India’s Saina Nehwal wins Swiss Open title
Indian badminton player Saina Nehwal has won the Swiss Open Grand Prix Gold title with a victory over the Korean player Ji Hyun Sung in Switzerland.
Nehwal, who was ranked second in the tournament, won 21-13, 21-14 in 43 minutes in the women’s singles final.
Saina Nehwal is ranked fourth in the world
The world number 4 player defeated Ji Hyun, ranked number 19.
Nehwal, the first Indian to win a Super series tournament, won a gold at the Commonwealth Games and the India Grand Prix gold last month.
Last year Nehwal also won three Super Series titles – Singapore, Indonesia and Hong Kong Open.
The 21-year-old shuttler, from the northern state of Haryana, was the first Indian woman to reach the singles quarter-finals at the Olympics.
Nehwal is also the first Indian to win the World Junior Badminton Championships.
Last year she was awarded the country’s highest sporting honour, the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna award.
Reference Link : http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-12802326
Courtesy : BBC News
Tejaswini wins with a world record
Tejaswini Sawant.
NEW DELHI: Tejaswini Sawant became the first Indian woman shooter to be crowned a World champion when she won the 50m rifle prone event with a World record 597 in the 50th World shooting championship in Munich on Sunday.
The 29-year-old Tejaswini shot a series of 100, 100, 100, 99, 99 and 99 to pip Joanna Ewa Nowakowska of Poland, who also equalled the world record with a 597, with a better tally of inner tens, 41 to 39.
Olga Dovgun of Kazakhstan, who has so far shot the World record thrice in prone, had to settle for bronze with a 596, while the seasoned Sonja Pfeilschifter of Germany had to be content with fourth place.
Since women’s prone does not figure in the Olympics, there was no question of Tejaswini doubling her joy with an Olympic quota place.
The soft-spoken shooter from Kolhapur, Tejaswini joined Abhinav Bindra and Manavjit Singh Sandhu as the only two other Indian shooters to have won a World championship gold. Of course, they had done it in Olympics events, air rifle and trap respectively.
Among the juniors, Asher Noria had won the double trap gold in the current edition with a junior World record, while Navnath Fartade had won the gold in air rifle in the last edition in Zagreb, Croatia, in 2006.
It was a quantum leap in international performance for Tejaswini, as she had won only a bronze in the World Cup in rifle 3-position event so far. That performance, when she shot a National record 588 also happened in Munich, last year.
In fact, Tejaswini had not competed in the prone event on the world stage so far, and had been restricting her entries only to the Asian Championship and the Asian Games in Doha. With the rigorous selection trials cutting her options down, she capitalised on her chance, in an unfamiliar event, to stamp her class.
For someone, who had shot into prominence, bagging gold medals during the last Commonwealth Games in Melbourne in 2006, Tejaswini had to grapple with her form over the years.
This effort would propel her to go for the Olympic quota place in the 3-position and air rifle events for the London Games.
The 20-year-old Heena Sidhu shot 382 in women’s air pistol and missed the final by one point. She had a below par last card, in an otherwise good series of 95, 98, 97 and 92.
With Annuraj Singh (381) and Shweta Chaudhry (378) pulling their weight, the Indian team was placed fifth, a solitary point behind the bronze medallist China, and four points behind the gold medallist Australia in a strong field of 37 teams.
In the junior section of the women’s prone event, C. Rekha did well to shoot the third best score of 594, but had to take the sixth spot on the basis of lesser number of inner 10s. It was a 10-point jump to her effort for the team on Saturday. She had a series of 98, 100, 99, 100, 98, 99.
In women’s skeet, Arti Singh retired from the competition after a round of 18, on Saturday.
The results: Women: 50m rifle prone: 1. Tejaswini Sawant 597 (EWR) 41x; 2. Joanna Ewa Nowakowska (Pol) 597 (EWR) 39x; 3. Olga Dovgun (Kaz) 596; 45. Meena Kumari 590. Team: 1. Switzerland 1780 (111x); 2. Germany 1780 (110x); 3. Korea 1779; 10. India 1768.
Junior women: 1. Sharon Barazani (US) 596; 2. Sarah Beard (US) 595; 3. Jennifer McIntosh (GBR) 594 (44x); 6. C. Rekha 594 (28x); 59. Aparajita Tiwary 580. Team: 1. Czech Republic 1780 (WRJ); 2. Austria 1772 (99x); 3. Ukraine 1772 (92x); 19. India 1747.
