Unai Emery Quotes

I believe you have to take care of the kids from the youth team, the ones coming through, and people like Butragueno know how to do that.

Welcome to the world we live in as coaches. You've got to figure out what you can do best and better to get these kids a chance to be successful. I think that comes through a lot of things - confidence, improvement, recruiting.

I've always enjoyed the coaching side, working with young players, trying to improve them and to make them not only see football different but to see life differently.

I would like to involve and love to work with young players.

There are still so many issues around young players, and we need to find the right way for them. What is really important? What does he need for his self-belief? For his development?

I find young kids. I enjoy coaching and enjoy making them better players.

At a young age winning is not the most important thing... the important thing is to develop creative and skilled players with good confidence.

I think the coaches have to play a big role in the players' development.

Of course that's Ajax development, giving young players a chance.

When you're in youth development, you have to develop players - win or come in second. But the job where I am and the reality of our industry is to win to be successful, and that is what I have to do. I have to be successful, and I want to be successful, so we'll do everything we can do to win.

At Ajax, we have a certain philosophy that is sometimes more important than winning - the development of players.

It's important for me to exalt my players in their strengths and to try and cover their weakness, no?

The most important thing for me is to feel that young players want to learn on the training pitch. If they spend 10 hours sitting around playing PlayStation, that's their business.

When I got in this profession, as a young guy, as a college coach at San Jose State, I knew right then that I had a passion to do this, to touch people's lives, to develop young men in the game of football.

I began training the young players at Nova Iguacu and at Boavista, and I enjoyed it. I had always wanted to be a coach, and this accelerated the process.

I've always tried to grow people rather than cricketers.

I think that's vitally important, that we get players playing at a younger age group.

If the be-all and end-all of your ability is, 'Have you got a trophy to your name,' I find that hard to understand. It's so naive in terms of what the job of being a football coach is all about.

Coaching is something I really would do. A lot of people don't think I'm serious about it. I like working with the kids. When you work with the guys one-on-one and get them to understand it's a little bit better. That's the way I was taught by Tim Grgurich. That's how he taught us.

The best thing you do as a coach is develop an environment where these guys can have some success. Vince Lombardi was that way. He cared about these guys not only as football players but also as men.

The biggest mistake we usually tend to make with young players is over-coaching.

Kids should be encouraged to compete.

I didn't really want to be the coach who wins but the coach who educates.

Kids can really get better quickly. Here's another thing I would like to say: Kids should never be coached by their parents, ever. They should be as natural as possible.

Coaches coach guys on the field. I get to spend time with practice squad receivers and tight ends or a young center who's always inactive on Sundays... I feel really good about having an impact on those guys and their careers.