h*h
发帖数: 27852 | 1 summary:
从小培养，以培养基本足球技术为主，少打比赛也不在乎比赛成绩，通过出卖成品青年
球星赚钱
How a Soccer Star Is Made
The youth academy of the famed dutch soccer club Ajax is grandiosely called
De Toekomst — The Future. Set down beside a highway in an unprepossessing
district of Amsterdam, it consists of eight well-kept playing fields and a
two-story building that houses locker rooms, classrooms, workout facilities
and offices for coaches and sports scientists. In an airy cafe and bar,
players are served meals and visitors can have a glass of beer or a
cappuccino while looking out over the training grounds. Everything about the
academy, from the amenities to the pedigree of the coaches — several of
them former players for the powerful Dutch national team — signifies
quality. Ajax once fielded one of the top professional teams in Europe. With
the increasing globalization of the sport, which has driven the best
players to richer leagues in England, Germany, Italy and Spain, the club has
become a different kind of enterprise — a talent factory. It manufactures
players and then sells them, often for immense fees, on the world market. “
All modern ideas on how to develop youngsters begin with Ajax,” Huw
Jennings, an architect of the English youth-development system, told me. “
They are the founding fathers.”
Goal
Goal
News and features from around the world of soccer and the Web.
Go to the Goal Blog
Multimedia
Slide Show
The Ajax Soccer Academy: From Boys to Pros
Interactive
The Evolution of the World Cup Ball
Related
Letter: From Boys to Pros (June 20, 2010)
Readers’ Comments
"Great piece! Reminds me of my days playing at the youth academy of Ajax."
John O'Brien, Los Angeles
Read Full Comment »
In America, with its wide-open spaces and wide-open possibilities, we
celebrate the “self-made athlete,” honor effort and luck and let children
seek their own course for as long as they can — even when that means living
with dreams that are unattainable and always were. The Dutch live in a
cramped, soggy nation made possible only because they mastered the art of
redirecting water. They are engineers with creative souls, experts at
systems, infrastructure and putting scant resources to their best use. The
construction of soccer players is another problem to be solved, and it’s
one they undertake with a characteristic lack of sentiment or illusion.
The first time I visited De Toekomst happened to coincide with the arrival
of 21 new players — 7- and 8-year-olds, mainly, all from Amsterdam and its
vicinity — who were spotted by scouts and identified as possible future
professionals. As I came upon them, they were competing in a series of four-
on-four games on a small, artificial-turf field with a wall around it, like
a hockey rink, so that balls heading out of bounds bounced right back into
play. It was late November and cold, with a biting wind howling off the
North Sea, but the boys skittered about in only their lightweight jerseys
and baggy shorts. Their shots on goal were taken with surprising force,
which kept the coaches who were serving as goalkeepers flinching and
shielding themselves in self-defense. The whole scene had a speeded-up,
almost cartoonish feel to it, but I certainly didn’t see anyone laughing.
After a series of these auditions, some players would be formally enrolled
in the Ajax (pronounced EYE-ox) academy. A group of men standing near me
looked on intently, clutching rosters that matched the players with their
numbers. One man, Ronald de Jong, said: “I am never looking for a result —
for example, which boy is scoring the most goals or even who is running the
fastest. That may be because of their size and stage of development. I want
to notice how a boy runs. Is he on his forefeet, running lightly? Does he
have creativity with the ball? Does he seem that he is really loving the
game? I think these things are good at predicting how he’ll be when he is
older.”
Like other professional clubs in Europe and around the world, Ajax operates
something similar to a big-league baseball team’s minor-league system —
but one that reaches into early childhood. De Jong, a solidly built former
amateur player, is one of some 60 volunteer scouts who fan out on weekends
to watch games involving local amateur clubs. (He works during the week as a
prison warden.) His territory includes the area between The Hague and
Haarlem — “the flower district, which is also a very good hunting ground
for players” is how he described it. He’ll observe a prospect for months
or even years, and players he recommends will also be watched by one of the
club’s paid scouts, a coach and sometimes the director of the Ajax youth
academy. But for some families, the first time they realize their boys are
under serious consideration is when a letter arrives from Ajax requesting
that they bring their sons in for a closer look, an invitation that is
almost never declined. To comprehend the impact of a summons from Ajax,
imagine a baseball-crazed kid from, say, North Jersey arriving home from
school one day to learn that he has been asked to come to Yankee Stadium to
perform for the team brass.