Skeet: 1. Kimberly Rhode (US) 97 (72); 2. Wei Ning (Chn) 96 (71); 3. Danka Bartekova (Svk) 95 (72). Team: 1. US 205; 2. China 204; 3. Slovakia 201.
Junior women: 1. Virginia Orlando (Ita) 70; 2. Jaiden Grinnell (US) 68 (2); 3. Zhang Yue (Chn) 68 (1). Team: 1. US 197; 2. China 194; GBR 186 .
Reference Link
http://hindu.com/2010/08/09/stories/2010080953691700.htm
Courtesy
The Hindu
Saina zooms to second in world rankings
India’s champion shuttler Saina Nehwal moved one step closer to becoming the queen of world badminton when she became the World No. 2 in the latest Badminton World Federation rankings released on Thursday.
Incidentally, Saina joins former world junior chess champion Koneru Humpy as the only Indian woman player to be ranked world No. 2 in any discipline.
“Definitely, this is great news. But I would repeat again that these rankings are the direct outcome of the consistency at the highest level. And this also means bigger responsibility on me in the days to come,” remarked Saina about her latest achievement.
The 20-year-old Hyderabadi was ranked World No. 3 only recently after her grand winning streak. For someone who has taken a truly deserving break after completing an incredible hat-trick winning three international titles including two Super Series last month, Saina was just planning to be back in the rigorous training schedule from tomorrow.
“Yes, I am pleased with the timing of the latest ranking as it comes ahead of the World Championship in Paris next month,” she said.
“Things are happening so fast and so good. It is a nice feeling to be out there in top three of the world,” says Saina recovering from a bout of cold and cough. “I also take the opportunity to thank all those who have been with me especially my coaching staff headed by Gopi sir, and special thanks to physio Kiran,” she added.
For his part, chief national coach Pullela Gopi Chand also felt it was great news for Indian badminton itself. “Imagine the kind of impact it would have on the other Indian teammates when we leave for the World Championship. For here is Saina who has given a new dimension to the women’s badminton itself in particular and to Indian sport in general,” he pointed out. “I definitely look at this very good news as a huge fillip to the sport itself and should only spur the others to look far beyond the horizon,” he said to a query.
But Gopi also has an advice to Saina hoping that she stays focused on priorities like good training programme, adequate rest and taking proper diet. “These things look simple but help you a long way,” h he said.
“I think Saina has stepped into the big league with her great performances at the highest level of late. She has finally started translating her immense potential with the desired consistency in big events. This is important,” Gopi remarked.
Dronacharya S. M. Arif said this was great news for Indian badminton and that he would not be surprised if Saina becomes the World No. 1.
“She has the potential, tremendous will power and great commitment coupled with inclination to keep improving,” he pointed out.
Dr Harvir Singh, Saina’s father, said by the grace of God and with so many people helping her, his daughter could achieve all these things. “I only wish she continues to get this support in future also,” he added.
Reference Link
http://www.thehindu.com/sport/other-sports/article517023.ece?homepage=true
Courtesy
The Hindu
Savouring a grand victory, Spain erupts in celebrations
| First-time World Cup winners return to grand welcome in Madrid; thousands take to the streets to cheer nation’s heroes |
PHOTO: AP
Spanish captain and goalkeeper Iker Casillas (left) shows the World Cup trophy to the daughters of Prince Felipe (third right) and Princess Letizia (fourth right) as Queen Sofia (right) looks on, during a reception for the Spanish team at the Royal Palace in Madrid on Monday.
MADRID: Spain erupted in wild celebrations on Sunday after the national football team won its first World Cup following Andrés Iniesta’s extra-time goal in a 1-0 victory over the Netherlands.
“Iniesta Presidente! Iniesta Presidente!” chanted one group of fans as they marched along the centre of the Gran Via, Madrid’s main thoroughfare, in the early hours.
An estimated 3 lakh people formed a sea of red and yellow to pack Madrid’s downtown Paseo de Recoletos boulevard to watch the final from Johannesburg on giant screens and celebrated at the final whistle as Spain became the world and European champions.
The celebrations were easily the biggest ever held in living memory in Spain. Fireworks lit up the city sky as people herded out onto the streets. Television shots showed exuberant partying in jammed town squares across the country, from Zaragoza in the northeast to Seville in the southwest.
