I remember reading this story last summer and finding it really fascinating the part I really liked was the part that talked about the spread of coaches: "Fin

I remember reading this story last summer and finding it really fascinating the part I really liked was the part that talked about the spread of coaches: "Fine. But how have they done it? For once there is a fairly easy answer. This is a command economy kind of fairytale, managed from the top down. There are three clear strands. The first of these is coaching. Arrigo Sacchi famously suggested elite coaching should be open to people from any walk of life, from elevator operators to stockbrokers. At the end of the last century the Icelandic FA put this into practice. Bolstered by the TV money pouring into every Uefa country, Iceland set up an open, hugely popular training scheme. Currently this nation of 335,000 has around 600 qualified coaches, 400 with Uefa B licences, or one per 825 people. To put this into context, in England this number falls to one per 11,000. The result is a spread of expertise right down to the lowest level. “Here you need a Uefa B licence to coach from under-10 level up and half of the Uefa B licence to coach under-eights,” Dagur Sveinn Dagbjartsson of the Icelandic FA says. This isn’t simply box-ticking. The Uefa B is one step off the level needed to coach a professional team in England. Yelling dads it ain’t. Dagur is coordinator of the Icelandic FA’s coach education programme. Boyish and studious, like so many other people around here he has a genuine fascination with the systems being put into place. “Even if you start training at four years old you get good quality coaching. Every coach in Iceland gets paid, we don’t have any amateurs. Every kid who plays pays an annual fee and can go and train with a professional club. My own kid started when he was three. One coach had the Uefa A licence and one the B licence.” " ------------- -------------- its interesting to think about what sort of advantage the institutional spread of knowledge is