My first proper world cup, where I followed every game, and even collected an album with all the players, was 20 years ago, with Korea and Japan in 2002.

My dad woke me up to watch Brazil against England, they were playing in the quarter-finals, and it started with Owen, my favorite player at the time scoring an amazing goal. I’ll never forget that match. It was at 3:00 AM, and England, the team I was rooting for, ended up losing spectacularly, thank you, Ronaldinho… He then went to FC Barcelona to delight us all with his technical ability and creativity, and despite him playing for the biggest rival of the team I like, I got to enjoy it too.

The world cup is beautiful, outside of the politics of it all, for all the small and large dramatic moments it presents within the month it’s played. 

There are 32 countries trying to win the tournament, after a long, and often dramatic qualifying process. A fact that I always like to remind myself, is that the winner needs to win 7 matches at the most, Spain won in 2010 by winning only 6 games. It sounds easy, but it’s not, there’s no room for mistakes, as one little mistake could take you out of the race even if you’re the favorite to win it.

Perfection is required. Drama is ever present, even in matches where countries without a big soccer tradition or famous players face each other, you’ll find beautiful moments of sadness, fear, anger, surprise, disgust, and happiness.

If you like to experience raw human emotion, but hate soccer, or don’t even understand it, I’d encourage you to watch the world cup, just pick a side, on any random game, and see how you react to near goals or goals against, even to smaller things, like losing a ball, or the referee not seeing a clear foul. 

Our beautiful game of soccer has remained almost unchanged for many years when it comes to rules. The offside rule is the only one that’s not intuitive to understand for those who don’t watch or follow the game regularly. 

I’m not going to try to explain it to you, but instead, I’d encourage you to google it, as it’s the most important defensive concept teams can exploit in their favor, but I guarantee you that your understanding or lack of it will not affect your enjoyment of the game, at times you’ll even feel frustrated because a goal was called off after an offside, and that’s part of the beauty of it all.

I look forward to continuing watching this world cup, every game I’ve watched has been exciting in its own little way. The drama in the world cup is unmatched in sports in my opinion, regardless of the quality of play that a match might present.

On the weekends or weekdays that I watch soccer I’m looking for quality of play, richness in tactics, and technical prowess, none of that matters in the world cup, it’s all about the drama of winning and losing, regardless of how they do it. For that, it’s the best introduction to the beautiful game of soccer, so please give yourself that opportunity.

I’ve had the opportunity to coach and manage different soccer teams.

A couple of teams were just kids, where I was mostly a coach. I also had a couple of amateur adult soccer teams, where I played the role of both coach and manager.

I like to make the distinction between coach and manager because I think it often gets confused.

A coach is a person that helps you perform better, they might say things like “run that way after you make that pass”. A manager is someone that provides a plan of action, they’ll plan the logistics of the game, they’ll have a contingency plan when a starting player gets injured, and they’ll try to anticipate as much as humanly possible.

They’re similar but not the same. With kids, I didn’t care about the results of competitive matches, whether we won or lost it had no impact, what I did care about was cultivating a great team culture, I focused on relationships and raw technical skills of the sport, rather than results as a team.

With adults it was the opposite, we were an amateur team, however, we cared about results, which without coaching and nurturing the team culture is impossible anyway.

As a manager, I planned every single training session. I planned the matches and the pre-matches presentation. As a coach, I did my best to help my players improve their fitness, understanding of the game, and improve their movements and skills, though I focused less on skills, not because you can’t improve that, because the highest impact on the team at the time was to make sure that we all followed our game plan, were in top fitness capacity and that we behaved as a coordinated team on the field. Time is finite after all.

Game plans are a dime a dozen. There are many ways in which you can win. You can win being defensive, playing the counter-attack, or you can win playing an attacking style. There’s no shortage of examples of teams winning one way or another.

What matters is two things: above all, the talents of your team, and secondarily the ability of the coach to convince the players to follow the game plan. If your team has great defensive players, playing a great defensive game, makes sense. Optimizing for what you have is the most rational way to approach the “how to play” problem.

