by Ruud Gullit
Belgium
These waves of teams in international soccer depend on the number of new players coming in at any one time. You would imagine that the chances of that happening in large countries like Germany, England, France, Italy and Spain were greater: after all, the pool of potential players is larger. But the theory is disproved by the success of smaller countries like the Netherlands, Denmark and Belgium.
The Belgians have a generation of talent to whet the appetite. Eden Hazard, Vincent Kompany, Kevin De Bruyne, Axel Witsel, Thomas Vermaelen, Jan Vertonghen, Marouane Fellaini, Nacer Chadli, Dries Mertens, Moussa Dembélé, Toby Alderweireld and keepers such as Thibaut Courtois and Simon Mignolet. Not to mention the luxury problem of which striker to choose: Romelu Lukaku, Kevin Mirallas, Divock Origi, Yannick Carrasco or Christian Benteke. For their football association it’s all about setting the right policy. That is partially true, but there is also an element of chance: the coincidence of a generation of good players.
For a small country to win big prizes, it needs a bit more than a generation of talented players—it needs one or two world-class stars. The Netherlands won the European Championship in 1988 with Marco van Basten, and Denmark did the same in 1992 with Peter Schmeichel and Brian Laudrup.
For the Belgians, the 2014 World Cup in Brazil came a little too soon, but with Hazard, Dembélé and Chadli they now have players who can make a difference at the highest level. That Belgium’s domestic competition is not the toughest matters little in today’s international soccer world. The concentration of big money in a handful of leading competitions in England, Spain, Germany and Italy draws the best players to those countries. Each week the best face the best, raising the standard even higher and ensuring that everyone gets better.
The Netherlands
A country with a collection of players of the same generation playing at the peak of international club soccer has a chance of creating a national team that can compete seriously in major tournaments. The Netherlands is currently in the trough of the wave and does not have a role of major importance among the international powers, although the Dutch team reached the World Cup final in 2010 in South Africa and four years later the semifinal in Brazil.
There are not many players in Europe’s top teams with a Dutch passport. PSV performed extremely well in the Champions League last season. Yet I consider it an exception rather than the rule: it is no guarantee of a place at the championship ball. In the foreign teams that reached the quarterfinals of the Champions League, the only Dutch player capable of making a difference in a game was Arjen Robben (Bayern Munich). But Robben won’t be young forever. His contemporaries Wesley Sneijder, Robin van Persie and Rafael van der Vaart are no longer in contention.
Brazil and Argentina
Whereas Argentinians play to win, for Brazilians it’s about the playing, about moves and skills. They lack the nasty, tricky aspect of the game. They are completely different on the pitch: frivolous, playful, often technically brilliant yet tactically sloppy. Brazilians often abandon discipline just when they need to be disciplined and not try to solve everything with soccer skills—in central defense for example. But once they get going, they are amazing. Top Brazilian players are often proficient in every aspect of their position. Brazilians adapt easily when they join leading European clubs because they have great basic skills.
The most complete Brazilian team I can remember—Garrincha and Pelé were before my time—is the one Italy eliminated at the World Cup in 1982. This, along with the Dutch side of 1974, is considered the best team never to have become world champions—which was for one reason: it had no world-class striker. If it had possessed a Pelé, or a Romário, Bebeto or Ronaldo, then Brazil would have become champions in 1982 too. The last Brazil side to become world champions, in 2002 in Japan and South Korea, was full of European experience. That team had discipline and routine and was able to let Ronaldo, Ronaldinho and Rivaldo do their thing.
Romário drove his managers crazy. He resented having to train: a manager’s nightmare—it is impossible to justify this to the rest of the team. Yet, on the pitch, Romário made the difference, silencing his critics at PSV, Barcelona and Brazil. If Romário failed to score, then the rumors began. So he made sure he scored. He was incomparable in the penalty area, a real phenomenon, stalking his prey like a leopard ready to pounce.
As Barcelona’s manager, Johan Cruijff recognized his quality and brought Romário from PSV. He gave the Brazilian the freedom to play exclusively around the box, saving his energy for the decisive moment. Cruijff had trouble with him later. Romário made up his own rules, regularly returning late from Brazil after international games, or summer and winter breaks. This made his position in the team untenable. Yet whenever he played, he scored—although, of course, you have to be on the pitch to be able to score.
There’s often something not quite right about Brazilians. Some Brazilian strikers struggle when they lose the ball. They forget to take up their defensive position because they’re still thinking about the chance they just missed or the ball they didn’t get at the crucial moment. Argentinians switch directly and apply themselves, whether they are Sergio Agüero, Gonzalo Higuaín or Carlos Tévez. For me it is not surprising that it’s two Argentinians who are generally considered the best soccer players ever: Diego Maradona and Lionel Messi—although I can name a lot more amazing Brazilian players than Argentinian ones. Which puts the difference in a nutshell.
