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Karl
Senior Member
USA
914 Posts |
 Posted - Nov 16 2005 : 09:34:11 AM
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The search to unearth the football stars of the future has probably never been greater or more intensive.
David Fairclough, views from the press box
The days of scouring the local parks for homegrown talent are still vital but the net is now cast much further and the football scouting business is now much more scientific. When English clubs adopted the academy system it arrived on a huge wave of optimism and with it the hope of increasing quality and producing more home grown players. It has definitely brought an improvement in facilities in which to develop young players and clubs have certainly invested massively but, seeing the lengths clubs are now going to bring talent in, does this mean the academy experiment has not been working?
I have long wondered what is the ideal age for boys to be introduced into professional clubs and still remain unconvinced lads should be attached to clubs before they leave primary school. As a regular spectator of academy football over the last few years, I have seen and heard of many young lads who seemed destined for a career in football fail to come through and disappear from the scene completely. One of the reasons for this I feel is because there are too many players all playing the same way, in other words over-coached.
Fairclough on being discovered
Around the time I was 13 - after I'd played in a district football competition on Stanley Park - I was approached by a man who asked me my name and told me he was a scout from Liverpool Football Club. I think I was dumbstruck and wondered if it was a joke. I went on my way home and didn't even mention it to my parents.
There is an argument to say in comparison to years ago at the base of the football pyramid, the initial ability is better and more widespread but in my opinion the amount of real stars with any individuality is not as great.
Obviously youngsters are not practicing football in the same way as we did as kids for a variety of reasons. I received no real coaching until I was 13 years old and that allowed me to develop my own style. Around that time - after I'd played in a district football competition on Stanley Park - I was approached by a man who asked me my name and told me he was a scout from Liverpool Football Club. I think I was dumbstruck and wondered if it was a joke. I went on my way home and didn't even mention it to my parents.
A few weeks later, after arriving home from another match, my mum said somebody from Liverpool called earlier at our house wanting to know where I was playing that day. He had obviously called too late but said he would come back the next day in the hope of watching me play on the Sunday morning. I must have impressed them because they had me visiting the Melwood training ground two days later and signing forms within the week. I am not sure that if a similar situation arose today the decision would be made as quick. Even after signing, I still didn't have much coaching at Liverpool until I was just short of my 16th birthday and I believe that fact had a major effect in influencing my style of play.
With all that in my mind, I am interested now to see how many big clubs are now signing 16 and 17 year olds from outside of their own academies - some from smaller British clubs, others from Europe and even further afield. Arsenal were probably the first of the Premiership clubs to seriously look outside of the British Isles and introduce a large contingent of young foreign players to the English game. These days they are not alone as a number of youth scouting networks now stretch all over the world with Liverpool have been busy attracting highly-rated young players from not only English clubs but also teams in Spain and Austria.
The Premiership is now more cosmopolitan than ever before and foreign coaches seem keen to cross-pollinate our game with a mix of the best Brits and international players. With this in mind, some clubs are forming nursery relationships with other clubs in Europe while others are building relations on other continents.
Liverpool FC only last week announced a link up with soccer academies in America. Football is predominantly a middle class sport in the USA but this project will take the sport to a wider audience and include educational development for youngsters. Although the States is something of an untapped market, I'm sure this scheme is not simply being set up to produce professional footballers. However, if the scheme does produce a talented player, I am sure the club will be ideally placed to monitor his progress.
Recently I heard how Dynamo Kiev built a new football academy programme and a few years ago they actively searched for the best 25 players within the Soviet states born in 1985 to develop them as a group. Oliksandr Aliiev, the one player to really emerge from the squad, starred in the World Youth Championships and was unearthed 4,000 miles away in Siberia! He is now 20 and hopes to make it into the Ukraine squad for the World Cup.
Italian and Spanish clubs have long used South America to find their greatest imports and a scout from AC Milan recently told me how they found Kaka as a 17-year-old junior. They signed him for what was then a modest fee and in two years turned him into one of the leading players in the world and one that is priceless now.
In recent weeks the likes of Liverpool and Chelsea have looked to sign young English talent from the lower divisions and hopefully they will emerge and develop in the way players like Kevin Keegan and Ray Clemence did with us in the past. As the game goes even more global, it will be the clubs with the greatest vision who will stay ahead of the rest.
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The Limits of a football academy
