Youth Development: The Euro Stars
 
  When a third of your country lies below sea level, you need a little blue sky thinking to keep your head above water. Fortunately that’s an area in which the Dutch are masters. For more than a thousand years this tiny country has achieved the impossible and successfully reclaimed land from the ocean. In football, their accomplishments have been similarly miraculous. With a population numbering fewer than 15 million, a professional league only 50 years old and a comparative lack of financial resources, they have managed to consistently compete against the bigger nations of Planet Football. How? By becoming experts in youth development.
 
  No other country in the world has squeezed so much talent from such scarce resources as Holland. And if it’s Ajax who have a reputation as Europe’s premier producer of youth talent, the truth is that in every corner of this tiny nation, clubs are producing top-class footballers – and they have been doing for years.
 
  “Ajax were always known for homegrown players,” says Andy Roxburgh, the former Scotland manager who is now UEFA’s technical director. “They had wise old heads like Rinus Michels, Leo Beenhakker and Louis van Gaal who paid a lot of attention to the youth teams and talked a lot about grassroots. Rinus would talk about having a ‘red thread’ from the top of the club to the bottom. Ajax’s youth system was very well promoted, shall we say, but they certainly weren’t the only club doing it.”
 
  These days, says Edward Sturing, the head of PSV Eindhoven’s youth academy, five clubs dominate youth development: Ajax, PSV, Feyenoord, AZ Alkmaar and Heerenveen. “Across all the age groups, the successful teams are spread between those five clubs, but no one club dominates,” adds the former Holland international. “Ajax have a great programme, but it’s no better than many other clubs.”
 
  The reason, says Roxburgh, is simple: “In Holland, they don’t just make the kids do training drills. They’re given time to practise on their own so they can develop individual skills. The preparation that goes into youth development in Holland is very detailed.”
 
  But what exactly does this detailed preparation involve? Asking the question to Sturing is like throwing a hungry dog a bone. “OK, let me show you on my laptop,” he says, dragging FourFourTwo to his desk in his plush office inside PSV’s youth academy. The next 20 minutes is like being back at school in a science lesson, as detailed coaching schedules, diagrams and charts for all the different age-groups flash before our eyes.
 
  “With our seven to 12-year-olds the first thing we work on is individual skill, playing on their own,” Sturing explains with gusto. “Then we move them into one-on-one situations. Then into two attackers against one defender. After that it’s an eight-versus-eight game situation where winning is not important and the emphasis is on taking risks and playing attacking
  football. You can see with players like Arjen Robben [a PSV youth product] that this is the way he learnt to play the game.”
 
  This blueprint is not unique to PSV, either: it’s written and handed down by the KNVB, the Dutch FA, and all the country’s professional clubs buy into the vision. “When we play 11 versus 11 we must play 4-3-3,” says Sturing, pointing at yet another diagram on his computer. “It’s a more difficult system, but it’s more flexible and it means players can adapt more easily.”
 
  The small details are all taken care of. The KNVB states that for every under-17 team, there must be two head coaches (“It’s a difficult age, when boys become men,” explains Sturing, pointing at his head), while at every club there is a dedicated skills coach and, remarkably, two “co-ordination
  trainers”. “The biggest problem for seven to 12-year-olds is ball control and body control,” explains Sturing, dragging us outside to illustrate his point.
 
  On the training ground, we find four 12-year-old boys decked out in distinctive red and white PSV shirts with black shorts. The only time a ball is used is when they begin a one-handed throwing and catching exercise. The rest of the time they’re doing roly-polys, handstands and cartwheels. “You have to be the boss of your own body – and we can coach that.” Never mind total football, this is total training.
 
  But the top clubs do not work alone. Without the thriving local football scene they would struggle. There is no organised schools football, but there are nearly 2500 local clubs of which 95 percent have a fully functioning youth set-up. Every weekend all those clubs play competitive matches in the age groups between seven and 19. That’s a lot of football and a lot of footballers.
  “In Holland the pyramid is very big,” explains Sturing, making a triangle with his two hands. “To have so many local clubs for such a small country is amazing, because the base of the pyramid is so big there is a lot of quality at the top.”
 
  So in terms of young players, the Dutch have quality and quantity, but it’s what they do with the raw materials that gives them an edge. Few can dispute that the best coaches in the world are produced in Holland. In 1999, FIFA honoured Rinus Michels as coach of the century. At last year’s World Cup, there were four Dutch coaches – Marco van Basten (Holland), Guus Hiddink (Australia), Leo Beenhakker (Trinidad and Tobago) and Dick Advocaat (South Korea). In contrast there wasn’t a single Englishman.
 