Spain — long tagged a perennial underachiever before winning the 2008 European Championship to end a 44-year title drought — had never before gone past the quarterfinals. The team finished fourth at the 1950 World Cup when the playoff system was different.
Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, whose poll numbers have dropped due to the country’s economic woes, said he celebrated the win with some Catalan sparkling wine. It was a fitting toast for a team with so many players from his favourite club, Barcelona.
A deafening roar rose from Madrid, including the sound of the blaring vuvuzela horns imported from South Africa and shouts of ‘ Viva España,’ when captain and goalkeeper Íker Casillas lifted the World Cup trophy at Soccer City.
One banner amid the masses in downtown Madrid read “Octopus Paul, Forever!” with a crudely drawn picture of the octopus from Germany, who had forecast Spain’s victory.
Traffic jams emerged spontaneously throughout the city as motorists took to the streets, honking their horns and waving Spain’s yellow and red flag from windows.
Television images even showed hordes of people waving Spanish flags in Barcelona, where more than 1.1 million people protested on Saturday against a court ruling that their autonomous Catalonia region, home to many separatists demanding a breakaway nation, must remain a part of Spain.
The night sky of Alcorcón, a working class neighbourhood of Madrid, was lit up by fireworks and the bar patrons toasted each other with beer and sangria on a sweltering summer night, dancing in the streets and dodging firecrackers tossed by other fans.
Police helicopters hovered over Madrid into the early hours and riot police protected major monuments.
The victory dominated the country’s media, with newspapers paying tribute to the first Spanish team to claim football’s most prestigious trophy and television stations replaying Iniesta’s winning goal over and over. The Spanish team returned to a jubilant nation and a huge fiesta on Monday, when a huge cheer erupted from a crowd gathered at Madrid’s Barajas airport as Casillas emerged from the squad’s plane with coach Vicente del Bosque and held aloft the golden trophy. — AP, AFP
Reference Link : http://www.hindu.com/2010/07/13/stories/2010071363632200.htm
Courtesy : The Hindu
SPAIN CROWNED WORLD CHAMPION
Kevin McCarra
| Andres Iniesta finds key for Spain to beat Holland |
PHOTOS: AP
Spain’s Gerard Pique holds the World Cup trophy as the team celebrates their historic win in the final against the Netherlands at Soccer City in Johannesburg, South Africa on Sunday.
JOHANNESBURG: A late goal from Andres Iniesta gave Spain victory over the Netherlands at the death of a cynical and ill-tempered final.
To Spain the glory of a World Cup triumph in which they prevailed over a deplorable Netherlands side that was reduced to 10 men when the English referee Howard Webb eventually dismissed the Dutch defender John Heitinga with a second caution in the 109th minute. Cesc Fabregas, on as substitute, fed Andres Iniesta to score the winner seven minutes later.
An unforgettably ugly World Cup final ground its way to a penalty shoot-out, after offering cautions in place of goals. The Netherlands were overwhelmingly the guilty party, with eight bookings to Spain’s four. Although football was not wholly excluded, chances were shunned and the Spain right-back Sergio Ramos put a free header high from a corner kick in the 77th minute.
A little later, Arjen Robben broke clear for Holland but Iker Casillas saved at his feet. The goalkeeper’s team-mates had not been incisive enough until the very end.
The mayhem and nastiness of the occasion was an encumbrance for Spain, who will have visualised a wholly different type of game. It was potentially unsettling that victory should be seen as their destiny considering that they had never even reached the final before. Vicente del Bosque’s side, for that matter, have developed a highly individual style founded on exceptional technique that exhausts and demoralises opponents as a midfield of supreme artistry confiscates the ball.
Possession
The flaw lies in the fact that possession can be an end in itself for Spain. European champions though they might be, the team began its World Cup programme in South Africa with a defeat by Switzerland. They went behind then and a single goal sufficed for the victors. That occasion must have been prominent in the thoughts of the coach Bert van Marwijk and the Netherlands players. It can certainly be agreed that adversity of another sort lay before Spain in Johannesburg.
There had been an expectation that the Dutch would be much less respectful than the young Germany side that lost to Spain in the last four. The Netherlands have a hard-bitten air and Mark van Bommel, the defensive midfielder, is utterly at peace while making enemies. Curiously, the Bayern Munich player attracts the bulk of the animosity despite the fact that it was his abrasive colleague Nigel de Jong, of Manchester City, who was suspended from the semifinal.
