Football's fledgling stars: Looking closer to home to find next Messi
By Chris Murphy, CNN
June 28, 2011 -- Updated 1141 GMT (1941 HKT)
Baerke van der Meij may only be 18-months-old but already he is making a name for himself in the fiercely competitive world of soccer.
A video clip of Baerke booting balls into his toy chest sent YouTube gaga, attracting over a million hits, and prompting his local club VVV Venlo to snap the toddler up on a 10-year "honorary" deal.
While the crayon on his contract had more to do with air time for VVV than playing time for Baerke, it does reflect a growing trend for clubs to source their talent closer to home.
Rather than lavishing the exorbitant figures required to snare a Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo, many are now transfixed on unearthing home-grown stars that could provide better value for money.
English club Arsenal made headlines last year when they signed six-year-old Fletcher Toll, tipped as the next David Beckham, a sign that even the biggest clubs have more than one eye on the future.
The most hailed youth model in Europe is at Dutch club Ajax, whose "total football" philosophy gave birth to such legends of the game as Johan Cruyff and Marco Van Basten.
Five of the 11 players who started Netherlands' World Cup final defeat to Spain in 2010 came through the Ajax academy, including Wesley Sneijder and Rafael van der Vaart. It is a football institution revered and respected the world over.
The current head of their youth academy, Jan Olde Riekerink, says it is the club's tradition, allied to their penchant for attractive football that has helped them produce a formidable production line of talent.
He told CNN: "I think (our reputation) is based on three main issues; first, there's a typical Ajax player, for example, Johan Cruyff, Marco Van Basten, they are technical, fast, offensive, creative, have a lot of speed and quickness of thinking.
"Second we have a strategy to create talent in scouting and in developing, we train from eight-years-old to 21 in the same way, educate in the same system. Third, we have the history.
"It is very difficult to copy this organization, because it's not only about the pitches, it's especially the people and the philosophy."
Ajax begin their quest to school the next clutch of soccer superstars at the age of eight, bussing kids to their Amsterdam training center several times a week.
Once there, they study Ajax's artful style of play, learn the benefits of a healthy diet, and also try their hand at Judo and gymnastics, to help with physical flexibility and to begin to hone the mental attributes needed to prosper in the game.
The critical time in any budding star's evolution, according to Riekerink, is between the ages of ten and 12, when their brain acts as a sponge - absorbing a host of tactical and technical information.
So when does it become clear a player has all the credentials to make it?
Riekerink said: "You can tell a player has talent, you can never tell the ceiling of that talent. You can recognize the technical skills, the speed of thinking, the way they position themselves but if they are young of course it's mainly about the technical skills."
The kids are retained on one-year contracts until the age of 16, when they can be signed on three-year, paid deals. How the youngsters react to each step up the ladder is critical.
"Every talent grows with a challenge that it gets," Riekerink says, quoting the example of former AC Milan and Barcelona striker Patrick Kluivert, who flourished at 19 when he was handed a chance in Ajax's first team by recently departed Bayern Munich coach Louis Van Gaal.
"He (Kluivert) took his chance and he grew at the moment he got a higher challenge. He became a world-class player -- it's always how they adapt to the next stage."
After a period of increased spending in the early part of the century, Riekerink says the club are now returning to their roots and focusing on the academy as vital to their future plans.
"Finally we're back to the basics; focus on the education, focus on giving the youth a chance, focus on giving the talent the right impulse to grow and I think that's at this moment our main course."
Believe it or not, big-spending English club Manchester City, are just as fixated on developing their own talent despite shelling out an estimated £300m on players since Abu Dhabi billionaire Sheikh Mansour bought the club in 2008.
The club may have been transformed into one of Europe's finest through stupendous levels of spending but the owner has decreed that home-grown talent must play a big part in their future.
"It's a huge, if not, number one priority," Mark Allen, the club's Head of Academy and Business Operations, told CNN. "The owners have made it abundantly clear they would like to see in the future, people coming through from our youth operation into our first team."
The rules in England are similar to Netherlands, whereby a youngster can sign with a club at nine and if they progress through the ranks, agree professional terms at the age of 17.
In between City claim to be as big on education as they are on football, schooling their youngsters on how to deal with success, failure, leadership traits and the skills needed to deal with everyday life, or as Allen puts it "all of those things they may well fall short of if they are cocooned in a football world."
"What we're trying to do is match the great players with great people, because we believe the combination of those two actually takes you to the next level," he adds.
Allen says the priority in the early stages of development is to encourage the kids to have fun with the game, all the while honing their technique.
"The four facets that we're looking at are technical, tactical, physical and mental," he says. "Can we hone and develop that technique that allows players to play both left and right side, feel comfortable receiving and turning on the ball, passing the ball, shooting with the ball?
"I don't think there's a magic formula. You assess potential and you assess them ready for the next level -- that's the best you can get to."
Credit: CNN (www.cnn.com)
No comments:
Post a Comment