#198 Culture as a methodology

Culture, in the language of the Aboriginal researcher Tyson Yunkaporta's people, has no direct word. Instead, they use a phrase that roughly translates as "being like our place." That is the idea this episode sits with: not culture as the backdrop to coaching, but culture as the methodology itself.

This episode grew out of a conversation with two football experts, namely Adin Osmanbašić, Assistant Manager at FC Schalke 04, and Mario Hansi, Technical Director at the Estonian Football Association, who has spent years working at the intersection of culture, identity and football development. Something Adin said in that conversation, that culture isn't the context for the methodology but the methodology itself, set off everything that follows.

In this episode: why ginga in Brazil and the quiet, individualised habits of Finnish football both come from worlds that shaped the people in them, not from training programmes. Why you can copy a club's sessions but not its culture, and why Barcelona's training plans don't produce Barcelona players. And, most importantly, why the culture is the methodology itself.

This one also connects directly to the Progressão book which is currently being translated into English — more on that soon.

🌍 More at progressao.fi 

📷 Instagram @progressaofi 

👥 LinkedIn @Project Progressão

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, folks! This is Progress Sal, we tellaan muhallistä, often misunderstood ja kompleks given football. It's a holistic, skillful, and adaptive journey to better humanity. Welkom to Process Salve. I'm your host Janis Sarajarvi, and I vote to begin this episode a little bit differently kuin usual. Not with a question or with a thesis, but with a moment with people. So, a few weeks ago I had a conversation with two top football people. One of them is Arin Osman Basic, a top football coach and educator whose work spans club development and coach education across youth and top football. Second one is Mario Hansi, a technical director in Estonian Football Association, and a football thinker who has spent years working at the intersection of culture, identity, and football development. So the three of us were talking about what actually shapes footballers. Is it training methods, is it tactical system, genetics, culture? And at some point in that conversation, Ain said something super interesting. He said: culture isn't just the context in which we coach, it is the methodology itself. So, very interesting thought. You can kind of go deep into that in many ways. What's a methodology? How do we develop really football players? And actually, this is the same thing that we have been trying to say in the Progresso book. We didn't just found the particular sentence yet. But this culture is the methodology can be that. So today I want to explore that idea. Culture as a methodology, and I want to do with the depth it deserves. I will draw on the work in our book which I wrote together with Jussippek Savolainen and it's been edited by Anti Hans Peltonen in Estonia and Finland and it's also been translated into English. If you haven't read it yet, I hope this episode is an invitation to read the book. Because what we tried to do in that book was not write about football coaching, only football coaching, we tried to write about what it means to be human in the context of football. And that, it turns out, begins and ends with culture. So let's go! Let me start with something that sounds almost a little bit like mythological but it's actually quite precise. So in our book we write about the aboriginal researcher Tyson Junkaparta who once noted that in his native language there is no word for culture. Instead there is a phrase which translates roughly as the way of being so deeply inside something that you no longer notice it. That's culture. Way of moving with your environment. It's not only the traditions that we have, not only the language that we speak, not foods or songs or whatever. Culture is everything that is around us. And it happens when the world has grown so far into you that you cannot see where you end and the world begins. And when you understand culture this way as something living, breathing, you start to understand why football is so different in different places. So not because the rules are different, rules of the game are similar in different parts of the world. They are in the rule book. Also the training. It it has become more similar because internet is you know allowing everybody to see how others train. It's because of the humans are different and especially human environment correspondence is different. They were formed by different worlds. We tell this true Brazil in our book. Why do Brazilian players move the way they move? Why is there a chinga that swaying, deceiving, elastically human quality to the body? It didn't come from a training program, it came from the streets, from Pelada, from Malandra Jain, the cultural wisdom that says you survive in this world by being more clever than the system that tries to contain you. You do not confront authority directly, you find the small gaps, the unexpected angles, the movement movements that makes the defenders think one thing while you do another. So Chinga is not a technique. Cinga is more like a philosophy expressed through the body. It's a culture as a way of moving. And then you come to say Northern Europe, Finland or Estonia, and you ask what is our football culture? What are our bodies expressing? Answer is complex, and in our book we're quite direct about that. Many of us grew up with individualized training, with repetition over connection, with learning how to control the ball alone, not how to read other people, not how to navigate the beautiful chaos of people in space together. We learn to control the ball, not the game. And why? It's not because Finnish coaches for example are bad, we have highly educated coaches, we have something else there. Our world that is forming us long winters, the cultural value of quietly being within yourself, the absence of street football, the early specialization maybe in somewhere in the current times. You go into structured clubs, all of this build particular human beings, and those human beings moved in particular ways on the pitch in Finnish ways or Estonian ways. And