Brotherly Bond

19 March 2011 Last updated at 01:20 GMT

// Teenage carer bullied over having ‘small’ family

 

Ethan is practising to become a DJ and hopes to put the bullying behind him

Fourteen-year-old Ethan has a tough time helping care for his younger brother and his mother who have a form of dwarfism called skeletal dysplasia.

“The best thing about being smaller than everyone else is that you can fit down the back of the sofa, and it’s handy for when you’re playing hide and seek and things, because you can hide where everyone else can’t,” said 10-year-old Aidan.

Ethan’s little brother Aidan has a genetic condition which means his bones did not develop properly, affecting his height and movement. He inherited it from his mother, Michelle, and it means Aidan often has to use a wheelchair.

Michelle said: “It affects all our joints and it’s a curvature of the spine, which Aidan has had corrected, and also all the long bones are curved as well.”

Aidan and Ethan, who are from Cambridge, have a unique relationship.

While their father Lee, who is a support worker for adults with disabilities, is at work, Ethan helps get Aidan dressed and takes him to school, as well as help his mother cook dinner and with housework.

 

Ethan and his father Lee both help look after his mother and brother

Ethan said: “Sometimes I get annoyed, but that’s life and you just have to get on with it.”

But sometimes helping his brother can cause friction between the pair.

Aidan said: “It can be a bit frustrating when I want to do something myself and Ethan comes in and helps.

“(But) Sometimes it can be good because you don’t have to do everything when you can’t sort of do it yourself.”

Ethan has found that the toughest thing to cope with was bullying, which has been so bad he has been forced to move schools.

“People at my old school used to take the Mick – like calling my mum a midget and oompa loompa,” he said.

“I’ve found not to tell anyone at school. Over the years I’ve had quite a bit of bullying.

“In my old school, how it started was they’d ask why my mum was small and I’d tell them that she was born with a bone condition and they just thought it was funny.”

At the height of the bullying, Ethan was walking home from a party with his mother when he was attacked in the street by a stranger.

“A boy just walked up to us and started shouting he then pushed me off my bike, and I hurt my knee and my hand, and he started hitting me and kicking me, asking me who I was.

“I didn’t reply and he retaliated more. I managed to get away on my bike and he threw a glass bottle at me and it hit me in the back.”

He reported the assault to the police, and his attacker was sentenced to 80 hours of community service.

He said: “The advice I’d give someone who’s getting bullied is to tell someone and not suffer in silence.”

Living with limited movement also means Aidan has to face daily challenges.

 

Aidan is facing a difficult process to improve his mobility

He was desperate to regain his independence and walk up stairs by himself, and after an operation to straighten his legs, he underwent intensive therapy to build up his strength.

The 10-year-old needed hydrotherapy treatment, but feared water, as earlier in life he had had a breathing tube.

But after some initial fears, he embraced the pool.

“When I got in the pool for the first time, I was very wobbly. But then afterwards I didn’t want to get out again,” Aidan said.

But he already has set himself a new challenge: “I’d like to play football next.”

Ethan has also set himself a challenge, to become a DJ. After studying the craft in music lessons with his friends, he played in front of his school friends at a school disco for the first time.

He wanted Aidan to share the experience, and got him on stage with him. And that brotherly support meant he had the confidence to perform.

“It’s quite scary but once Aidan came on I really enjoyed it. It really helped when I was helping him.”

Reference Link : http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-12758501

Courtesy : BBC News

Israel's alternative 'world cup'

While all eyes were on the World Cup in South Africa, a football tournament of another type was being played on pitches across Israel. (Images courtesy of jenswenzel-photography.com)

The Football 4 Peace tournament brings together children from Arab and Jewish families, most of whom have never met a child from the other community.

The project began in 2001 with 100 children from two communities. Today, it involves 24 communities and over 1,000 boys and girls.

During the two weeks of activities, a team of 40 volunteers from the UK and Germany were on hand to support local coaches and the young participants.

The children are all aged nine to 13. Half are Arab and other half are Jewish.

Some were initially reluctant to shake their counterparts’ hands, but by the end were playing as a team, the coaches said.

This year, Football 4 Peace celebrates ten years of activities in Israel.

The tournament culminated in a final in the northern Israeli town of Nazareth Elite, which has strained relations with its Arab neighbour, Nazareth. Many children had never played with a child from the other community before.

The project aims to build greater co-operation and understanding on both sides and to provide the skills to create life-long positive relationships.

The project was originally developed by the UK’s Brighton University and is supported by the British Council, the Sports University in Cologne and the Israeli Sports Authority.