Germans are the Argentinians of Europe in my opinion, especially now they have added the technique of those from a non-German background to their arsenal. The German skill-set is more or less complete, since they already had physical strength, stamina, the right mentality and tactical insight. Today’s German players are in many ways close to perfection as soccer players.
In fact there is something astonishingly similar about the Germans and the Argentinians. When they play each other, the game often disappoints, as in the World Cup final between Germany and Argentina in 2014. Both teams were so good that they hardly made any mistakes. It was no coincidence that the decisive goal was an extraordinary effort by Mario Götze. Only something on that level could make the difference. It seemed beforehand that Messi would decide the final, but his performance declined as the tournament progressed. At the World Cup he paid the price for an incredibly long and arduous season.
In the last two world championships, the Netherlands reached the final in 2010 and the semifinal in 2014. That last result was a fluke, more a question of luck than quality. The Netherlands didn’t even qualify for the 2016 European Championship.
Tactically, the Dutch understand everything. That’s not the point. The reason why the Dutch fall short is the lack of physical strength (defense) and technique (getting away from the opponent). Physical contact is practically taboo in the Dutch competition, so that confrontation is not part of the game. Everything is about position, with one or two touches. Yet the tactic lacks depth; far too much of the game is about passing wide, back and forth: they should ask players not to turn away or to get past an opponent in an individual move.
The Dutch youth-training program has a lot to answer for. Until recently, the occasional exception—Wesley Sneijder, Robin van Persie, Arjen Robben—has masked the trend. Sneijder made the 2010 World Cup for the Dutch and Robben the 2014 World Cup. Now they are older and make less of an impact, the Dutch team has declined.
Exceptional players need nurturing. You wouldn’t expect Ronaldinho, Messi and Ronaldo just to keep passing. You need to encourage these players to show their amazing skills. Isn’t the Netherlands the country that places a premium on individual freedom? Then why not encourage young talented players who like to bend the rules every now and then . . .?
Meanwhile, the Dutch team is slipping down the ladder of international soccer. Even the second-tier teams can beat us, as the Netherlands’ failure to qualify for the European Championship of 2016 showed, eliminated by Iceland,
the Czechs and Turkey. We have become complacent and convinced ourselves that everything is fine the way it is. But if you don’t develop, you deteriorate. The competition is always improving. Dutch football allowed other football associations and foreign clubs to look behind the scenes. These associations and clubs copied our programs, added a more physical approach and mentality, and then left us standing.
And the Dutch know-it-alls? They still ask: “Why should I do this? Why do that?” Of course, that critical “why” and “yes, but” are a part of our mentality, and have brought us far. But you have to move on. At some point you have to show something for your effort. As a small country, surrounded by big countries, we know we have to offer something special. We don’t have it at the moment on the soccer pitch.
Meanwhile, we don’t even have any real defenders. There are two reasons. First, because referees don’t allow physical confrontation, and second because the emphasis in defense is on technical skills. Since the focus is on keeping possession, that is the type of player scouts look for—players who concentrate on keeping the ball. But what I want to know is, when the other side has the ball, can that defender actually defend?
Daley Blind, not originally a central defender but placed there by the manager Louis van Gaal, is a good example: a fantastic player on the ball, but physically vulnerable as a defender. By contrast, Jaap Stam was a true defender, who also knew when and how to play the ball to his teammates.
Youth programs
Youth-training programs reflect a country’s soccer culture. Go to any game in England, Spain or Italy and you’ll see venom, aggression, everywhere and all the time, from amateur to youth soccer—it is ingrained and second nature.
For Spaniards, Italians and English, friendly soccer doesn’t really exist. It’s not in their vocabulary, because playing is all about winning. That is the priority. And it is part of their DNA, far more than friendly soccer. Practice games are a different matter, but then the competitive element is just as important. In the Netherlands that mentality is simply absent.
The Netherlands
Now my son, Maxime, plays in the B1 team at AFC, a local amateur club, against teams from Ajax, PSV, AZ and Feyenoord, so I’m on the touchline at Dutch youth matches every week. It’s remarkable, no less than at the top of Dutch soccer, that the mentality is rarely about winning: there is no sense of making every effort to win and the world collapsing if you lose.
That absence of a winning mentality is as much the result of the coaching, training and scouting as it is of referees who don’t allow that mentality to find expression. I don’t mean that youngsters should be allowed to go wild and kick and hit other players or go berserk at the ref or an opponent. No, I mean showing a measure of desire. I just don’t see it, or not any more. And you need to have that desire if you want to play at the highest level, just as players like Nigel de Jong, Jaap Stam and Mark van Bommel had.
“We need to train kids. Train footballers,” I hear them saying. But soccer is about more than controlling the ball and position. Confrontation should also be a part of training.
Link the training to rewards. Make sure the kids always play for something. And if they lose when practicing finishing or passing, for instance, there should be some kind of symbolic punishment. So the losers should run an extra lap, or do ten extra push-ups, bring the balls to the pitch for a week and other minor jobs that even the youngest player hates doing. At the same time you should reward youngsters who win or do something well.