One player there was de Jong’s discovery, an 8-year-old who, he said, had
“talent that is off the charts.” But if this boy were to be accepted into
the academy, it would mean he had completed just the first of a succession
of relentless challenges. Ajax puts young players into a competitive caldron
, a culture of constant improvement in which they either survive and advance
or are discarded. It is not what most would regard as a child-friendly
environment, but it is one that sorts out the real prodigies — those
capable of playing at an elite international level — from the merely gifted.
About 200 players train at De Toekomst at any given time, from ages 7 to 19.
(All are male; Ajax has no girls’ program.) 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. One of them was
the coach of a boy I had been following, Dylan Donaten Nieuwenhuys, a
slightly built, soft-featured 15-year-old who began at Ajax when he was 7.
Dylan’s father, Urvin Rooi, served as a sort of guide for me. Gregarious
and opinionated, he introduced me to other parents, made sure I came inside
for hot drinks at the cafe and even gave me lifts on his scooter from the
training grounds back to the transit station. He was particularly useful in
translating a culture that was nothing like I had ever seen in many years of
reporting on American sports. When I observed that for all the seriousness
of purpose at De Toekomst, I was surprised that the players did not practice
more hours or play more games, Rooi said: “Of course, because they do not
want to do anything to injure them or wear them out. They’re capital. And
what is the first thing a businessman does? He protects his capital.”
When the boys start at the youth academy, Rooi said, 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. “The little
boys drink their tea out of Ajax cups,” he said. “They sleep in Ajax
pajamas under Ajax blankets.” As spring approaches, he continued, they get
nervous about whether they will be permitted to stay for another year. “
This is when they sometimes start to get bad school grades. They don’t
sleep. They wet their pants.”
Over time, though, the academy hardens them mentally as well as physically.
I asked Dylan 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.”
LATE ONE 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, started at the academy when
he was 7. 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 Champion’s League tournament, Europe’s highest club competition.)
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.
An emerging national-team star, Gregory van der Wiel, was not among the
names on the list, because he still plays for Ajax, but it is widely assumed
that he will be the next big sale. A heavily tattooed rap aficionado who
likes to spend his downtime in Miami’s South Beach, van der Wiel, now 22,
was sent away from Ajax at 14 because of a poor attitude — “I was an angry
little boy who had not yet learned to listen,” he told me — then was
invited back after spending three years in the academy of another Dutch pro
club, now defunct, which he recalls as having had inferior facilities,
coaching and even uniforms. I asked Martin Jol, the coach of Ajax’s first
team, if it was difficult for him to nurture young players knowing he would
lose them just as their talent blossomed. “I think that is the purpose of
Ajax, to develop players and bring them up to the first team as young as
possible,” he answered. “And then we sell them, not for peanuts but for a
lot of money.”
In the U.S., we think of money as corrupting sport, especially youth sport.
At Ajax, it is clarifying. With the stakes so high — so much invested and
the potential for so much in return — De Toekomst is a laboratory for
turning young boys into high-impact performers in the world’s most popular
game.
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.)
Ajax makes mistakes, plenty of them. It sends the wrong boys away, and some
of them become stars elsewhere with no compensation returning to the club.
As a production line, it is grossly inefficient; only a small percentage of
its youngsters become elite players. But the club does not throw money after
pure fantasy, encouraging visions of pro careers that never have a chance
of materializing for children who do not have the foundational talent to
reach such goals. The club decides which boys have potential — “Please
note,” its Web site advises, “Ajax’s youth academy cannot accept
individual external applications” — and then exposes them to scientific
training and constant pressure.
The director of the Ajax youth academy is Jan Olde Riekerink, an intense man
with piercing blue eyes who spends much of his day walking from field to
field, observing. He usually stands in the background, out of sight, before
coming forward to urge better effort or correct some fine point of technique
. “He is always watching, like a spy,” Urvin Rooi told me.