Van Bommel did collect a caution here but notoriety was being dispersed liberally. His yellow card was the third of four that Webb had flashed by the 22nd minute. The teams had a pair apiece by then and there was a kind of parity as an initially nervous the Netherlands settled down. De Jong took up old habits unacceptably later in the first-half, but escaped with a yellow card after landing his studs in the chest of Xabi Alonso.
The midfielder was unscathed, but Spain had a fragility of sorts. Fernando Torres, out of form since a knee injury in March, was again among the substitutes. That had not left the team toothless, but they had to step out of character for the semifinal, when the centre-back Carles Puyol scored the single goal with a pounding header at a set-piece.
As it turns out, the direct approach may not be as alien to this side as we suppose. Ramos leapt to connect with a Xavi set-piece after four minutes and Maarten Stekelenburg was fully extended to parry to his right. The finer points of open play were forgotten before the interval.
Spain, as anticipated, had more polish but the final assuredly did not gleam. Intrigue lay, after a further foul or two, in speculation as to how close Webb had come to giving Van Bommel a second yellow card.
Menacing
The Netherlands were also menacing in laudable ways. A prepared move for instance involved Arjen Robben pulling back a corner to an unmarked Van Bommel, but the midfielder miscontrolled his attempt. That was in keeping with the shabby character of the final then, but the Dutch may have found satisfaction in being in contention against Spain. In the 45th minute, the goalkeeper Iker Casillas had to be alert to turn behind a Robben effort that could have sneaked past him at the near post.
Whatever was said at half-time did not lead to many people changing their way. Before an hour was completed, it had been necessary for Webb to caution Giovanni van Bronckhorst and Johnny Heitinga of the Netherlands.
Spain’s Andres Iniesta scoring the winning goal in the extra-time against the Netherlands in the World Cup finals.
Van Bronckhorst is captain, veteran and cultivated left-back but not even he could rise above the ugliness.
The tone might have altered swiftly with a goal that looked likely in the 62nd minute. Wesley Sneijder suddenly introduced artistry with the lovely pass that freed Robben and the winger attempted to take care, yet Casillas got his right leg in the path of the shot and conceded merely a corner. It was a spell in which Holland were in the ascendancy.
The better moments made it all the more infuriating that Webb still had to keep reaching for a yellow card. For convenience sake, he would have been as well keeping it in his hand at all times. Football did break through now and again, with Spain squandering an excellent opportunity.
A piercing cross from the substitute Jess Navas went through the legs of Heitinga, but David Villa met the ball cleanly and it was deflected for a corner. By that stage both sides must have understood the unpalatable nature of the final, with the Netherlands the principal offenders, but it was beyond them to mend their ways. – c Guardian News and Media 2010
Reference Link : http://www.hindu.com/2010/07/12/stories/2010071287750100.htm
Courtesy : The Hindu
Saina zooms to career-best third in rankings
Ace Indian shuttler Saina Nehwal on Thursday took a giant stride towards realising her goal of becoming the world’s best player as she jumped three places to a career-best third in the latest international rankings.
Saina’s rise follows back-to-back title triumphs at the India Open Grand Prix and the Singapore Open Super Series respectively.
By virtue of the consecutive titles earlier this month, Saina, with 64791.2637 points, made a significant upward movement in the chart and is just behind Chinese duo of Yihan Wang and Xin Wang.
Saina’s previous best ranking was a fifth position which she attained in March this year after becoming the first Indian woman to reach the semi-finals of the prestigious All England Super Series Championships.
However, she dropped to the sixth position in the subsequent weeks.
Saina is presently playing in the Indonesia Open and is well on course for a hat-trick of titles after reaching the quarterfinals of the Super Series event.
Reference Link:http://www.thehindu.com/sport/other-sports/article483893.ece?homepage=true
Courtesy : The Hindu
Additional Info from TheGoodnessApple : Saina Nehwal once told in a press release in 2009 that she would become world No 1 in 2010 and looks like she’s on her way to the No: 1 slot.
Way back then she was in Rank 1o and now she has jumped to No 3 and is in right spirits for Numero Uno!
Three Cheers & Good luck to you Saina!!!
Link to the 2009 press release : http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/sports/saina-nehwal-aims-to-be-world-no1-by-2010_100145411.html
Remaining on the Diamond, Against the Grain
LITHONIA, Ga. — Football and basketball devoured Trey Griffin’s baseball team over two seasons. The players were 11 and 12 years old, playing out of Gresham Park in south DeKalb County, a predominantly African-American enclave of youth baseball in metropolitan Atlanta. The middle-school football teams lured the fastest and the strongest. The middle-school and summer-league basketball teams grabbed the tallest and the quickest.