Reference Link
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10610622

Courtesy
BBC News

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

Football project for dementia sufferers may be extended

Success for project which uses football to aid dementia

The study found old photos were a “potent trigger” for fans with dementia

A new therapy which uses football to stimulate the minds of dementia sufferers could be extended abroad, after the success of a pilot project.

Researchers at Glasgow Caledonian University said showing memorabilia to men with the condition stimulated their memories in a “remarkable” way.

They were able to chat about memories of players and games, after being shown photographs and match programmes.

Researchers in Canada may now take the same approach, using ice hockey.

Professor Debbie Tolson, director of the university’s Centre for Evidence Based Care of Older People, described it as a fascinating study with impressive results.

“The men’s life-long interest in football connected them to their former selves and shared memories,” she said.

“There is very little provided specifically for men with dementia and this is a welcome and positive innovation.

“At the moment, I am gathering together a group of researchers to mount a proposal to roll out the concept to other European countries.”

The project has been conducted by the university together with the Scottish Football Museum, Alzheimer Scotland and member clubs of the Scottish Football Heritage Network.

There are nearly 25 million people with dementia across the world, with an estimated 4.6 million new cases each year.

Prof Tolson said: “By listening to men with dementia and family carers we have realised how little meaningful activity is provided for men that reflect their past passions.”

She said the study had shown that photos were a “potent trigger” for fans with dementia.

“We are currently in discussion with potential European partners to bid for monies so that we can do research to understand the best way to help men with dementia through football reminiscence,” she added.

Reference Link
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/10427391.stm

Courtesy
BBC News

Youth League Fights AIDS With Soccer

Patrick Barth for The New York Times

The league has expanded to five villages and 2,500 boys on 160 teams in under-14 and under-17 divisions.

MAWEWE, South Africa — Far from the World Cup, in this poor, rural village where there are no paved roads, no nets on the goals and no shoes for many of the players, Clement Nkala, 17, sat in a chair in his soccer uniform and held out his finger to be pricked for an H.I.V. test.

Nomsa Shabangu, right, the Director of Medical Educators at Triad Trust, explained the HIV test to Clement Nkala.

In a country where 5.7 million people are infected with the virus that causes AIDS — the most in the world — the problem is particularly acute here in the Nkomazi district of Mpumalanga Province, near South Africa’s eastern border with Swaziland and Mozambique.

Medical workers estimate that 65 percent of people between the ages of 18 and 34 in this area, slightly smaller in size than Rhode Island, carry H.I.V. and that 5,000 to 8,000 children under the age of 5 have been orphaned.

“I am thinking of my future,” Nkala said Saturday afternoon. “It is important to know your status.”

Sarah Kate Noftsinger seemed pleased and startled. A player volunteering to be tested in the open, with his friends playing nearby, would not have happened in this remote district 15 months ago, when she started a youth soccer league that has expanded to five villages and 2,500 boys on 160 teams in under-14 and under-17 divisions.

In this culture, parents seldom talk to their children about sex, medical workers said. Many are afraid to be tested for H.I.V., fearing that they might get their fingers pricked one day and die the next. Denial can be more comforting than the stress of knowing. Admission carries the risk of being shunned by a family, by an entire community. Nkala was a breakthrough.

Sarah Kate Noftsinger at a recent match. The league has 2,500 boys on 160 teams in five villages.

“This is a big step,” said Noftsinger, 29, of Richmond, Va., who is director of sports and leadership for Triad Trust, a Boston-based charity that seeks to reduce AIDS-related deaths.

Subduing H.I.V. in this region of 500,000 people will not happen soon, it is universally agreed. But this is another fledgling attempt, by creating a sports league and educating players, to show that H.I.V. is preventable, that medicine is available for those who are infected and that there can be a big difference between living with H.I.V. and dying from AIDS.

“It’s a way to address something that nobody wants to talk about through a game that everybody loves,” Noftsinger said.

She is a small woman with the ebullient energy of a midfielder, which she was until the Women’s United Soccer Association folded in the United States in 2003.

She first came to this area to give a two-week clinic in December 2008. Five local advocates, in their mid-20s, pleaded with Noftsinger to help them start a sustainable league that could combine soccer and H.I.V. awareness and might prevent another generation from being lost.

Too often, said Zola Ndlovu, the league’s executive liaison, well-meaning Americans put on clinics then leave without training the locals to carry on in their absence.

“When they are gone, we are still dying,” Ndlovu said.

On June 6, a championship tournament was completed before a monthlong break for winter and the World Cup. Trophies and medals were awarded.

Flying home from that first trip, Noftsinger scribbled a business plan on a napkin. She felt the empathy of a survivor, having twice recovered from colon cancer and from a broken vertebra, sustained while heading a soccer ball.