One Sunday in March, I was on the sideline of a game — Ajax’s 15-year-olds
matched up against the youth academy of another Dutch professional club —
when I noticed Riekerink behind me. He was by himself, bundled into his
parka and writing in a small notebook. With the Ajax boys up two goals and
dominating the action, I told him I was impressed by their skill. (I was
always impressed by the quality of play at De Toekomst.) “Really?” he
responded. “To me this is a disaster. They are playing with the wrong tempo
, too slow.”
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. At the Ajax academy, these exercises — designed to maximize
touches, or contact with the ball — are the main event. “You see this a
lot of places,” a coach from a pro club in Norway, who was observing at
Ajax, said to me. “Every program wants to maximize touches. But here it is
no-nonsense, and everything is done very hard and fast. It’s the Dutch
style. To the point and aggressive.”
Gregory van der Wiel’s description of the detail-oriented routine at De
Toekomst struck me as dead on: “You do things again and again and again,
then you repeat it some more times.”
I HEARD A LOT OF misconceptions about American soccer in the course of
reporting this story. Many people seemed to believe that the sport is still
a novelty in the United States, a game that we took up only in the last
couple of decades and that is not yet popular or perhaps is even disdained
by our best male athletes — an understandable view given the much greater
international success of the U.S. women’s teams. I had lunch one day with
Auke Kok, a historian and Dutch soccer journalist, who offered up his own
hypothesis. He talked of the “brute force” of American football as opposed
to the elegance and flair of great international soccer. “I’ve always
wondered if our football is too stylish, too feminine,” he said. “Am I
right that it’s too girlish for Americans?”
I told him that I was pretty sure that that is not the case. But it is no
surprise that the rest of the world might be flummoxed — and come up with
some offbeat theories — trying to explain why a nation as populous,
prosperous and sports-loving as the United States still does not play at the
level of the true superpowers of soccer.
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. The American men are certainly
improving. After finishing a surprising second to Brazil in last summer’s
Confederations Cup, the U.S. qualified with relative ease to be among the 32
teams competing in the World Cup finals in South Africa, starting June 12
against England. Few would be surprised if the U.S. emerged from group play
into the second round. But it would be a shocking, seismic upset if the
Americans somehow leapt past traditional powers like Germany, Italy or
Argentina — to say nothing of the favorites Brazil and Spain — to capture
the championship.
The other nation that shows up on any list of World Cup favorites is the
Netherlands, a perennial contender widely considered to be the best team
never to win the championship. Drawn from a nation of fewer than 17 million,
with a core of stars who trained at Ajax, the Dutch national team plays in
the Total Football tradition that relies on players who know what they want
to do with the ball before it reaches them and can move it on without
stopping it. The British author David Winner, in his book “Brilliant Orange
chess,” and the Dutch can be quite haughty about it. They abhor the cloying
defensive tactics associated with the Italians and the boot-and-chase way
the English played for years, and it has been observed that they sometimes
appear more intensely interested in the artfulness of a match than in the
result.
The Dutch style (indistinguishable from the Ajax style) even has its own
philosopher-king — Johan Cruyff, an Ajax star in the 1970s, considered just
one step down from Pelé in the pantheon of playing greats, who can sound
like a more erudite Yogi Berra. “Don’t run so much,” he once said,
meaning that players often cover lots of ground but to no effect. “You have
to be in the right place at the right moment, not too early, not too late.”
In March, I had a seat at the Amsterdam Arena, just across the highway from
De Toekomst, to watch the U.S. national team play the Dutch in a “friendly,
” a pre-World Cup tuneup and test. Thanks to a late goal by the U.S., the
final score was only 2-1, in favor of the Dutch, but the match was a version
of that old playground game: it’s our ball, and you can’t play with it.
The Dutch zipped it from player to player and from one side of the field to
the other while the Americans ran and ran, chasing the ball but rarely
gaining control. When the Americans did get the ball, their passes too often
flew beyond reach or directly out of bounds.