Similarly, with training, there are many methodologies, each of them have their merits, there doesn’t exist one that’s the end-be-all of training methods, however, whichever helps me and my players achieve our goals is the best one, and that might change depending on the context.

A few key takeaways:

Show and tell

When explaining things to players, visually showing them, rather than using words was way more effective.

Ruts are bound to happen

In my first season with our adult soccer team, I only lost three games out of 15 or so that we played. It hurt when it happened and almost broke the team, we were used to winning, after that we fell into a rut, and winning became hard.

Winning is important for morale, but managing losses is key for team-building. Navigating the down moments together as a team, and using that as fuel for motivation is super important.

Trust is earned not given

As a coach and manager, you need to earn the trust of your players because if they don’t trust you, they won’t put into practice your game plan, and they’ll not play like a team. Instead, it will be like a dysfunctional family. The tricky part is that you don’t need to convince one or two, you need to convince the whole team, even people that might not be on the team but play supporting roles, like the team delegate. That’s why professional coaches usually bring their full-on team when they go to other clubs.

Have fun

This period of my life was one of my happiest. I had a lot of fun, and neither of these activities had anything to do with money, as I did it for free. The day-to-day is something that I miss to this day. Players also should have fun in the field, many at times were anxious and angry, however, it’s really hard for players to be in a state of flow and playing their best if they feel as if they have to win, the added pressure works well for some, but rarely for the majority. Going to the field with the idea of having fun will yield more productive results.

The score takes care of itself

The book with this title was highly influential in the way I prepared my sessions and competitive matches. I did my best to always communicate to my players what I wanted of them in terms of tactics in the field, but above all, I asked them to be happy and have fun in the field, which is counter-intuitive but super important. The best players in the world always look like they’re having fun: Cristiano Ronaldo, Messi, Neymar, etc.

Very often something off-script will happen

As a coach and manager, I wanted to control as much as possible but in reality, the nature of the game doesn’t allow for that. Planning for eventualities is hard, however, understanding that off-script situations during the game are bound to happen and preparing your players for the unknown is key to deal with this situation. Being okay with this will make all the difference in the world.

I picked up tennis almost a year ago and now I’m in love.

What I love about tennis is that it requires my full concentration at all times. Everything is so fast and the slightest change in my racket angle can make an otherwise great shot a really bad one.

I started taking group classes and quickly moved to friendly matches and very small tournaments.

I came to realize that inner-talk in tennis is your worst enemy. Even though it’d be something that I’d do constantly.

In matches, I’d cheer myself and I’d narrate what to do as if I were my own coach.

Little did I know that this would make me tight. My concentration would shift from the game, the court, the ball, the position of my opponent, and the whole environment to my mind, and this back and forth, between playing and going to my inner self-talk is what made me tight, robotic-like, even.

This wasn’t my realization, but it was the clear conclusion that I got from the famous book: The Inner Game of Tennis. I read this book in desperation and anger, after losing a match that I shouldn’t have but did because I couldn’t play my best game, not even my C game.

After reading the book everything made sense.

Imagine that you wanted to dance, but instead of feeling the music and expressing how you feel the music you start an inner monologue on how you should move that would go like this:

Move your right feet to the right, now your left to the front, raise your hand, move your head side by side.

If you were to approach dancing this way, I guarantee it—your movements wouldn’t have rhythm, you wouldn’t flow and you would feel tight. You will look robotic.

That was me, trying to play tennis. I wasn’t flowing on the court.

For almost a month now, I’ve been focusing on being present while I’m playing. The easiest way to do this is to look at the ball at all times. Listening to how the ball sounds when it leaves my racket and having body awareness, especially feeling my feet.

Giving your full attention to the ball is intoxicating. It allows me to hit much better but that’s not the only upside. The real upside is getting out of my head, to be fully present, whether I’m winning or down in a match.

I already knew that playing football had this effect on me. It’s a great experience to feel the same playing tennis.

I now play tennis to improve my concentration.