this is what is very interesting, and where I think Mario put his finger on something essential in our conversation as he was talking about the frustration coaches feel when they visit Barcelona or Porto or any of the great football cultures and come back with full of methods, full of ideas, full of session plans, tactic principles, periodization schedules, and then they start to implement them faithfully, carefully and wonder why they do not produce the same results. The answer is because they took the fruit without the tree. The sessions in Barcelona are not producing Barcelona players, Barcelona culture is producing Barcelona players. The sessions are just one expression of that culture, the visible tip of something, you know, enormous and invisible underneath. You cannot copy a culture, you can only grow one. And growing a culture takes time. It takes you know your presence, you have to be there a long time. It takes what we call in the book something almost artisanal, the craftsman's relationship to material, not imposing a predetermined shape, but working with the substance, responsive, patient, attuned. We use the figure of the botanist as an alternative image for the coach. So as a person who walks into a forest with genuine curiosity, who knows a great deal about plants but knows that this particular plant in this particular soil with this light that is here will grow in a way that cannot be fully predicted, who tends the conditions, who removes obstacles, who watches, you know, who is all the time there present and understanding where the world is moving and moving with the world. In this moment I want to introduce a word that might feel unusual in a football context, but wait a little bit. Cosmology. The indigenous Yonku people of Australia have a cosmology, a living understanding of the world and the human beings' place in it. This cosmology is not a document or a philosophy textbook, it lives in ceremonies, in art, in the way elders walk with young people through the land and name what they see. It's in ritual, it's in story, in the accumulated wisdom of generations moving through the same place. And what does this have to do with football? Actually everything. So every football culture has a cosmology, often unarticulated understanding of what the game is, what a good player is, what football is for in human life. And this cosmology, not the coaching manuals, not the session plans, and this cosmology is what actually shapes the development of players. So when the young Brazilian kid plays pelada on the street corner, nobody is teaching them jinga, like ek explicitly teaching. But the cosmology of the game they inhabit, the value placed on outwitting the opponent, the appreciation for the unexpected, the joy taken in the impossible is teaching them nonetheless, the culture is the curriculum. And when a Finnish or Estonian kid sits in a gymnasium in February bouncing a ball against a wall alone because there is nowhere else to play, and that too is a cosmology, but it's a different one. It's more solitary and more mechanical. What cultures do, like real football cultures, the ones that produce extraordinary players generation after generation is make certain kinds of knowledge atmospheric or cosmology. Probably you will not read about Shingo when you are a kid. You breed it, you see it in the people around you, you feel it in the way the older players receive you when you join them for the first time in the street. You inhabit it before you can articulate it. This is what it means to live inside a cosmology. And this is what we mean when we say culture is a methodology. The learning doesn't happen through the session and the curricula and the manuals. The learning happens through being immersed in a way of life that has football woven into it where the game is not a scheduled activity but a living presence. And then somebody comes and asks, so what do we do? If culture cannot be transferred, if it has to grow, what's our role as coaches, educators or leaders? And this is where the word cultivation becomes interesting. So cultivation begins with humility. It begins with looking honestly at what your current culture actually is. So we ask, what's actually here? Who are these people? Truly, you know, this quad, this community, this city. What's the actual soil? What's our history? What can grow here? So in the book we describe the bioecological model of the psychologist Uri Bronfenbrenner, the idea that the developing person sits at the center of concentric circles of influence, the family, the team, the club, the federation, the broader society, and all of this interact, all of this shape development. And the coach who understands this stops asking how do I produce better players and starts asking, What kind of world am I helping to create? And the world is the methodology, and the world can be tended. You paint the walls of the dressing room in the club's colours, you bring the history of the club into the space where players live, you make certain values atmospheric not by saying them but by enacting them consistently every day. You create what we might call, as Wittgenstein said, a form of life, a way of being together that has its own gravity, that pulls people to work particular ways of seeing, moving, deciding. And this is the artisanal work. This is the opposite of the factory model. Before I close, a few words about next week. So if culture is a soil, then the question of what grows in it follows naturally. And that takes us to a word the football world has been wrestling with for years talent. What's talent? Can we identify it or should we? So next week I want to take that question apart because I think it is one of the places where our inherited language is causing harm, especially in smaller football countries like Finland and Estonia, where every player we lose is a loss to the whole ecosystem. If today's episode was about the forest as a whole, next week's is about the trees, the soil under them, and the quiet networks underneath that decide which trees grow tall. We will talk about why I think we should retire the word talent almost entirely and reach for a richer one, and why this is not just a semantic shift but a moral one. Also, please note that Procreve book is being translated into English, and more about this later. Until next week.