Other nations and professional clubs around the world play in a manner
similar to the Dutch — including, not coincidentally, Barcelona, one of the
most consistently successful clubs in Europe, and where Cruyff played after
leaving Ajax and then coached for eight seasons. What this type of play
demands is the highest order of individual skill: players with a wizardlike
ability to control the ball with either foot, any part of the foot, and work
it toward the goal through cramped spaces and barely perceptible lanes.
After the U.S.-Netherlands friendly, the Dutch coach praised the Americans
for having a “well-organized” defense — which was true but seemed to be a
case, unintentional perhaps, of damning with faint praise. But what else
could he say? The Americans did a good job of backing up and closing ranks,
a survival tactic that, along with several heroic saves by the goalkeeper
Tim Howard, kept the Dutch from running up six goals or so.
That was only one game, of course, but it seemed to bring into focus what I
had been observing at the Ajax youth academy, as well as learning about
American soccer. How the U.S. develops its most promising young players is
not just different from what the Netherlands and most elite soccer nations
do — on fundamental levels, it is diametrically opposed.
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.
The American approach is the more democratic view of sport. The aspirations
of each member of the team are equally valid. Elsewhere, there is more
comfort with singling out players for attention and individualized
instruction, even at the expense of the group. David Endt, a former Ajax
player and a longtime executive of the club, told me, “Here, we would
rather polish one or two jewels than win games at the youth levels.”
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. It’s not unusual for a teenager in the U.S. to play
100 or more games in a season, for two or three different teams, leaving
little time for training and little energy for it in the infrequent moments
it occurs. A result is that the development of our best players is stunted.
They tend to be fast and passionate but underskilled and lacking in savvy
compared with players elsewhere. “As soon as a kid here starts playing, he
’s got referees on the field and parents watching in lawn chairs,” John
Hackworth, the former coach of the U.S. under-17 national team and now the
youth-development coordinator for the Philadelphia franchise in Major League
Soccer, told me. “As he gets older, the game count just keeps increasing.
It’s counterproductive to learning and the No. 1 worst thing we do.”
The U.S. diverges all the way to the last stages of a player’s development.
In other places around the world, the late teenage years are a kind of
finishing school, a period when elite players grow into their bodies,
sharpen their technical ability and gain a more sophisticated understanding
of game tactics. At the same time, they are engaged in a fierce competition
to rise through the ranks of their clubs and reach the first team (the
equivalent of being promoted from a minor-league baseball team to the big-
league club).
An elite American player of that age is still likely to be playing in
college, which the rest of the soccer-playing world finds bizarre. He plays
a short competitive season of three or four months. If he possesses anything
approaching international-level talent, he probably has no peer on his team
and rarely one on an opposing squad. He may not realize it at the time, but
the game, in essence, is too easy for him.
Of the 23 players chosen for the U.S. team going to the World Cup, 15 of
them played at least some college soccer. Among the 8 who went straight into
the professional ranks are several of the team’s most accomplished
performers, including Landon Donovan, DaMarcus Beasley and Tim Howard, and
promising players like Jozy Altidore and Michael Bradley (son of the head
coach, Bob Bradley). Did they rise to the top of the American talent pool
because they bypassed college? Or did they skip it because they were the
rare Americans good enough as teenagers to attract legitimate professional
opportunities? The answer is probably a little bit of both. But you will
find no one in the soccer world who says they would have enhanced their
careers by staying in school.
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.”
ONE DAY AT AJAX, I stood beside an otherwise empty playing field and watched
for 30 minutes as a coach tutored Florian Josefzoon, a lithe, dreadlocked
18-year-old who is being groomed for stardom. Bryan Roy, a former member of
the Dutch national team, demonstrated a series of stutter-steps and
pirouettes, then kicked the ball to Josefzoon, on the right wing, who
trapped it and tried to match Roy’s moves as he turned and headed up the
right side. It was as if Roy were teaching him a dance. When Josefzoon
mastered one set of steps, Roy showed him something new. “He is one of the
talents,” Roy told me. “He’s a winger; I was a winger. He has been put
into a special program in order to bridge the gap between the under-18s and
the first team, so it is natural for me to be the one to help him.”