  In Zeist, just east of Utrecht, the only dedicated coaches’ academy in the world has been producing top coaches for the past 30 years. Today, there are more than 100 Dutch coaches working around the world and if CVs are anything to go by, the best of the current crop is Guus Hiddink. “Because we are such a small country,” says Hiddink, “we have to be very inventive. That’s why we get the best out of our young players and that’s why our training for coaches is long and hard and spread over many years.”
 
  Youth coaches are particularly valued in Holland, with jobs in a club’s youth set-up very prestigious. Half of the youth coaches at Ajax, Feyenoord and PSV are former players. “I think if you want to be a good coach you need to start right at the bottom,” says Sturing. “I’ve coached at all the different age groups and it’s the only way you can make mistakes and try different things. If you start at the top level you can’t make mistakes because you then have a problem.”
 
  All of this begs the question: if Holland has the best coaches and the best youth system, why have they never won the World Cup? It’s a whole different discussion of course, but if there is a criticism of the Dutch youth system, it’s that there is too much emphasis on skill, technique and individualism. They may have produced some of the world’s greatest attacking talents, but can you name a truly world-class Dutch defender? Henk Span, editor of Dutch football magazine Hard Gras, certainly struggles. “Ronald Koeman was more a ‘libero’ than a defender,” he notes. “At the moment Khalid Boulahrouz is regarded as the best in Holland and he’s not looked good enough at Chelsea.”
 
  But there are other reasons for Holland’s failure on the world’s biggest stage. “The Dutch are obsessed with playing beautiful football,” says Span. “We’d rather lose than win by playing ugly and that’s why we’ve never been world champions.”
 
  One country which has managed to become world champions and play great football is France. Over the last 10 years alone, they’ve won the World Cup (1998), the European Championships (2000) and reached another World Cup Final last year. The reason is simple: they’ve moved ahead of the rest of Europe in the development of players. On matchday one of this season’s Champions League, the country with the most players in the 32 starting line-ups was Brazil with 65. Next was France with 37. Portugal had 24, Italy 22, Holland 15, Spain 15, England just 14 while there were only 12 Germans.
 
  That France is now producing more top-quality players than any other country in Europe is largely down to George Boulogne. In 1966, he sat down with the French Football Federation and decided the national team weren’t good enough. So, in 1973, he created the French academy system that was to lay the foundations for les Bleus becoming world champions 25 years later. Along with the club academies there are now nine regional elite centres (Clairefontaine is just one), where the best players spend the week before returning to their clubs at the weekend. Club academies and regional centres are residential and incorporate full-time football coaching alongside education.
 
  Former Monaco and Scotland midfielder John Collins believes that offering quality education at the academies is the key to ensuring unprecedented access to young footballers. “There is a lot of emphasis on education because the players live at the academies,” says the Hibs boss. “They come in at the age of 14 and it’s train, school, train, school. They are under complete
  surveillance all the time so they have to work at their grades. At Monaco there were 14 classrooms within the club’s stadium.”
 
  Over four years, between the age of 12 and 16, a French boy attending an academy receives 2304 hours of training, twice as much as in England. But it’s not just more quantity, there’s quality too. “It was Gerard Houllier’s idea to introduce what is known as ‘preformation’ training,” says Andy Roxburgh. “The idea was that between the ages of 13 and 16 most of the coaching should concentrate on individual work and developing technique. Gerard believed that if a player got to the age of 16 and his technique wasn’t up to scratch there was no way of ever catching up.”
 
  Of course, academies aren’t the only place to play football – Johan Cruyff and George Best didn’t learnt in an academy, they learnt on the street – but cultural changes in Europe have seen street football decline for 20 years. “Marcello Lippi is always bemoaning that kids are playing far less street football today,” says Roxburgh. “In central and northern Europe we really need to try and recreate an environment where there is more spontaneity and freedom of expression with a football. They play a lot of futsal in Spain and Portugal, which is what the Brazilians do, and it’s great for the grass roots, but it’s not so big in Europe. In the past, there were plenty of kids playing in the street so there were plenty of lads to choose from. Now, though, there have to be structures in place in order to find the best players.”
 
  Roxburgh’s favourite catchphrase is “chance or design”. As head of grass roots development for UEFA, he has to be diplomatic about who are the good, the bad and the ugly when it comes to youth development, but it doesn’t take a genius to gauge how alarmed he is about certain countries buying too many foreign players. “You can either take a chance, buy lots of players and hope they work out,” he says, “or you can do things by design and produce your own. English clubs have the money to buy players, and no restrictions on how many they can buy, so there will always be a glass ceiling for their own academy players.”
 
