New York Times: How a (Dutch) Soccer Star is Made

We are less than one day away (about 21 hours to be exact) from the World Cup!!  For the next month, that's all anyone will discuss...well, not really.  There will be nonstop chatter about Lebron James and the rest of the free agents, offseason football, and Strasburg (if he continues to dominate), but you get my point.  The World Cup will dominate a lot of conversations for the next four weeks.  New talent will emerge.  Small nations will be put in the world's spotlight for the first time.  And, hopefully, Americans will fall in love with the sport that is loved so much around the world, even if it is short lived.

Over the past month, it's been difficult to avoid the growing buzz about the tournament and which stars to watch.  We all know that the popularity of soccer/football in the States pales in comparison to the rest of the world.  Have you ever given any thought as to why?  Or, furthermore, have you ever thought about the resources and dedication that are put toward developing world class soccer talent in countries outside of the great U.S. of A.?  

Michael Sokolove of The New York Times travelled to Amsterdam and visited the Ajax (pronounced EYE-ox) youth academy aka De Toekomst — The Future.  There, the Sokolove learned the ins and outs of Ajax (stop pronouncing it like the cleaner, lol!).  Ajax and other soccer academies around the world are similar to a big-league baseball team’s minor-league system — but one that reaches into early childhood.  Ajax starts training soccer stars as young as 7 years old through the age of 19. Two hundred promising soccer stars are invited to train at Ajax, the boys only club.  Hardly anyone turns down an invitation. 

Ajax's most notable graduate and accomplished Dutch player at the moment is Wesley Sneijder.  At 23, Real Madrid acquired him for 27 million euros.  He now stars for Inter Milan, the current Italian champion and the winner of this year's Champions League tournament. 

Last night, I read the full 10 page article on the New York Times website and recommend you do the same.   If you're uninterested in the development of soccer players overseas, but care about the development of young basketball or baseball players in the USA, you'll learn something by reading this article.  The article compared, contrasted and criticized the USA's approach to developing talent.

Below are a some highlights from the article.  In no way does it cover everything, but my hope is that you'll have a better appreciation, understanding, and respect for the care and diligence that youth academies like Ajax and others dedicate toward developing top talent.  I think you'll also be forced to question if the US way is the best way to develop athletes.  I was.  

Background of Ajax... 

The Ajax youth academy is not a boarding school. The players all live within a 35-mile radius of Amsterdam (some of them have moved into the area to attend the academy). Ajax operates a fleet of 20 buses to pick up the boys halfway through their school day and employs 15 teachers to tutor them when they arrive. Parents pay nothing except a nominal insurance fee of 12 euros a year, and the club covers the rest — salaries for 24 coaches, travel to tournaments, uniforms and gear for the players and all other costs associated with running a vast facility. Promising young players outside the Ajax catchment area usually attend academies run by other Dutch professional clubs, where the training is also free, as it is in much of the rest of the soccer-playing world for youths with pro potential. (The U.S., where the dominant model is “pay to play” — the better an athlete, the more money a parent shells out — is the outlier.)

Every year, some in each age group are told they cannot return the following year — they are said to have been “sent away” — and new prospects are enrolled in their place. And it is not just the children whose performances are assessed. Just before my second trip to Amsterdam in March, several longtime coaches were informed that they had not measured up and would be let go.

When the boys start at the youth academy they are attached to the ideal of Ajax, whose senior team packs in 50,000-plus fans for its home games and still occupies a mythic place in world soccer because of the innovative style it established in the 1960s — a quick-passing, position-shifting offensive attack that became known as Total Football.

Over time, though, the academy hardens them mentally as well as physically. I asked a player how he felt about his coach’s being fired. He shrugged. “The football world is a hard world,” he replied. “He has made the decision to send boys away. Now he knows how it feels.”

On the success of the academy... 

Late on afternoon in the cafe at De Toekomst, I was talking with a coach, Patrick Landru, who works with the academy’s youngest age groups, when he asked if he could take my writing pad for a moment. I handed it over, and he put down five names, then drew a bracket to their right. Outside the bracket, he wrote, “80 million euros.” The names represented five active “Ajax educated” players, as he called them, all of whom entered the academy as children, made it through without being sent away and emerged as world-class players. Eighty million euros (or even more) is what Ajax got in return for selling the rights to the players to other professional clubs. Once a team pays this one-time transfer fee, it then negotiates a new, often very large, contract with the player.

Wesley Sneijder, the first name on the list and probably the most accomplished young Dutch player at the moment was acquired for 27 million euros. The other four players named on my pad were, like Sneijder, highly paid pros for clubs outside the Netherlands and prominent members of the Dutch national team that will compete in the World Cup beginning this week in South Africa.

 On training- the schedules and culture...