On an adjacent field, Ruben Jongkind, a consultant who mainly works with
Dutch track athletes, was altering the posture and gait of a 15-year-old
recently acquired from another Dutch club. Jongkind told me that while the
boy was actually quite fast, he did not have enough range of motion in his
vertical plane. “He was running like a duck, shuffling,” Jongkind said. “
That takes more energy, which is why we have to change his motor patterns,
so he can be as fast at the end of a game as the beginning.”
Jongkind had been working with this player for several weeks and said he had
progressed to “consciously able but not subconsciously able” to run with
the desired form, meaning that in the heat of competition, he reverted to
his old form. I pointed out that a fast but flawed runner in the United
States would likely be left alone. “Everything can be trained,” Jongkind
said. “You should always try to make an improvement if it’s possible.”
Ajax keeps a detailed dossier on each player from the moment he enters the
youth academy. 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.”
Versloot, with his spiky hair, longish sideburns and black-framed glasses,
has a sort of hipster-geek look. In November, I observed him putting boys
through some of their regular fitness tests. In one, a training group of 16-
year-olds ran 30-meter sprints as sensors registered their times in five-
meter increments. Versloot was most interested in their performances in the
first 5 and 10 meters. “That’s football distance,” he said. “It’s an
acceleration that occurs multiple times a game.”
When I came back in March, I watched several groups participate in a
grueling shuttle run, similar to what basketball players refer to as “
suicides” — a series of back-and-forth sprints, with short rest, in which
participants dropped out in exhaustion until only one was left. They wore
monitors to measure their heart rates. Versloot explained why: “If they say
, ‘I’m tired, I’m done,’ we can look later and say to them: ‘That’s
not what the heart monitor showed. It said you were only at 75 percent of
maximum. So you have to do it again in a week.’ They understand that it’s
not a punishment; it’s an opportunity to do better.”
De Toekomst is not where you come to hear a romantic view of sport. No one
pretends that its business is other than what it is. “We sold Wesley
Sneijder for a ridiculous amount of money,” Versloot said. “We can go on
for years based on what he was sold for.”
David Endt, who as manager of the first team is in charge of travel and
logistics, occupies a sort of unofficial role as the club’s conscience and
historian. His cubbyhole of an office atop the Amsterdam Arena is a mini-
museum, its walls plastered with all manner of memorabilia. He proudly
showed me a pair of scissors displayed above his desk, explaining that they
were brandished by an Ajax player as he tried to attack a teammate in a
famous locker-room incident a couple of decades ago. “Now I have them,” he
said with an impish grin. The youth academy, Endt said, is where the heart
of the club beats. “You can feel the atmosphere of what is Ajax. People
from clubs around the world come to visit, and they always want to know, ‘
What is the secret?’ But it is a matter of earth and air. We are in
Amsterdam, so we are a little bit adventurous, a little bit artistic, maybe
a little bit arrogant. You can observe what we do, but it is something you
cannot copy.”
Ajax won the European club championship as recently as 1995, the same year
that a decision in the European Court of Justice (the Bosman transfer ruling
, named after the Belgian player who brought the case) gave players the
power of free agency when their contracts end. It priced Ajax out of the top
tier of competition and left the continental championships to be fought
over by the big clubs in the English Premier League, Spain’s Liga, Germany
’s Bundesliga and Italy’s Serie A, which get vastly greater fees for
television rights. Endt told me that the need to sell players — just to
keep the club going and to bring money in to help pay the salaries of
players on the first team — is well understood but regretted. “We’re
realistic about it,” he said, “but the real Ajax man is crying inside.”
Ajax is listed on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, but 73 percent of the shares
remain in private hands and are not publicly traded. Just as no one
sugarcoats the mission at Ajax, the demands placed on children are not
minimized. “One of the things we say is we are never satisfied,” Endt said
. “That is both good and bad. It can be difficult to be in a situation
where whatever you do, you are told you should do better.”