  Having too much money is a lame excuse, he adds, pointing to the likes of Real Madrid, Barcelona, Lyon, Manchester United and Inter Milan as big clubs that are investing heavily in youth. “Most of the top clubs are doing it now because it’s cheaper in the long run,” he says. “Barcelona are a great example. [Lionel] Messi is Argentine, but he’s been with them since he was 12. They’ve produced [Cesc] Fabregas, Xavi, [Carlos] Puyol and [Andres] Iniesta.”
 
  So if Holland and France have got youth development licked, what about Spain, a country, like England, with a professional league that attracts the cream of the world’s football talent?
 
  A glance at the national youth teams’ record makes impressive reading. "La Seleccion" has won the European Under-17 championship six times, more than any other country, the UEFA Under-19 title four times and in 1999, with Iker Casillas in goal and Xavi anchoring the midfield, they claimed their first ever FIFA World Under-20 Championship.
 
  Spain also boast one of Europe’s best youth clubs – Antiguoko. Never heard of them? Fans of Liverpool and Everton should sit up and take note, because both Xabi Alonso and Mikel Arteta are graduates of the Basque club, whose under-16s made it to the national championship play-offs this year. Up against the youth sides of Real Madrid, Barcelona and Espanyol, they eventually lost to a Valencia side which included two players who had already featured for the first team. That Antiguoko, an amateur club with no official income and no stadium, even made it that far was nothing short of miraculous. So good are they at developing players that Liverpool are trying to sign them up as their feeder club, a move which is causing a major stink in San Sebastian because for years Antiguoko have had an agreement with Real Sociedad. The system in Spain usually has one main club being fed by several smaller local clubs. The parent club pays the feeder club a “salary” and that ensures they get first pick of the best players.
 
  “The Spanish system is pretty comprehensive,” says Englishman Phil Ball, resident of San Sebastian and author of Morbo: The Story of Spanish Football. “They combine schools football and club football, so that one weekend the kids will play with the school and a week later they will play for the local clubs. The coaching is more specialised at the clubs and the best players at the local clubs then get invited to train with the professional club, but the school and club teams are being monitored all the time so nobody can slip through the net.”
 
  One player earning rave reviews in San Sebastian at the moment is an 11-year-old called Harry Ball, Phil’s son (“a chip off the old block” jokes Ball senior). He’s recently been invited to train with Real Sociedad. “He’s not allowed to officially play for Real until he’s 14, so until then he’ll keep
  playing for his school and his local club and we’ll see what happens.”
 
  Phil Ball was a half-decent player himself and once had trials for Lincolnshire County Schools. His experiences in Spain and England couldn’t be more different. “I found the county system in England very elitist,” says Ball. “Once you got in the team you stayed there, and that was that, really. I find it amazing that people in England are getting upset that plans for an elite academy [the FA’s national centre at Burton upon Trent] have been shelved. Why should they concentrate on a small number of top players? They should be spreading the resources throughout the regions and supporting the local clubs.”
 
  Ball also has some interesting views on the quality of youth football in Spain compared to England and believes that when it comes to the big boys, La Liga, and not the Premiership, rules the roost. “Whenever I go back to England I watch kids of the same age as Harry and the main emphasis seems to be on running, breaking sweat and kicking the **** out of each other. It’s like the Premiership. Everybody says that because three English clubs made it to the semi-finals of the Champions League the Premiership is the best, but if you’ve got a Russian oligarch shouldn’t you be expected to make the semi-finals? For me, the best judge of whether a league has strength in depth is the UEFA Cup, where the middling teams play each other, and Spain has dominated that competition for the last two years.”
 
  The year 1995 was a great one for Ajax, but a grave one for Dutch football. On May 25 at the Ernst Happel Stadium in Vienna, Patrick Kluivert’s 85th-minute goal against AC Milan earned Ajax their first European Cup in 22 years. Louis van Gaal’s side, who had won the UEFA Cup three years before, contained eight homegrown players. Seven months later, though, the world changed forever. When Belgian footballer Jean-Marc Bosman won his landmark ruling in 1995, the floodgates were flung wide open for out-of-contract players in the European Union to change clubs without a transfer fee. All of a sudden it was almost impossible for all but the richest clubs to hold on to their best players beyond the terms of their existing deals.   

Within two years of that Champions League triumph in Vienna, seven of the Ajax players had left to play in England, Spain or Italy. It had happened before, of course. After their hat-trick of European titles in the 1970s coach Rinus Michels and the two crucial Johans, Cruyff and Neeskens, were plying their trade in Barcelona. The difference with the Bosman ruling was that it gave an unprecedented freedom to all professional players.