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brazil is 4000 miles and a world away from american soccer

(even if you could beat them, join them)

Almost a decade ago, and just one week after Manhattan Kickers FC president and director Curt Rosenthal moved to New York, he met his wife, Maria. Originally from Rio de Janeiro, Maria’s presence suddenly made Brazil a big part of Curt’s life, and with every year it gets bigger.

At just 35-years-old, the little-known coach (who spoke before to TIAS about his life and club) holds the North American rights to bring clubs and coaches down to Brazil to train with CBF staff and play games against Brazilian youth national and club teams.

While a few weeks in Brazil isn’t alone going to spawn superstars, Rosenthal realized it was a special opportunity after immediately seeing big changes in his teams after their South American sojourns. Brazil–surprise–has something to offer that the American version of the sport was desperately lacking. And it goes way beyond soccer.

“This is where god kissed the earth,” Rosenthal says, remembering what one of the MKFC parents said after visiting Granja Comary, Brazil’s national soccer training ground nestled in the mountains in Teresopolis. North of Rio, the town holds the national park headquarters and the CBF training ground. Above, MKFC players take instruction from CBF coaches. Dedo de Deus, “the finger of god,” the tall narrow spire of rock which stands out from the lush mountain backdrop, was first climbed in 1912 and stands today as a prerequisite for any accomplished climber.

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THE BACKSTORY:

Curt Rosenthal: “Brazilians are very open people. It is a welcoming culture. The people I’ve worked with in soccer down there really like that you have an interest—they enjoy and appreciate the idea of dialogue and exchange about the game without having to act like they know everything. That is part of what I love about the culture in Brazil and why it is a special place. To me they are unequivocally the best in the world at the game, but surprisingly, they want to know what they can learn from American players and coaches. There is never a sense of, “we know better.” For this reason I’ve learned so much over the years, so much of what is spoken about is so honest and open and comes from a place of passion and love for the game.

TIAS: So how it did go from casual acquaintances to this formal agreement?

I’ve been going down there one, two, three times a year for the last ten years. Always seeking out soccer, I eventually met some great people connected with not only the top clubs in Rio, but CBF. A few years back they took me to the CBF National Training facility at Granja Comary. It is about an hour and a half outside of Rio in a city in the mountains called Teresopolis. Besides national teams, club teams use it as well for certain trainings. Each of us separately had been thinking about the exchange of ideas and how that could be built into a program where foreign players and teams come to Brazil to train and learn from the environment. They have been doing this informally for years, but wanted to formalize it through CBF. This lead to us developing a structure, which we are still building, where international teams, players and even coaches can come and train or learn under CBF coaches, see the country, absorb the culture, go to some games. It’s nothing that hasn’t been going on in Europe, but they wanted to do it in the Brazilian way. So we did a test case with two of my own teams. It was an amazing trip, went off without a hitch. The way they hosted us, the professionalism, attention to detail, but mostly their warmth and generosity was as high-quality as you could hope for, and I’ve done my fair share of trips like this as a player and coach throughout Europe for a long time. The kids, coaches, and parents had an amazing time. The following year we did it one more time with more players from Manhattan Kickers FC, then from there it was decided to turn this into something significantly bigger and offer other programs for coaches, goalkeepers, futsal.

Flamengo’s second and third-string goal keepers watch as their coach drills MKFC keeper, Sam Harris, at the national training grounds.

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And that is boiled down to a package of sorts?

Yeah, for the club-team experience there is a basic 10 day package. This includes training at the facility, staying on the premises as long as there is not a national team staying there, although if there is we train next to them, which happened to us two years ago. We set up friendly matches against professional clubs from Rio: Flamengo, Vasco, Fluminense, Botafogo. There is a futsal part of the trip, which includes training on the national futsal court and watching a professional futsal match. And then we go into Rio for a few days, watch a professional game at Maracana, instructors work with the kids on beach soccer and we set up a beach tournament. And then of course we do not miss the cultural tourism part, so they get something beyond just soccer. I mean, it’s Rio de Janeiro and there is a ton of great stuff to see.

