BEHIND THE PLAY #6

I’ve just heard about a new club in our city that despite not existing in any fashion yet are promising to offer programming here for "elite” U6 to U13 players.

Where to start…

Let’s go with Australian physiologist Wayne Goldsmith who was charged with going around his country from 1992 until the Sydney Olympics looking for the best athletes in various sports so they could be put into high performance environments and become future Olympians. After all this his take was that even he has no idea what an eight year old will be like as an athlete when they’re older. “There’s no such thing as an elite eight year old,” he says in this video. “But I promise you,” he continues, “that specializing them too soon is a road to doom.”

Then consider a DFB (German Football Federation) study that looked at the pathways German Bundesliga players took to get there. Were they always the best players in their club youth academies and always making U15, U17 etc National Teams? No, they were not. The only reasonably consistent piece of data was that those who made it to professional and full national team levels were players who had experienced success and the lack of it along the way. They had multiple ingress and egress points, sometimes making a regional team and sometimes not; same through to the various youth national teams. The thought that professional players all clearly excelled at the highest youth levels all the way through was just not the case. So the experience that so many parents are deathly afraid of exposing their children to (hardship) is the one that seems to help players achieve their ultimate goals. It’s a rare parent these days that embraces opportunities for their kids to face discomfort and build resilience.

Sometimes even the clubs with the best youth development programs in the world get it all wrong. Barcelona paid 250,000 Euros for 12-year-old Dennis Krol from Bayer Leverkusen’s youth academy in 2005. That was the last time fees flowed for Krol. Everything after that was a free transfer to lower division teams back in Germany until he was playing amateur football when he was 23.

So it’s foolish to hype up great talents when they are very young and assume they will be among the very best when they are adults. Sure, there’s unicorns like Messi and Martin Odegaard but there’s a million over-hyped 13 year olds for every one of those and its incredibly unfair to put any teenager through those massive expectations before tearing them down when they get released as a 19 year old and need to find their feet in the real world.

When I was a Technical Director and I would lead parent information meetings at our club ahead of the last part of our evaluations for next season’s teams. I always showed parents this slide.

“Those of us who are involved in youth development or in soccer academies, must bear in mind that, of the 16-year-olds who sign a professional contract, 85% are out of the professional game by the age of 21.”

Higgins, T. Laying the foundations. The Technician - UEFA (Jan. 2007)

It’s actually a safe bet to wager that there are far more players who were on nobody’s radar as youngsters and then blossomed when they got a bit older. Particularly in this current environment where the idea of “elite six year old” programs intersects with parental FOMO anxiety. Consider just these Canadian examples; none of whom played is super-duper-just-out-of-diapers-select programming while they were at single digit ages

Alphonso Davies was playing in a free, after-school soccer program in Edmonton for recent refugees when he was eleven. Jonathan David, similarly, did not play anything other pick up soccer at school until he was 10 having emigrated from Haiti when he was six. Vanessa Gilles, in my mind the main reason the Canadian women’s team beat the USA in the semi-finals of the 2020 Olympics that allowed them to go on and win the gold medal against Sweden, was a tennis player and didn’t play on a soccer team until she was sixteen. Jason de Vos, captain of the only men’s national team to win a major competition (the 2000 Gold Cup) told me he was playing several sports when he was young and didn’t focus on soccer until he was 14.

It’s not just the high profile players that did well despite a late start to the game. At UBC, I played centreback with my buddy Alex. His path was also non-linear. He openly jokes that he was, for several years when he was around 7-10 years old, the kid who made castles from the gravel we played on at that time and also liked to shoot imaginary planes out of the sky while play was going on around him. That same kid then went on to captain a U16 Canadian national team for a series of games in Trinidad. And then he got so burned-out after playing so much that he quit playing entirely two years later in Grade 12. We then met up at UBC and won three national championships each. He had multiple All-Canadian awards and played four years in the Canadian Soccer League between 1988 and 1991.

There’s so many other stories of supposed prodigies who went nowhere and late developers who went somewhere without needing expensive, ego-stroking programs for kindergarten age kids. So don’t get your knickers knotted about which shiny new program for five year olds you may be missing out on and remember that something or somebody kept eight year old Alex playing through those winters of disinterest so he could start at UBC as a first year student and help lead what would be a juggernaut team for five years. My money says it was patient, supportive parents. And best of all? When he didn’t enjoy it, he stopped and came back when he was ready to. Beats kids training and playing 6-7 days a week, ten months of the year on artificial turf in multiple programs. The most likely outcome with that? Injuries that keep them out of the game for long stretches and in several cases leads to them quitting for a different sport or pursuit.

_{A song you may not know but will surely like once you have: Today it’s from Clay Orange, aka Ross MacNab, a great local songwriter who put out a solo album recently (he’s also in a band, Tanglers, with my son). Here’s ‘A Wink and a Nudge’ [Apple Music] [Spotify] [YouTube]}