Baseball was left in exile.
“The team just fell apart,” said Griffin, a senior at Martin Luther King High School, and the DeKalb County player of the year. “This guy is playing football, that guy is playing basketball. Out of the whole team, maybe there are three guys who played just baseball.
“The coaches and other kids tried to get me to play football, but when I brought home football equipment, my father took it back the next day.”
Griffin, a right fielder, challenges the trend of African-American athletes who migrate to football and basketball as they approach their teenage years. The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida released a study April 29 that found that 9.1 percent of players on major league opening day rosters were black, down from 10.2 in 2008, but up slightly from 9 percent in 2009. Richard Lapchick, the institute director, said the number of blacks in baseball in the late 1970s and early 1980s peaked at about 26 percent.
Griffin will not be a high draft pick in the first-year player draft, which begins Monday, but Baseball America projects him to be drafted in the first 10 rounds. He is a muscular 6 feet 3 ½ inches and has a strong arm, attributes that would have served him well in football as a wide receiver or quarterback.
And yet for reasons that seem to range from personal preference to family support to a precedent set by an older brother, Griffin has stuck with baseball.
“When we would throw the football around, he makes one-handed catches, and he could throw it long,” said Mack Brown, Griffin’s classmate and a standout high school running back who signed with the University of Florida. “We had a good team last year, but we could have used another athlete like him.”
For the most part, Griffin’s parents, Ted Griffin and Sandra Drinks-Griffin, resisted pleas from coaches and other players to have their son play football. They also found their way around other barriers that could have detoured their son from baseball.
“A lot of parents here give up on children in baseball because they cannot afford it,” said Ted Griffin, an electrician. “They could not take the risk financially to see if their child had a future in the sport. Football and basketball coaches, on the other hand, find a way to get a kid what he needs.
“When they turn 12 or 13, they hand these kids a football and say run with it,” he added.
For their son, the Griffins found travel baseball teams in the mostly white, northern suburbs of Atlanta. The Griffins’ basement went unfinished, the dining room went without a chandelier and there were yard sales to raise money to pay for the exclusive teams that traveled and played 100 games in the summer. Still, Trey Griffin said the pressure was always on him and his friends to put on football pads.
“People always asked why I wasn’t playing football,” he said.
The Griffins shunned football not only because their son had talent for baseball, but also because his grades dropped in the ninth grade, the one season he did play that sport. They finally pulled him from the team.
“The coaches said we can make him a quarterback, we can make him a wide receiver, and I said not with these grades,” Drinks-Griffin said. “He was caught up in the sound of the crowd and spending too much time trying to learn plays.”
Ted Griffin’s oldest son by another marriage, Xavier Avery, was offered a football scholarship to the University of Georgia, but turned it down when he was picked in the second round of the 2008 draft by the Baltimore Orioles.
Ted Griffin said Xavier played 96 games one summer with a travel team to sharpen his skills in baseball.
The baseball coaches at Martin Luther King High have their own view on why baseball is not thriving among their students. Sean Brinkley, a co-head coach, said baseball did not come quite as easy as football or basketball for many kids and that some walked away.
“In this area, the football players have lost their interest in baseball because baseball is too hard,” Brinkley said. “The sport has been minimized because it takes so much work in the summer, the fall and during the season. They don’t understand you need to go to the cage every day and swing the bat 200 times. It’s rigorous.”
Carlos Howard, the other co-head coach, added: “We had a great athlete here, who played football and basketball, and he came out here and worked hard, and couldn’t hack it in baseball. Some of these kids don’t understand there is more money in baseball than the other sports and you can get paid quickly.”
The Griffins understand and invested as much money as they could, and even if the draft does not go as planned, their son will have something to fall back on — a baseball scholarship to Oklahoma State.
The cost of youth baseball, the abandoning of the sport by other African-Americans, did not discourage them.
“The talent level here is so high for football that we have a lot of guys go play college, so there is a lot of football hype,” Trey Griffin said. “But I love baseball.”
Reference Link
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/sports/baseball/07griffin.html
Courtesy
The New York Times Company
How a Soccer Star Is Made
Under-10 players at work at the Ajax academy in Amsterdam.
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.”