Versloot said that, on average, one and a half products of De Toekomst per
season will rise to the first team and go on to a significant, well-
compensated pro career. Some of the others will gravitate to second- or
third-tier pro circuits or the high amateur ranks in the Netherlands, where
the best players make “black money,” under-the-table payments. The
pressure to emerge from the academy as one of its top products — and to
produce them — is immense. “It is always a very tense atmosphere here, for
everyone,” Versloot said. “You have to just get used to it.”
EARLY IN EACH NEW calendar year, youngsters in the Ajax academy are given
preliminary notice of their status. Some are told they are secure, others
that they are in danger of being sent away in the spring. A current 16-year-
old at Ajax said he still recalled this conversation from when he was 8. (
Ajax discourages players who have not yet signed pro contracts from talking
to reporters, so he agreed to talk only if his name was not used.) “It was
my second year, and they said: ‘You are in doubt. We don’t yet know if you
’ll be one of the boys who get to stay,’ ” he recounted. “They said I
was a good technical player, but I was too passive and had to become more
aggressive.”
This player is now considered among the best in his age group, but like all
boys who stay at Ajax for many years, he has seen many classmates leave. “
My best friend left two years ago,” he said. “I don’t speak to him
anymore. He thought I was not in touch enough, that I was not supporting him
. He was furious. I realized he was just a football friend and that you can
’t have real friends at Ajax.”
Ricardo van Rhijn, who just signed a pro contract and is captain of the
Dutch under-19 national team, described the annual leave-taking in somewhat
more benign terms. “At a certain moment, we have to say goodbye,” he told
me. “It’s hard, but every boy knows the reality of the situation. They
know they have to leave and close the chapter of Ajax.”
Urvin Rooi’s son, Dylan, said that in his current training group of 15-year
-olds, several new boys had been brought in for tryouts, and one had already
been told he was accepted. It sounded like being in a workplace in which
your possible replacement had already been installed at the next desk and
given your identical tasks, to see if he could do them better.
Dylan’s father is involved in a business that builds homes on the Dutch
island Curaçao. His mother is a psychotherapist. It is not unusual for
players at De Toekomst to come from middle- or even upper-middle-class
backgrounds, and virtually none come from poverty in a nation where the
standard of living is high and literacy is 99 percent. The demographics are
not much different from the soccer-playing population in the United States,
where most players still come from suburban comfort. In the Netherlands,
though, youth players may end up with less education than their parents in
order to pursue professional soccer careers, starting with a less-demanding
high-school curriculum than they otherwise might take.
Dylan at first spoke to me on the condition that I would not use his name
but then insisted that it be included, reasoning that he had related his “
personal thoughts, and people should know the name behind the thoughts.” We
spoke at a delicatessen in his neighborhood in central Amsterdam, where a
picture of him in his uniform hung on the wall. (The contrast between his
introspection and the unrevealing interviews given by most American athletes
was striking.) He said he guessed that probably only two or three of the
boys he began with when he was 7 would have pro careers in their sport. “I
would feel very bad if I’m not one of them,” he said. “I have tried
everything I can do to make it. I haven’t done as much in school as I could
. I would feel like I’ve been wasting my time all these years. I would get
very depressed.”
I asked if some of what he learned at Ajax — focus, perseverance, the
ability to perform under pressure — might benefit him no matter what he
ends up doing. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “We’re training for
football, not for anything else.”
The Ajax development system has its critics. Some assume that because the
first team is no longer a competitive force in Europe and does not even
consistently finish first in the Eredivisie, the top Dutch professional
league, it is no longer turning out top talent. But if all those who trained
at De Toekomst now playing elsewhere were to come home — Wesley Sneijder
from Italy; Rafael van der Vaart from Spain; Ryan Babel, Johnny Heitinga and
Nigel de Jong from their teams in England — Ajax could compete with any
club in the world. The more substantial criticism is that Ajax has become
too mercantile and coldblooded. “I feel like they’ve lost some of the
spirit of the place,” John Hackworth, the former U.S. youth coach, told me.
“What made them great, these heroes they create, now go on to stardom so
quickly somewhere else.”