I think a good example of where soccer is here in the States is that you have this exclusive relationship with CBF. Here you are, a young guy with a small club, and no one before you had set this up. That that opportunity was still open and available is sort of surprising.

It comes back to the way we isolate ourselves as a country, in general. So it would make sense that we keep to ourselves too much in youth soccer too. Our players need to be part of the fabric of international youth soccer, competing against foreign clubs and getting seen by foreign scouts. If you look at some of our top National Team players right now, someone like Jonathan Specter as an example, he was noticed by Manchester United while playing internationally as a youth player. Just think how many more players this could happen to if we got out there more, and how much better off we would be for it.

Players from Manhattan Kickers FC after a day-long tournament in the futsal stadium in Teresopolis.

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But in Brazil, it’s not about being seen as much as having an experience?

I am working with CBF on a way to bring the spirit of the game in Brazil to America. We will do this through a training format where our players are accessed on a more imaginative level. Where they learn to think about the game as something that is fun and experimental. We want our coaches here to be able to really access their players and challenge them to become special with the ball, have more creative insight into their decisions, as well as a deeper and more textured level of game intelligence. It will really come down to the coaches and directors of clubs in this country who will need to do their best to strip away all the focus on records and leagues and affiliations and tournaments from their programs and get more in tune with the player and his relationship with the ball. We need guys who are magicians and while right now I think we have a lot of youth players in this country who are really dedicated to soccer, we are not serving them with the best programs. We’re too practical with the players and this limits their potential. We are developing a curriculum to work with American coaches to teach them the spirit of the game in Brazil and how to make exercises and drills an outlet for fantasy and imagination. We are developing ways to teach coaches how to talk to the kids, or not talk too much, but mostly to get the idea imparted to our players that the only way they will succeed on the highest-level of the game is to love soccer simply for enjoyment of the game itself. In our club, where we’ve started to implement some of these ideas, a paradigm shift has occurred. I am so happy to see our young players get more excited to play 4 v 4 amongst themselves than to go to an “out-of-town” 8 v 8 tournament where you might need to tie or win by six to advance to get a trophy.

Is that the bottom line for this sort of Brazilian experience, where beyond good soccer, something else is imparted to the kids?

The biggest thing that Brazil can offer is the environment. It is an environment where soccer is central to life. Soccer is approached in Brazil in a very specific way, that is very different from the way we approach it. For American kids to see this living, breathing life of soccer everywhere they look, it completely changes their minds about who they are as players and how much it means to play this amazing game. It blows their minds really. It blew my mind when I first went down there, and I was an adult. To have that type of experience at a young enough age can influence the kids to enjoy the game in a different way.

When you get to philosophize it, try to engage culture, the list is endless when you open that idea of “the right kind of fun. The right kind of seriousness.” Those terms are defined and implemented in different places according to the culture. Between Brazil and the U.S. it seems at times those things—fun, and seriousness—are implemented at completely opposite times.

This is something we were speaking about earlier. My point was Brazilian soccer is very well known for the joy and the fun they have while they play. But that should not be mistaken for the serious nature of the players and everyone else surrounding the game.It’s sort of like a comedian who can take his craft very seriously, but when he steps on stage, he is prepared because he has worked really hard, so his mind is clear and as you watch him you see he is having a blast and does not appear serious at all.. I don’t know if that is the best analogy. So much of it is cultural and there is no question ours isn’t changing any time soon. But that’s fine, although let’s at least show our kids that there are other options are out there and provide them with a wider, more open foundation to build their game.

It’s hard to play soccer in the sand. You need a special touch with your bare feet and to keep the ball moving instead of dying in the sifted quartz. Roll it over the cratered surface and take your best guess where it will go. “If you grew up on beach soccer,” Rosenthal says, “and then went to grass. It’s so much easier. The beach is a great training environment and usually fun.” Above, four players from the MKFC ’96 team enjoy some relaxing time after their training on the beach in Ipanema.

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banner photo of MKFC players boarding a plane at JFK airport in NYC en route to Brazil. All photos courtesy of Manhattan Kickers FC.

For more information about the Brazil Program, head over to http://cbfprograms.com/