players to organise friendly matches, tournaments or leagues.
• Enable the ability to easily create a pickup game with your friends and your friends, friends.
• A want to collate player stats, which encompasses a want to make a “fantasy football league” where we are the stars with our our own real stats.
• An aversion towards a sometimes perceived corporate take over of the peoples game.
• An acknowledgement that globally, where either money or bureaucracy prevents the natural propagation of grass roots football, we can overcome this and bring the peoples game back to the people.
• “total football”, because it has appeared to me that throughout the years that the game has evolved, that total football was the greatest TEAM philosophy to have ever emerged. It takes the full understanding of systems and styles of play and requires each individual player to grasp the concept. In doing so they give and receive from the team both with and without the ball. Sharing positions, responsibilities and glory in a dynamic and understanding way that no other methods of playing allows. Total football steps further than being a system of play and becomes a philosophy of play, both on the pitch and now off of it too.

I initiated a think tank (on LinkedIn) based solely for the purpose of discussing the development of grass roots football in India (something that is close to me, because of a charity run by father.) The discussion brought to light the main requirements for the propagation of grass roots football from scratch. Besides the need for a quality training system being set in place, the need for organised competition seemed paramount throughout all the age groups. Hopefully this site can help people that need the tools to run something like this.

India is an enormous market and something that a lot of football clubs and coaching companies have eyed up with the thought of a lucrative result at the end of it. This bothers me.

I myself, originally from the UK (after stints in Australia, Malaysia and various other places) have been living in Hong Kong for the last six years. I have seen large professional football clubs academies and football schools come from around the world, to this little nation within a nation, with little more than an interest of making a little profit or finding the next superstar. I hear the same happening everywhere and see this happening in India. It is nice for these world renowned and famous clubs to bring their brands here, but on the most part they are charging the upper middle classes for a chance to participate on the clubs terms. Has the passage of these great footballing names through tiny Hong Kong had a lasting effect on football in the country? The answer is a resounding, no!

When the public entertains these clubs that bring their brands to markets well outside of their own, the question that needs asking is whether the motivation is to help the local community secure a self sustaining grass roots system and unfortunately, so far, the answer to this is no.

I hope total football leagues can start to change that.