During training sessions at Ajax, I rarely heard the boys’ loud voices or laughter or much of anything besides the thump of the ball and the instruction of coaches. It could seem grim, more like the grinding atmosphere of training for an individual sport — tennis, golf, gymnastics — than what you would expect in a typically boisterous team setting. But one element of the academy’s success is that the boys are not overplayed, so the hours at De Toekomst are all business. Through age 12, they train only three times a week and play one game on the weekend. “For the young ones, we think that’s enough,” Riekerink said when we talked in his office one day. “They have a private life, a family life. We don’t want to take that from them. When they are not with us, they play on the streets. They play with their friends. Sometimes that’s more important. They have the ball at their feet without anyone telling them what to do.”

By age 15, the boys are practicing five times a week. In all age groups, training largely consists of small-sided games and drills in which players line up in various configurations, move quickly and kick the ball very hard to each other at close range. In many practice settings in the U.S., this kind of activity would be a warm-up, just to get loose, with the coach paying scant attention and maybe talking on a cellphone or chatting with parents. 

On how Ajax compares to a traditional American development system... 

More than three million boys under age 18 play organized soccer in the U.S., but we have never produced a critical mass of elite performers to compete on equal terms with the world’s best.

Americans like to put together teams, even at the Pee Wee level, that are meant to win. The best soccer-playing nations build individual players, ones with superior technical skills who later come together on teams the U.S. struggles to beat. In a way, it is a reversal of type. Americans tend to think of Europeans as collectivists and themselves as individualists. But in sports, it is the opposite. The Europeans build up the assets of individual players. Americans underdevelop the individual, although most of the volunteers who coach at the youngest level would not be cognizant of that.

Americans place a higher value on competition than on practice, so the balance between games and practice in the U.S. is skewed when compared with the rest of the world.

No other nation has as comprehensive a college-sports system as exists here, and none assume that an elite athlete will seek (or benefit from) higher education. “You have a major problem in the ages of 17 to 21,” Huw Jennings, now the director of the youth academy at Fulham, in the English Premier League, told me when I visited him in London. “The N.C.A.A. system is the fault line. I understand that it is good for a person’s development to go to university, but it’s not the way the world develops players.”

On monitoring the boys' diets... 

I was in the office of Olav Versloot, the club’s chief exercise physiologist, when a 14-year-old knocked on his door, eager for the results of his latest body-fat measurement, which was too high the last time. Boys in their midteens are permitted to have up to 13 percent body fat; by 17, the measure is supposed to be down to 12 percent. (The younger players, who are almost always lean enough, are monitored more loosely.) “The first time limits are exceeded we are quite liberal,” Versloot told me. “Diet suggestions are made. But after that, we start a program with a dietitian. Parents are called in, and special exercise programs are started.”

On how to become a star...

There are two ways to become a world-class soccer player. One is to spend hours and hours in pickup games — in parks, streets, alleyways — on imperfect surfaces that, if mastered, can give a competitor an advantage when he finally graduates to groomed fields. This is the Brazilian way and also the model in much of the rest of South America, Central America and the soccer hotbeds of Africa. It is like baseball in the Dominican Republic. Children play all the time and on their own.

The other way is the Ajax method. Scientific training. Attention to detail. Time spent touching the ball rather than playing a mindless number of organized games.

The more thoughtful people involved in developing U.S. soccer talent know that we conform to neither model. We are a much larger nation, obviously, than the Netherlands. Our youth sports leagues, for the most part, are community-based and run by volunteers rather than professionals. They have grown organically, sending out tendrils that run deep and are difficult to uproot. Change at the elite levels is more possible than at the stubborn grass roots.

Efforts to change American soccer culture are largely occurring in the older age groups. Some of the most talented players are being extracted from a deeply flawed system, but only after they’ve been immersed in it for many years.

The academies of M.L.S. teams have begun to abandon the pay-for-play model and are bearing nearly all costs, including travel, for their players.

I'll be paying extra attention to the Netherlands team. They have a pretty easy group with Japan, Denmark and Cameroon, so they should advance to the next round with no problem.  


Like I said, these are just excerpts from the article. When you have time, please read the full article and leave a comment below.  Would the Ajax model work in the states?  I'd love to know your thoughts.

Sidenote:  I love that the New York Times' feature stories also include a slideshow and video.  That's very thoughtful of them.  They recognize some of their readers prefer to watch a 3 minute video or review pictures via slideshow over reading a 10 page article.  I consumed the info via all three options.  I'm a junkie, lol. 

Below are links to the full length article, slideshow, and video.  Pick your poison.

Article: How a Soccer Star is Made

Slideshow:  The Ajax Soccer Academy:  From Boys to Pros

Video:  Training to Play the World's Game 

Don't forget the World Cup starts tomorrow (Friday) at 10am/ET on ESPN with South Africa vs. Mexico.

I'm most looking forward to USA vs. England on Saturday at 2:30pm/ET on ABC.  I'll be posted up at a bar at JFK waiting to board my flight to Bermuda.  I'm hoping I can find some Amarula to put me in a South African frame of mind!

Click here for the full World Cup schedule.




Source:  The New York Times