Surgery was required in 2006 to repair the vertebra and a ruptured disk. A year and a half of lethargy followed, she said, as she healed. She quit taking classes at business school and left her job as an assistant coach for Stanford’s women’s soccer team. The idea of a league in South Africa shifted a stalled Noftsinger back into overdrive. She buzzes about now, carrying three cellphones, writing notes on her hand. Even her name has been compressed from Sarah Kate to Skate.

“Fast forward always, in Charlie Chaplin mode,” said Themba Mahakane, the league’s financial director.

For six weeks at a time, Noftsinger travels here as executive director of the league’s umbrella organization, Triad Nkomazi Rush. She believes the league will survive only if it can be maintained by local leaders. Scheduling, finances, marketing and medical education are administered by a local seven-member executive committee. Her approach is to offer advice but not to take control.

In three years, Noftsinger hopes to make herself obsolete. She envisions the league continuing with full-time jobs for local administrators, coaches and medical workers in an area with an unemployment rate estimated at 60 to 90 percent.

Once a week, players receive instruction about topics like H.I.V., domestic violence and self-confidence. Instruction is provided by medical workers and by an improvisational drama troupe that uses plays, songs, dance and poetry to address social situations encountered in daily life.

Teams with perfect attendance receive uniforms provided by Rush, an American youth soccer organization. To keep the uniforms, players must continue attending the classes. A few girls from a nearby village called Block B have begun taking health lessons and have asked to join a team.

The ultimate goal is to have each player tested for H.I.V. every 90 days, using a fingerprint-based system that keeps the results confidential.

A goal of the soccer league is to have each player tested for H.I.V. every 90 days.

“Triad Nkomazi Rush is trying to make people see that a person with H.I.V. is not the enemy,” said Paul Makofane, the deputy director for sports advancement in Mpumalanga Province. “And they are transferring skills, so we won’t have to rely on the mother programs from the United States. We can run our own.”

Almost everyone in this area has a relative or friend infected with the virus. The mother, father and brother of Nomsa Shabangu, the league’s director of medical education, have all tested positive, she said. Among migrant farm workers, who frequently change sexual partners, she said, the infection rate may be 80 or 90 percent.

Ignorance about sex and disease is rampant. From village to village, myths persist that men can be cured of H.I.V. by having sex with an infant less than 2 years old, or with a virgin, or even with a goat or a dog, Shabangu said. She had her own misunderstandings, giving birth at 16.

“I was not aware that I could get pregnant and have a baby from sexual activity,” Shabangu, 26, said. “Our parents taught us that you go and buy a baby from the hospital or they fall from airplanes. It’s important that we start telling the truth about these things.”

Some H.I.V. transmission results from desperate poverty in Nkomazi villages, where the most thriving business can be the local mortuary, Noftsinger said.

A woman might trade sexual favors to buy a few extra minutes for her cellphone, so she can keep in contact with her relatives, or for help paying the grocery bill so she can feed an extended family decimated by AIDS.

Sarah Kate Noftsinger, a director for a charity that seeks to reduce AIDS-related deaths, helped found the youth league.

“What do you do when you have to put food on the table for your brothers and sisters because your parents have died?” Noftsinger said.

The nascent league has faced inevitable advances and retreats. On Sunday, in the nearby village of Kamhlushwa, a championship tournament was completed before a monthlong break for winter and the World Cup. Trophies and medals were awarded. But the under-14 title game was suspended for more than an hour as opposing coaches tried to resolve a dispute over a red-card ejection.

By the time the match concluded, the sun had set. Noftsinger piled one of the teams in her pickup so the children would not have to walk more than a mile home in the dark.

“I think I got five more gray hairs today,” she said.

Some days are more heartening, like Saturday, when 14 players in Mawewe agreed to be tested for H.I.V. Nkala stuck out his finger and a drop of blood was placed in a cartridge that resembled a home pregnancy kit.

One of the players getting tested for H.I.V.

Medical workers estimate that 65 percent of people between the ages of 18 and 34 in the Nkomazi district of Mpumalanga Province carry H.I.V.

A few minutes later, the test came back negative. Nkala said he wanted to become sexually active. Through the soccer league, he said, “I know how to protect myself.”

It was important that the players took the test voluntarily instead of being pushed, said Clifford Ndlovu, the league’s marketing director.

“It shows they trust us,” he said.

Reference Link
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/11/sports/soccer/11aids.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all

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

Street children in South Africa aim for World Cup victory

Just like any other national captain, Wanda Msani is dreaming of glory at the World Cup in South Africa.

