Lionel Messi “Every day I played football with my friends in the street or the park. I didn’t want to do anything else”
Cristiano Ronaldo “I would skip homework, sneak out to play. I always had a ball. I kicked everything — bottles, stones, anything.”
Andrea Iniesta “I didn’t want video games. I wanted a ball. I would go outside and pretend to be Laudrup or Guardiola.”
Kylian Mbappe “As a child, I would go to sleep with my boots on. I watched Zidane clips, then ran outside to copy them. I was always playing.”
The Brazilian Example
During his travels to Brazil to study the development of elite footballers, Rasmus Ankersen calculated that a young child in the Brazilian favela practises football a total of around 22 hours per week between school, clubs and unorganised activity. That is more than 3 hours per day, 7 days a week.
Now let’s say that both the Brazilian child and the Scottish child have been exposed to the ‘Golden Years’ for early exposure to the ball, both had parents who inspired them to play with the ball between ages of two and four.
With the same starting point at 5 years old, let’s compare this to a Scottish child who practises around 6 hours per week.
By age 13 (when the elite youth development process starts), the Brazilian child will have amassed around 10,000 hours of football, while the Scottish player will have amassed 2,544.
A Culture of Play
Regardless of the exact number of hours, there is a clear trend of the world’s best players talking about playing football (or futsal) every day in their childhood. A key question from this report should be how Scotland, as a nation, can strategically stimulate an environment that was once the norm when we developed our greatest players.
Within our country, there is almost a defeated acceptance that children no longer play unstructured football as much as they used to, or indeed are as physically active as they should be. But as the case study of Iceland has shown, and as the case study of Japan shows, this culture can be stimulated in the modern era, even where it does not organically exist.
It must also be noted that it is a sign of the times in Scottish society that the notion of a child playing or practising sports for more than 3 hours per day may seem like a lot. As will be discussed elsewhere, this is simply how much a child should be active for their physical and mental wellbeing. In fact, to return to the example of Iceland, the very purpose of the government investing in free to use facilities and grassroots football was to improve the physical and psychosocial wellbeing of the nation. Football was simply the vehicle.
The Health Benefits
Strong evidence supports benefits when children get more than two hours per day of physical activity, and not only physically (Janssen & LeBlanc, 2010). A Swedish cohort of 16,000+ children found that each additional hour of daily activity in childhood reduced psychiatric diagnosis risk by 12%, anxiety by nearly 40% and depression by 23% in boys (Lundgren et al., 2025). In summary, practising football or other sports for several hours per day can lead to improved physical and mental health, alongside superior cognitive development, for our nation.
The Power of Repetitive Practice
Studies into high performance have long tried to establish what separates those who go on to achieve great things from the average person. One common suggestion has been that those who attain the highest levels rely not only on organised practice, but countless hours of ‘self training’, repetitive work which is often quoted as being “far from enjoyable”.
As far back as 1993 Ericsson, Krampe and Tesch Romer proposed this theory of “deliberate practice” based on their research into high achievers. In 2009, Dan Coyle’s bestselling book ‘The Talent Code’ translated the findings to show that this kind of “deliberate practice” allows signals to travel from the brain to the body at much greater speed. In a practical sense, it takes a difficult repetitive task an instinctive one.
Similar to Ericsson, Coyle discussed how the neuroscience showed that “struggle is not optional, it’s neurologically required… you must make mistakes and pay attention to those mistakes… keep firing that circuit, practising, in order to keep myelin functioning properly,” before adding “It is hard. It is boring. But it is absolutely necessary.”
Self Regulation
Similarly, Dutch Professor Marjie Elfering Gemser has authored many studies on elite athletic performance and found that work attitude and resilience at the ages of 6 to 8 were the two key determinants of future elite sporting success. This phenomenon is known as ‘Self Regulation’, which includes the ability to regulate emotions, such as the impulse to stop doing something boring and move on to something fun instead.
Furthermore, a host of evidence shows that ‘Self Regulation’ is like a muscle. It gets stronger the more we practise. That means that children can, from an early stage, improve their willpower.
This study found not only that those who had the discipline to spend longer on unenjoyable, repetitive tasks went on to achieve the most successful careers in elite sport, she identified the ages of 6 to 8 as the key window. This means that she was able to tell, already by this age, which children are committed to repetitive practice. This aligns with research showing that the key window to develop resilience occurs between the ages of 3 to 9. It seems, therefore, that it is not only the technical foundation which is developed at the earliest stage, but also the mental skills which are linked to elite performance.
In many ways, this research reflects common logic. Those who practise more will get better, and sometimes what we need to do get better is not fun. Those who are willing to practise more or longer than the average person (who gets bored or only wants to do something which is ‘fun’), will over time, become better than the rest.
The Scottish Context
Based on the evidence, a central pillar of the Scottish FA’s strategy should be to encourage children to spend countless hours mastering the ball on their own, not only through organised play and coaching sessions. Making a large part of the childhood experience fun is absolutely a positive step when coaching a group session but should not ignore the development of self regulation, developing the perseverance to focus on repetitive practice.
Given that self regulation is also correlated with success and happiness as an adult across all domains, sport, and football specifically, can only serve to develop this trait.
In summary, the key trend in elite player development is countless hours of both play and repetitive practice during childhood. Neither should be seen as competition to the other and both should be valued. The real debate in coaching should not be how much time to spend with children working on technique versus playing games. This debate misses the central point.
Based on countless real life examples, the real debate should be how we engage children to spend more time doing both.
Developing Creativity in Team Ball Sports Requires High Volume of Both Practice and Play
What was summarised above was also exactly the findings of Memmert, Baker and Bertsch (2010) when it came to analysing the most creative athletes in team ball sports.
Contrary to the argument that repetitive, deliberate practice somehow “removes creativity”, scientific evidence actually shows the opposite. It is a requirement of creativity. Repetitive practice gives players more tools at their disposal to solve situations, while unstructured play gives them more opportunities to practise different solutions in different situations.
The same phenomenon occurs outside of sports. Creativity requires both a form of imagination and method of execution. The musician must have the imagination to hear the melody in their head, but must also have spent the hours of repetition mastering the instrument to be able to transform it into a sound that others can hear. The artist must be able to visualise how they would like to transform a blank canvas, but it is the practice of mastering different brush strokes and artistic techniques which brings this image into the world.
Another musician, artist, or football player may have the same creative process, but without the deliberate practice required to execute their vision, they will never be considered “creative” in the practical sense.
To summarise the findings of the study, the most creative athletes spent more hours in both structured practice and unstructured play. The study also found that the development of creativity requires both elements.