I talked with Huw Jennings at the youth academy of Fulham, in London, as we
watched a group of 10-year-olds train. They were louder and more physically
animated than the boys I saw in Amsterdam. “What they do at Ajax is a
little rote for my taste,” Jennings said. “We are more apt to let the game
be the teacher.” He added that he believed Ajax “had become a caricature
of itself.” The last time he visited, he sensed that the dealmaking had
breached the complex itself. “That dining area was crawling with agents,”
he said, “right among the players and their parents.” (I did not see this
during my visits.)
Jennings acknowledged that, based on the methods pioneered by Ajax, top
clubs all over Europe were scouting very young kids and enrolling them in
their academies. A book published in 2009 by the British journalist Chris
Green, “Every Boy’s Dream,” estimated that 10,000 were being trained by
clubs in England. They are cheap investments for clubs wanting to scoop up
every boy with even a remote chance of one day becoming a top footballer.
Jennings said that his scouts, in response to the “unsuitability of the
indigenous population of Britain” — children who are too sedentary and
spend their time with video games — were increasingly focused “on the
inner city of London, among Africans, Eastern Europeans and Caribbeans.”
Fulham, like Ajax, is often a seller of talent. It recently sold a 20-year-
old to Manchester United for seven million pounds, or more than $10 million.
“It’s a little ugly talking about the financial terms,” Jennings said.
“I don’t like to do it. It feels not too far off from the slave trade.”
Everyone draws the line somewhere. Jennings told me that he recently
received a call from a rival club asking if it could schedule a game against
his “elite 5s” — 5-year-olds. He replied, “We don’t have elite 5s, but
we’ll play your expectant mothers.”
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.
I was at the youth academy of D.C. United — one worn artificial-turf field,
no locker rooms, a world away from De Toekomst — on what turned out to be
a moment of triumph for one of the bedrock franchises of Major League Soccer
, the top U.S. professional league. Just the day before, the team announced
that it signed its best youth player to a pro contract. Andy Najar, who was
17 and immigrated with his parents from Honduras as a teenager, was inserted
straight into D.C. United’s starting lineup right after dropping out of
high school during his junior year. The signing drew only modest press
coverage, probably a good thing for the team and an instance of pro soccer’
s still-under-the-radar status in the U.S. being of benefit to the league. (
The parade of players graduating from high school and jumping straight to
the N.B.A. proved controversial enough that it’s no longer allowed.)
Najar, considered an exceptional talent, will very likely be the rare player
to go from high school right onto an M.L.S. roster. But the decoupling of
soccer education from higher education is an avowed goal of executives at
the top levels of the American game. M.L.S. has been signing about a dozen
young players a year — some from its teams’ academies, others who have
already played a year or two in college — and putting them either on pro
rosters or into development programs. (Under this setup, called Generation
Adidas, money is put aside for players’ future college tuitions.) 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.
Also, dozens of top amateur soccer clubs around the country have been
designated by the U.S. Soccer Federation as academies, with the intent that
they will offer training on a European-based model — more practices, fewer
games, greater emphasis on technical skill. They have, however, already
drawn criticism that their coaches can’t break an old habit: trying, first
and foremost, to win rather than focusing on the stated goal of developing
elite individual talent.
The way we approach youth soccer in the U.S. is no more thoughtless than how
we groom talent in baseball or basketball. All the same syndromes apply.
Overplay. Too little practice. The courting of injuries — for example, the
spate of elbow operations for pitchers in their midteens brought on by
coaches who leave them on the mound for too many innings. The difference is
that because these are, largely, our sports, we have a head start on the
rest of the world and therefore a bigger margin for error.
Ajax is a fulcrum of the worldwide soccer market, exporting top players to
the world’s best clubs, because they take very young players and shape them
. The U.S., by comparison, is still a peripheral participant. In the past
decade, increasing numbers of Americans have gone overseas to play for
European clubs, many of them signing contracts as teenagers. But with just a
couple of exceptions, they are complementary players, not the star-quality
performers who make up the rosters of the World Cup favorites.