But Wanda’s tournament kicks off on 15 March, three months earlier than the Fifa event and for the 14-year-old boy who lives on the streets, there is far more than just a game at stake.

“When people walk past us, they look at us like we are dogs. They look down on us like we are not even people, just because we eat from bins,” he says, his eyes burning with anger.

“They will see that we can be something.”

Wanda Msani has been living on the streets since the age of nine

More than anything else, Wanda wants to make his father proud, hoping to be allowed to return home to the Umlazi township outside Durban, which he left five years ago, aged just nine.

Since then, he has been on the streets – sleeping on pavements, under trees, park benches and alleys with only a cardboard box to offer warmth.

“After my parents separated, my father started drinking all the time,” he says.

“When he got drunk, he would beat me up so badly he wouldn’t stop. I knew I had to run away.”

For Wanda and his team-mates, playing football offers an escape from their hellish lives of constant hunger, an absence of love, the threat of sexual abuse and in which sniffing glue is often the only comfort.

But while they hope that football can change people’s perceptions about street kids, it has also brought a new danger to contend with.

World Cup clean-up?

The street kids say Durban’s municipal police are forcibly removing children at night and dumping them miles away from town.

Some police reportedly use teargas to disorient the children and make them more submissive.

The tournament is the first step to my new life Nosipho Mabaso, 16

City officials have always denied that this campaign is linked to its World Cup preparations or commented on the alleged abuses. They say the round-ups are driven by the need to curb crime in the city centre.

Workers at Umthombo, a charity which co-organised the Street Child World Cup, say they hope the tournament will remind law enforcement officers that the youngsters are not criminals but traumatised children who need greater care and empathy than many hard-handed officers show.

Fifa World Cup local chairman Danny Jordaan last year said he would not support any move to “create a false impression about South Africa” when he addressed a media conference where the subject of a clampdown on street children was discussed.

“We cannot be a country that creates false impressions. We are a country of diversity, rich and poor, employed and unemployed, and the world must know that we have massive challenges of poverty and housing and we must address these issues,” he said.

Burning determination

Thirteen children are in South Africa’s squad for the seven-a-side matches against seven international teams – Brazil, India, Nicaragua, Ukraine, Philippines, UK, Tanzania and Vietnam – at the Durban University of Technology.

South Africa’s team has been around for more than seven years but this will be the first time its members aged 14-16 compete in an international tournament.

South Africa has spent millions on new football stadiums

For many of them the five-day football tournament is an opportunity to begin a new life.

They have been practising every day for two weeks ahead of the tournament, trading their worn-out clothes for smart blue and yellow football kit.

Vuyani Madolo from Umthombo has been coaching the team for many years and says it is a fulfilling and challenging task.

He spent three years of his life on the streets of East London and says he uses his own experiences to motivate his players.

“I ran away from home when I was seven after being repeatedly emotionally abused by my family because I still could not speak.

“I only learned to speak on the street. Today the children and I have a strong bond because they know what I went through and see that a better life is possible,” he says.

Although the round-ups have posed a new challenge to the already difficult lives of some of these youngsters, many are refusing to lose sight of their goals.

A new beginning

Nosipho Mabaso, 16, is the only girl on the team and says playing football has renewed her sense of self-worth.

“When I play football I forget about the bad things in my life.

We are also going to take the cup – the trophy will stay here at home Andile Dladla, 16

“Before I moved to the street no-one had ever tried to force me to sleep with them, but since coming here I know what that is like, it is very scary,” she says.

“I don’t want this life any more. I want to go back home and go back to school.

“The tournament is the first step to my new life,” she says, with a bright smile on her face.

Sixteen-year old Andile Dladla says he is looking forward to both his team’s World Cup and Fifa’s.

He says he draws inspiration from South Africa’s national team.

“I think that South Africa will take the trophy in June – I think they are getting better now, they are not losing every time.”

“We are also going to take the cup – the trophy will stay here at home,” he predicts confidently, raising cheers from his team-mates.

Reference Link
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8567522.stm

Courtesy
The BBC

Footballer to be commemorated

MALAPPURAM, India: The Malappuram Old Football Players Association will commemorate former international football player P. Moideen Kutty at a function to be held at the Chemist Bhavan here on Sunday afternoon. C.P.M. Usman Koya, former football coach of Calicut University, will inaugurate the function. P. Kunhimohammed, president of the association, will preside over the function. Mohammedali Munniyoor will lead a session on ‘new techniques of modern football’.

Reference Link
http://www.hindu.com/2010/03/14/stories/2010031452600300.htm

Courtesy
The Hindu