Ontario stops keeping score in kids' soccer

“Winning is always going to be important,” Alex Chiet, the chief technical officer for the Ontario Soccer Association, told Canadian paper the Star during the week, “but it’s a misleading measure of success.”

It might not be a view, it has to be said, that would be shared by the majority of sports fans, who would tend to view winning as a rather integral part of success, but Chiet was specifically referring to the association’s decision to, well, stop counting goals in under-12 football matches. And to do away with tables, promotion and relegation.

It is, he said, “part of a well-established, research-supported and holistic approach to player development”, arguing that an overemphasis on competition in the under-12 group resulted in “individual skill development regressing”.

How’s the decision being received? Well, mixed reviews, with cartoonist Steve Nease capturing the feelings of those who reckon that removing the competitive goal-counting aspect of the game is hardly going to prepare the children for the big bad world.

How do the players feels? Well, the Star asked nine-year-old Tessa McDonald, a midfielder with North Toronto’s under-10 team, for her view and she seemed a little unconvinced. It will, she said, be “a lot weirder” playing football without keeping score. “Winning is more fun than losing, and if there’s no score, how are you going to have fun?” she asked. She will, though, she confessed, keep score in her head – “as long as it’s not more than seven.”