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: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Soccer,” calls this approach “physical 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.
Reference Link
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/magazine/06Soccer-t.html?ref=magazine&pagewanted=all
Courtesy
The New York Times Company
Brazil's footballers make Zimbabwe smile again
I have never seen so many smiles in Zimbabwe. From the lady at immigration to the minibuses packed with cheering football fans to the normally grim-faced intelligence officials guarding President Robert Mugabe as he strolled into the packed national sports stadium here in Harare on a sunny afternoon and greeted the visiting Brazilian team.
During the warm-up, Kaka waved to the crowd and was answered with a deafening roar from about 60,000 happy Zimbabweans who had each paid $10 for an experience for which almost everyone I’ve spoken to has described as a “dream” or a “once-in-a-lifetime” moment.
The World Cup may not have started yet, but you wouldn’t know it from the giddy excitement here. After years of economic and political chaos very few Zimbabweans have the money to head across the border and experience the tournament kicking off in neighbouring South Africa next week. “This match is our World Cup” is something many people have told me today.
I’m writing this now on the touchline deafened by the roar of vuvuzelas with Zimbabwe’s Warriors starting to flag after a very impress start. There’s a man in a giant green and white eagle costume beside me, a slightly dysfunctional Mexican wave wandering around the stands, lots of adverts for the giant mining company Zimplats which is sponsoring the event, dozens of Brazilian journalists and a military brass band warming up for another performance.
It feels – at least today – like a refreshingly normal, happy country.
Reference Link
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/andrewharding/2010/06/brazil_make_zimbabwe_smile_aga.html
Courtesy
BBC News
The secrets of the world's most successful football school
“Good God,” murmurs the visiting scout from an English Premier League club, his hungry eyes fixed on the pitch and his jaw practically scraping the grass.
We’re standing on the touchline of arguably the world’s most successful football academy, at the end of a dirt track beside a rather murky lagoon on the scruffy outskirts of Abidjan. On the immaculate training ground, 22 barefoot 12-year-old boys are playing what even I can tell is the most dazzling, intelligent, agile football.
// “I expected good technique,” says the English scout – who insists that I not mention the name of his extremely famous club. “What surprised me is how tactical they are – how aware of space. They’re extraordinary,” he says.
Nearby, Walter Ammann, the Swiss director of Asec Mimosa’s Academy, is smiling serenely. “This is paradise, eh?” he says, looking around him.
Kolo Toure, Emmanuel Eboue, Salomon Kalou, Didier Zokora, Yaya Toure… the list of international stars to have emerged from Asec Mimosa’s Academy is remarkable. But why should one club, and one country have had so much success?
Mr Ammann talks with enormous pride of how the academy nurtures the children. “We try to protect them, and to teach them responsibility, to help them to become men. Some of the boys come here and they can’t even read or write.”
But Mr Ammann then moves on to talk in more general terms about African “attitudes,” how “African bodies are different,” and about the rhythmic training that he’s introduced at the beginning of every day.
Sven-Goran Eriksson, the former England manager, takes a similar line – up to a point. He’s visiting the club during a flying visit to the country, having just agreed to take charge of Ivory Coast’s World Cup team.
“I suppose this is the most successful academy in the world if you look at all the players who started their careers here,” he says. “Africans are strong, physically, naturally strong and quick. Obviously there is a lot of talent in this country. But this academy is top quality, for Africa, and in the world.”
The visiting scout takes a more prosaic view. He points out that the children at the academy train for at least four hours every day. “That’s simply not possible in England. The sun shines all year round here. English kids finish school at three, then it’s dark an hour later. They’re lucky if they get a couple of hours football a week.”
In keeping with the academy’s protective instincts, I’m only allowed to interview one of the students. “Lots of journalists come here, and we don’t want to turn the boys’ heads,” explains Mr Ammann.
Charles Silue, a 15-year-old striker shows me his locker, papered with pictures of football stars.
“I want to play for Barcelona, then for Manchester United,” he says without a trace of cockiness. And it’s Silue, composed, focused and phenomenally talented, who offers what seems to me the best explanation for Ivory Coast’s reputation as the world’s football factory.
“Many young African players just think about money,” he says. “They focus on that. But here we’re taught to think differently – to be responsible and concentrate on our objectives. Football is my passion. The money will follow.”
Reference Link
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/andrewharding/2010/05/the_secrets_of_the_worlds_most.html
Courtesy
BBC News
Goodness Apple 
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