Simon Clifford has been featured in a new book by the New York Times bestselling author Daniel Coyle which looks into the nurturing of talent in a number of different fields.

Coyle, who penned the award winning Lance Armstrong's War among others and is one of the most respected authors in America, details Clifford's work  in The Talent Code alongside other case studies including Tiger Woods and Frank Sinatra, looking at how talent can be unearthed regardless of prosperity.

The New York-based author spent two years looking at the most successful figures across a wide range of disciplines, predominantly in sport, highlighting the similarities in the way that each harbours leading talent.

Coyle's focus on Clifford's BSS and SOCATOTS organisation - the largest of its kind - looks at how footballers graduate from the programme with a far greater level of technical proficiency than their counterparts.

Among those to benefit from the BSS programme, which uses the Brazilian game of Futebol de Salao to develop attributes including close-ball control and passing, are Micah Richards, Michael Owen, Theo Walcott, Wayne Rooney and John Bostock.

That list is expected to grow dramatically as the first line of graduates to progress through BSS' sister programme, SOCATOTS, a directed play activity for children from six months to five years.

There are now over two million children training regularly within BSS and SOCATOTS, with operations now in place in nations such as Australia, America, Nigeria, South Africa, Singapore, Honk Kong, Canada and Finland.

This is not the first time that Clifford, BSS and SOCATOTS have been featured in a book. Gianluca Vialli's The Italian Job hailed Clifford's approach, while others such as Sir Clive Woodward's Winning cite his methods as crucial to the future of the game.

An extract from The Talent Code follows:

Trying to describe the collective talent of Brazilian soccer

players is like trying to describe the law of gravity. You can

measure it—the five World Cup victories, the nine hundred

or so young talents signed each year by professional European

clubs. Or you can name it—the procession of transcendent

stars like Pelé, Zico, Socrates, Romário, Ronaldo, Juninho,

Robinho, Ronaldinho, Kaká, and others who have deservedly

worn the crown of “world’s best player.” But in the end you

can’t capture the power of Brazilian talent in numbers and

names. It has to be felt. Every day soccer fans around the

world witness the quintessential scene: a group of enemy players

surround a Brazilian, leaving him no options, no space, no

hope. Then there’s a dancelike blur of motion—a feint, a

flick, a burst of speed—and suddenly the Brazilian player is in

the clear, moving away from his now-tangled opponents with

the casual aplomb of a person stepping off a crowded bus.

Each day, Brazil accomplishes something extremely difficult

and unlikely: in a game at which the entire world is feverishly

competing, it continues to produce an unusually high percentage

of the most skilled players.

The conventional way to explain this kind of concentrated

talent is to attribute it to a combination of genes and environment,

a.k.a. nature and nurture. In this way of thinking,

Brazil is great because it possesses a unique confluence of factors: a friendly climate, a deep passion for soccer, and a genetically

diverse population of 190 million, 40 percent of whom

are desperately poor and long to escape through “the beautiful

game.” Add up all the factors and—voilà!—you have the

ideal factory for soccer greatness.

But there ’s a slight problem with this explanation: Brazil

wasn’t always a great producer of soccer players. In the 1940s

and 1950s, with its trifecta of climate, passion, and poverty

already firmly in place, the ideal factory produced unspectacular

results, never winning a World Cup, failing to defeat

then-world-power Hungary in four tries, showing few of the

dazzling improvisational skills for which it would later become

known. It wasn’t until 1958 that the Brazil the world now recognizes

truly arrived, in the form of a brilliant team featuring

seventeen-year-old Pelé, at the World Cup in Sweden.* If

sometime during the next decade Brazil should shockingly

lose its lofty place in the sport (as Hungary so shockingly

did), then the Brazil-is-unique argument leaves us with no

conceivable response except to shrug and celebrate the new

champion, which undoubtedly will also possess a set of characteristics

all its own.

So how does Brazil produce so many great players?