How much does it matter for the U.S. to ascend to the top rung of worldwide
soccer and become a serious threat to win a World Cup? The effort itself
would bring some welcome changes. Players whose training was paid for by
professional clubs, rather than by their parents, would likely be treated as
investments and therefore developed with more intelligence and care for
their physical well-being.
But club-financed training is the entry level to a rough-and-tumble, often
merciless worldwide soccer economy. Elements of it clash with American
sensibilities. What Ajax pioneered, and still executes at a high level, can
look uncomfortably like the trafficking of child athletes.
Ronald de Jong invited me to go scouting with him one Saturday. He had his
eye on a specific target — “a 2004,” he said, referring to a birth year.
A 5-year-old whom he had seen and was checking in with every month or so.
This boy might not even be in school yet, I pointed out. “I don’t think he
is,” de Jong said with a slight smile, as if he recognized the absurdity.
“I believe he’s in day care.”
Ajax’s success would not be possible if it did not draw from a well-
organized, well-financed soccer culture. Any town of any size in the
Netherlands has an amateur club, with highly trained coaches and an academy
for its own top-level players. (It is said that Johan Cruyff was the only
Dutchman ever granted his coaching license without having to go through a
rigorous, yearlong course.)
I met de Jong at the train station in Leiden, and we drove to a particularly
well-heeled club called Quick Boys, in Katwijk. A spacious locker-room
complex with a private club on top had been built with funds from
benefactors connected with the tulip industry and local fishing interests.
The bar in the private club was an elaborate wooden sculpture shaped like a
herring boat.
De Jong, whose only material benefit from his association with Ajax is free
admission to the first team’s games, showed a card that identified him as a
scout and checked a schedule of games on a computer screen. As we
approached the field where our 5-year-old was to play, he spotted him right
away and said, “There’s the guy!”
I couldn’t tell for sure, but it seemed to me that the guy, Délano van der
Heyden, born in September 2004, might actually be small even for a 5-year-
old. The ball at his feet came up almost to his knees. He was “playing up,
” competing against boys as old as 9. When the game started, he was exactly
as advertised: remarkable. Délano kept up with the other boys, a few of
whom fell on contact and had to be attended by coaches, which he never did.
He showed the ability to kick with either foot. He could receive the ball
with his back to his offensive end and turn, with the ball still in his
control, and head toward the goal.
De Jong kept up a running commentary as we watched, becoming increasingly
excited. As Délano cleverly dribbled around a bigger boy who came charging
at him: “You see, they will try to physically dominate him, but he will
always seek a football solution. He always has a plan.” As the
concentration of other boys drifted: “He is not looking at planes in the
sky; he is looking at the ball.” At halftime, as Délano conferred with his
father, who was coaching his team: “You see how nicely they are talking?
You can tell he comes from a good nest.” Later, after Délano weaved
through three boys and blistered a shot just wide of the goal: “This is
unbelievable! At this age, I’ve never seen a player like this!”
Délano’s team was visiting at Quick Boys; his own club was smaller, a
concern for de Jong, who feared it might not fill his needs. He had already
asked Délano’s father to put him in a bigger club for the following season
. But what if the family did not want to? “Then I’ll ask Jan Olde
Riekerink to call his father,” he said, referring to the stern director of
De Toekomst. “Usually people will listen to Jan Olde.”
Even if Délano turned out to be a world-class prodigy, it would be at least
a dozen years before he could play for Ajax’s first team. He could not
even enter De Toekomst for another two years. But I understood de Jong’s
interest. Délano was well worth this investment of time and attention,
because one day he might be sold to Chelsea or Real Madrid or Juventus for
millions.
Michael Sokolove, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the author of
“Warrior Girls,” about the injury epidemic among young female athletes.
A version of this article appeared in print on June 6, 2010, on page MM40 of
the Sunday Magazine. | S*****e
发帖数: 6676 | | h*h
发帖数: 27852 | 3 summary:
从小培养，以培养基本足球技术为主，少打比赛也不在乎比赛成绩，通过出卖成品青年
球星赚钱 | h*h
发帖数: 27852 | 4 培养不培养，差别很大
【在 S*****e 的大作中提到】
: 球星是天生的，不用培养。
|
|