Today talent is not exploited to its full potential in the Netherlands. In fact an essential element of the game is lacking: combat, passion, winning mentality. All you see at youth complexes are clones. Too much of the same. Admittedly it is also the result of kids being unable to play in the street any more. That was where we learned the game, choosing teams, taking the initiative, playing as well as you could until you found a way to win. The fault lies just as much in computer games and cell phones.
Let the kids in the training programs choose their own teams, or set up a position play and make one player touch the ball three times; see how they get on with that. These days most position play is with one or two touches. I want to see how midfielders respond when they have to touch the ball three times and actually have to think about what to do next. Think about keeping the ball, about turning without losing it while opponents try to take it away. That teaches players to act faster, to choose a position, turn from an opponent, physically defend themselves in a tussle.
There are thousands of potential variations, but you hardly see any of them on the pitch in the Netherlands. What you see is passing, passing and more passing. Passing over and over and still not getting anywhere. And it’s so boring and predictable . . .
Spain
At FC Barcelona the training program is at such a high level—the second team plays two steps removed from the highest professional level—that, indeed, youth players are occasionally selected to play in the first team. Every Spaniard will point this out with pride, but if you look carefully you’ll see that hardly any new talent has pushed through in the last two years. Only Sergi Roberto is able to press his nose to the glass occasionally, but then only in games that can no longer be lost or where the chances of defeat in the first place are zero. As to extra quality that can make a difference at Barcelona’s level? Since Lionel Messi, Andrés Iniesta and Sergio Busquets, I haven’t seen any exceptional talent emerge from the club’s training program at the Nou Camp.
England
Looking at England in the same critical vein, I notice that far too little attention is paid to the development of young technical players: players who are able to decide a game with their insight and their technical skills.
Look at the central midfielders in the major clubs. You hardly ever see an English player in the role of playmaker. They get bogged down in the action. Yet soccer is more than confrontation and one-on-ones. As long as technical development remains a second or third priority, the English shouldn’t complain that top foreign players form the backbone, the axis, of the Premier League’s more successful teams.
Consider the leading teams. The keepers? At Manchester City, Chelsea, Liverpool, Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester United they are all from abroad. And don’t forget that England has a reputation for producing keepers, with historic figures like Gordon Banks, Peter Shilton, Ray Clemence and David Seaman.
Draw up similar lists of defending and attacking midfielders and strikers, and you come to the same conclusion. There are some English central defenders around, but English players are seriously under-represented in crucial positions in the Premier League’s top clubs. It is in the youth programs that you have to address that problem.
However difficult it may be: make a gentlemen’s agreement to establish a quota for a minimum number of homegrown players on the pitch. If you only need to have them in the squad, as now, you don’t need to play them . . . Naturally I understand that it will be difficult to realize, but if you were to keep an agreement like that in place for three years, I think you would see a considerable number of English players breaking through within a few years and playing at a higher level than the surfeit of mediocre foreign players who do little or nothing to benefit English soccer. Unfortunately, the upper tier of the English game has little patience for young players. They have to be able to play from the start, which is unrealistic. In fact the top tier has little patience for newly acquired, inexperienced players: perform immediately or leave.
Take Manchester United, where a plague of injuries forced the coach, Louis van Gaal, to dig into his own youth program. Suddenly young, competent English players were making their debut: Marcus Rashford, Jesse Lingard, Cameron Borthwick-Jackson. Did Van Gaal play these youngsters because he wanted to promote Manchester United’s own future and by extension that of English soccer? Maybe he did, but it was more than that. Van Gaal has always preferred working with young, malleable playe
rs. That is his genius. He finds experienced, tried and tested players difficult. At Barcelona he clashed with Rivaldo and Figo, and at Bayern with Ribéry, Luca Toni and Mark van Bommel, and his relationship with Ángel Di María at Manchester United was nothing short of poor.
Yet the question remains of whether young players can win games. I think so, as long as they are surrounded by experienced players who know the ropes. It didn’t work out as expected at Manchester United because often there were too many young players and the pressure in the Premier League is huge. English games are more intense than those anywhere else in the world.
That’s why clubs that have to win straight away, like Chelsea and Manchester City, despite their amazing youth programs and academies that operate with astonishing success only buy players who have already arrived. Sometimes it’s as if they aren’t training youngsters for their own team but for other clubs. A pity, because I’d love to see someone like Ruben Loftus-Cheek playing more for Chelsea.
Patience is a virtue that you rarely find at Stamford Bridge or the Etihad—even though paying out heaps of cash for experienced players is no more a necessity for success: just look at Leicester City and Tottenham Hotspur at the top of the Premier League in 2015/16.
Enabling young talent to break through
The problem with training young talent in the Netherlands is that young players rarely get the help and guidance they need from mature teammates, simply because top Dutch players leave the country too early and experienced players are no longer attracted to top Dutch clubs.