The surprising answer is that Brazil produces great players

because since the 1950s Brazilian players have trained in a particular

way, with a particular tool that improves ball-handling

skill faster than anywhere else in the world. They have found a way to increase their learning

* Soccer historians trace the moment to the opening three minutes of Brazil’s 1958

World Cup semifinal victory against the heavily favored Soviet Union. The Soviets,

who were regarded as the pinnacle of modern technique, were overrun by the ballhandling

skills of Pelé, Garrincha, and Vavá. As commentator Luis Mendes said, “The

scientific systems of the Soviet Union died a death right there. They put the first man in

space, but they couldn’t mark Garrincha.”

 BRAZIL’S SECRET WEAPON

Like many sports fans around the world, soccer coach Simon

Clifford was fascinated by the supernatural skills of Brazilian

soccer players. Unlike most fans, however, he decided to go to

Brazil to see if he could find out how they developed those

This was an unusually ambitious initiative on Clifford’s

part, considering that he had gained all his coaching experience

at a Catholic elementary school in the soccer non-hotbed

of Leeds, England. Then again, Clifford is not what you’d call

usual. He’s tall and dashingly handsome and radiates the sort

of charismatic, bulletproof confidence one usually associates

with missionaries and emperors. He appears to approach each day with immoderate zeal.

In the summer of 1997, when he was twenty-six, Clifford borrowed

$8,000 from his teachers’ union and set out for Brazil toting a

backpack, a video camera, and a notebook full of phone numbers

he ’d cajoled from a Brazilian player he ’d met.

Once there, Clifford spent most of his time exploring the

thronging expanse of São Paolo, sleeping in roach-infested

dormitories by night, scribbling notes by day. He saw many

things he ’d expected to find: the passion, the tradition, the

highly organized training centers, the long practice sessions.

(Teenage players at Brazilian soccer academies log twenty

hours per week, compared with five hours per week for their

British counterparts.) He saw the towering poverty of the

favelas, and the desperation in the players’ eyes.

But Clifford also saw something he didn’t expect: a strange

game. It resembled soccer, if soccer were played inside a

phone booth and dosed with amphetamines. The ball was less than half

the size but weighed twice as much; it hardly bounced at all.

The players trained, not on a vast expanse of grass field, but

on basketball-court-size patches of concrete, wooden floor,

and dirt. Each side, instead of having eleven players, had

five or six. In its rhythm and blinding speed, the game resembled

basketball or hockey more than soccer: it consisted of an

intricate series of quick, controlled passes and nonstop endto-

end action. The game was called Futebol de Salão,

 “It was clear to me that this was where Brazilian skills were

born,” Clifford said. “It was like finding the missing link.”

Futebol de Salao had been invented in 1930 as a rainy-day training

option by a Uruguayan coach. Brazilians quickly seized upon

it and codified the first rules in 1936. Since then the game had

spread like a virus, especially in Brazil’s crowded cities, and it

quickly came to occupy a unique place in Brazilian sporting culture.

Brazil became uniquely obsessed with it, in part because the game could be played

anywhere (no small advantage in a nation where grass fields

are rare). Futebol de Salao grew to command the passions of Brazilian

kids in the same way that pickup basketball commands the

passions of inner-city American kids.

As Alex Bellos, author of Futebol: Soccer,

the Brazilian Way, wrote, Futebol de Salao “is regarded as the incubator

of the Brazilian soul.”

The incubation is reflected in players’ biographies. From

Pelé onward virtually every great Brazilian player played Futebol de Salao

as a kid, first in the neighborhood and later at Brazil’s soccer

academies, where from ages seven to around twelve they

typically devoted three days a week to Futebol de Salao. A top Brazilian

player spends thousands of hours at the game. The great

Juninho, for instance, said he never kicked a full-size ball on

grass until he was fourteen. Until he was twelve, Robinho

spent half his training time playing Futebol de Salao.*

Like a vintner identifying a lovely strain of grape, a

cognoscente like Prof. Emilio Miranda, professor of soccer at

the University of São Paolo, can identify the Futebol de Salao wiring

within famous Brazilian soccer tricks. That elastico move that

Ronaldinho popularized, drawing the ball in and out like a yoyo?

