The story of an impressive team of assistants and the steps to achieving greater success.

Previously, Coach Park Hang-seo always used a large team of 15 assistants for both national teams simultaneously. Of course, these were all "experts from both within and outside the country, passionate about their work and capable of making the greatest contribution to the teams." The story that follows, however, takes a different approach, one that perhaps few people have paid attention to, or at least hoped to see...

Mr. P. Troussier had a large team of 16 assistants. (Photo: Archival image)

Let's start with Park Hang-seo, the "assistant" to South Korea's head coach, Guud Hiddink, at the 2002 World Cup. At that time, South Korean football invited this world-class coach to lead the team in the Asian World Cup, guiding them to their first-ever semi-final appearance and ultimately finishing fourth – the highest ranking ever achieved by the country's advanced football.

Park Hang-seo once confided about his former mentor: "He showed me what the life of a coach is like. My time as an assistant was very important to me. I learned from him how to organize work, plan, and handle situations. While working with him, I kept a daily diary. I recorded his instructions and how he worked. With that stored data, after becoming a coach, I would refer to the diary for every situation that arose. The diary was very valuable to me as a reference…"

In particular, the sincere advice of Guud Hiddink when Park Hang-seo was working in Vietnam, "...don't try to train any particular player because time will never allow it. Just try to make the most of the resources you have...", has been thoroughly applied by the South Korean coach and has brought brilliant success over the past five years, as everyone knows.

A second prime example is Arteta, Pep Guardiola's "assistant" at the renowned Manchester City team, who later took over Arsenal and is currently ahead of his former manager's team in the 2022-2023 Premier League standings. It's known that when he joined the London club as an assistant, Arteta's role was initially to connect with new members, but he gradually became involved in planning matches, making decisions while the ball was still in play, and even participating in shaping the club's future development.

The main point is that Arteta always shows the ability to learn from his predecessors, with "ambition, desire, and a complete passion for everything related to football and tactical calculations," as Xavi, another of Pep's pupils who is successfully managing Barcelona this season, put it. Meanwhile, his pupil Company learned from Pep by meticulously documenting everything he learned from his playing days to apply later. This includes "methods, processes, personality, psychology, tactical elements, and countless other things," as Pep Guardiola himself put it. This coach, according to Company, "always looks at each game differently to create his own style. From there, the team will find its own identity in the most suitable and best way"...

From there, we can try to assess and relate it to the process of inviting talented foreign coaches to lead the national teams and the process of "contributing to the national teams" and clubs in Vietnam by the assistant coaches, both then and after they left to work independently. Clearly, since the time of coaches Weigang, Dido, Riedl, Calistore, Miura, Park Hang-seo, and now P. Troussier, many assistant coaches have quietly learned from their experience and applied it to their assigned tasks, although the success achieved has been very modest compared to the requirements.

Hopefully, at least the formidable coaching staff from the time of Park Hang-seo and now Troussier will learn from the example of "assistant" Park Hang-seo, "assistant" Arteta, Savi, or Company to mature, become independent, and take control of their work, rising from "students" to "teachers" when the opportunity arises.