It originated in Futebol de Salao. The toe-poke goal that Ronaldo

scored in the 2002 World Cup? Again, Futebol de Salao. Moves like the

d’espero, el barret, and vaselina? All came from Futebol de Salao. When I

told Miranda that I’d imagined Brazilians built skills by playing

soccer on the beach, he laughed. “Journalists fly here, go

to the beach, they take pictures and write stories. But great

players don’t come from the beach. They come from the Futebol de Salao

court.”

One reason lies in the math. Futebol de Salao players touch the ball

far more often than soccer players—six times more often per

minute, according to a Liverpool University study. The smaller,

heavier ball demands and rewards more precise handling—as

coaches point out, you can’t get out of a tight spot simply by

booting the ball downfield. Sharp passing is paramount: the

game is all about looking for angles and spaces and working

quick combinations with other players. Ball control and vision

are crucial, so that when Futebol de Salao players play the full-size

game, they feel as if they have acres of free space in which to

operate. When I watched professional outdoor games in São

Paulo sitting with Prof. Miranda, he would point out players

who had played Futebol de Salao: he could tell by the way they held the ball.

* For a vivid demonstration of Futebol de Salao’s role in developing the skills of two-time world

player of the year Ronaldinho, see www.youtube.com/watch?v=6180cMhkWJA.

 They didn’t care how close their opponent came. As Prof.

Miranda summed up, “No time plus no space equals better

skills. Futebol de Salao is our national laboratory of improvisation.”

In other words, Brazilian soccer is different from the rest

of the world’s because Brazil employs the sporting equivalent

of a Link trainer. Futebol de Salao compresses soccer’s essential skills

into a small box; it places players inside the deep practice

zone, making and correcting errors, constantly generating

solutions to vivid problems. Players touching the ball 600

percent more often learn far faster, without realizing it, than

they would in the vast, bouncy expanse of the outdoor game.

To be clear: Futebol de Salao is not the only reason Brazilian soccer is

great. The other factors so often cited—climate, passion, and

poverty—really do matter. But Futebol de Salao is the lever through

which those other factors transfer their force.

When Simon Clifford saw Futebol de Salao, he got excited. He returned

home, quit his teaching job, and founded the

International Confederation of Futebol de Salão in a spare room

of his house, developing a soccer program for elementary and

high-school-age kids that he called the Brazilian Soccer

Schools. He constructed an elaborate series of drills based on

Futebol de Salao moves. His players, who mostly hailed from a rough,

impoverished area of Leeds, started imitating the Zicos and

Ronaldinhos. To create the proper ambience, Clifford played

samba music on a boom box.

Let’s step back a moment and take an objective look at

what Clifford was doing. He was running an experiment to

see whether Brazil’s million-footed talent factory could be

grafted to an utterly foreign land via this small, silly game. He

was betting that the act of playing Futebol de Salao would cause some

glowing kernel of Brazilian magic to take root in sooty, chilly

Leeds.

When the citizens of Leeds heard of Clifford’s plan, they

were mildly entertained. When they actually witnessed his

school in action, they were in grave danger of laughing themselves

to death at the spectacle: dozens of pale, pink-cheeked,

thick-necked Yorkshire kids kicking around small, too-heavy

balls, learning fancy tricks to the tune of samba music. It was

a laugh, except for one detail—Clifford was right.

Four years later Clifford’s team of under-fourteens from Leeds defeated

the Scottish national team of the same age; it went on to

beat the Irish national team as well. One of his Leeds kids, a

defender named Micah Richards, now plays for the English

national team. Clifford’s Brazilian Soccer Schools and sister organisation

SOCATOTS have now expanded to sixty one countries around the world.

More stars, are on the way.