The Away Game

by Sebastian Abbot

  Bernard quickly dressed in his best soccer gear after his coach told him a foreign scout was coming to town. Bernard loved Nike and always said the company would be his sponsor if he hit it big. He looked like a Nike advertisement as he walked out the door, albeit one that probably wouldn’t have made the company very happy since it was all knockoff gear sold on the black market. It was all Bernard could afford. He covered his lithe, five-foot frame with all the Nike gear he could get. On that day, he wore a white Nike T-shirt, black shorts, and white socks and carried his black and white Nike cleats. He set off in the direction of Star Park, the public field where the Football Dreams tryout was being held.

  The park was located down a red dirt road that branched off one of Teshie’s main thoroughfares. The crowded street was a riot of activity. Traders hawked a multitude of goods from small, wooden stalls: stacks of dried fish, large brown yams, and mounds of green mangos. Women walked by with plastic laundry buckets on their heads filled with peanuts and dried plantain chips. The din receded as Bernard walked away from the main street toward the park. He prayed God would help him in the tryout, known as a “justify” in Ghana. The term helps explain one of Bernard’s favorite Bible verses, Romans 10:10. “For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved.”

  Bernard wouldn’t have had to look far for religious inspiration on his walk. The short road to the park now hosts the God’s Time Beauty Salon, the God Is Good Beauty Salon, and the God Is Grace Beauty Salon. Pretty much every business in Ghana has some reference to Christianity in its name, a testament to the strength of religion in the country. The road also sports the Girls Girls Pub. Its sign features a woman in tight jeans and high heels next to a row of liquor bottles. What’s virtue without a little vice?

  The scouts were nowhere to be seen when Bernard arrived at Star Park. Its name was grander than the reality. The park was simply an open expanse of dirt bookended by a pair of goals. Their white paint was chipped badly, exposing the metal underneath. Players used crushed-up coal meant for cooking stoves to mark the field, leaving an uneven black line that meandered around the pitch.

  Bernard had already done an initial Football Dreams tryout at the park. All around Africa, Colomer used locals to conduct a first set of trials to weed the players down to the best 176 kids at each field. He and the other European scouts would show up a few days later for the second stage. Bernard was so eager for that first tryout he showed up before dawn, hours before it was scheduled to start. But like many players, he was still dubious that Football Dreams was a legitimate opportunity. African soccer is filled with people of all stripes who make big promises they never intend to keep. For this reason, Bernard grew disillusioned as he sat waiting for the scouts, who were late showing up for the second tryout. He eventually got fed up, figured the whole thing was a fraud, and decided to leave.

  On his way home, he ran into Oteng, who insisted he turn around and head back. Reluctantly, Bernard retraced his steps past the clamorous stew of traders and down the red dirt road to the park. Soon after he returned, he saw a truck approaching that said Aspire Africa Football Dreams on its side. It was emblazoned with the image of a small African boy heading a soccer ball and the slogan “Your Dreams Come True.” Perhaps the whole thing was legitimate after all.

  Colomer stepped out of the truck into Ghana’s bright sunlight, and the tryout was soon under way. The organizers had set up a tent and plastic chairs so spectators could watch the games in the shade. But Colomer didn’t sit. He moved up and down the field and sometimes stood right in the center, slowly turning in a circle as the play developed around him. The dirt pitch was uneven and littered with stones, causing the ball to bounce in unpredictable directions, but the best players were able to reel it in like it was on a string. Their cleats provided flashes of color against the drab, sandy background. Shouts of joy and despair welled up from the crowd in response to a classy step-over or a fluffed shot. These moves sent puffs of red dust into the air, records of the plays that lasted an instant before the wind erased them.

  Soccer increasingly seems like a game in which every action on the pitch is now recorded, catalogued, and processed for review, but the matches Colomer witnessed across Africa were very different. His eyes were the recording device, his brain the processor. That’s a challenging reality for a game as complex as soccer and a task as difficult as picking the next Messi. It’s a reality that science and technology are now changing. Analysts have moved far beyond basic statistics like assists, shots, and goals to scout for talent. The latest models even analyze how players think. That’s a quantum leap from where the technology was even a few years ago, but today’s advances obviously meant nothing to Colomer in 2007 as he stood on the side of Star Park in Teshie.

  Many of Bernard’s teammates from Unique FC also showed up for the tryout, so he took the field with them when it was his turn to play. Shorter than many of the other kids, he certainly wouldn’t have caught Colomer’s eye based on his physical presence. He was about five feet tall, around the same height as Messi when he first arrived at Barcelona as a 13-year-old. Like Messi, Bernard likely looked downright small in his black and white Nike gear, but he was brimming with confidence. He knew he had the talent needed to impress Colomer and make it to the final tryout in Ghana. Plus, he was sure he could count on help from a powerful friend. “I knew that definitely I would be among the final 50 players because I have always been praying to God that he would help me,” said Bernard.

  Perhaps God took the game off. Colomer didn’t select Bernard. He didn’t select any of them. They walked off the field dejected after their 20-minute game. “The scout said he didn’t see anyone,” said one of Bernard’s teammates, Shadrack Ankamah. Disappointed and confused, Bernard told his friends he was leaving. Shadrack and the others tried to get him to stay but had no luck. Bernard took off his cleats, changed out of his Nike gear, and headed for the exit. For the second time that day, he was leaving Star Park without so much as a nod from Colomer.

  Just then someone called his name. He turned around and saw it was Eugene Komey, the local coach who had organized the tryout for Aspire in Teshie. “I called him back because I wanted him to play again,” said Komey. He knew how good Bernard was and didn’t feel like his talent had shown through in the first game. Maybe he didn’t get enough touches. Maybe his teammates hogged the ball. Maybe he was just unlucky. Soccer is a game of luck as much as skill sometimes. Komey decided to put Bernard on his own team, Dragon FC.

  In a twist of fate, it turned out Dragon would play against Bernard’s team, Unique. His original teammates had convinced the organizers to give them another chance, but Komey was confident the best player was now on his team. The other players on Dragon thought so as well. “That side, they knew him as a great player, so every ball they got, they gave it to him,” said Shadrack. “He knew our weaknesses, too.” Bernard shredded his old teammates. With the ball balanced on his left foot, he danced around players in a way that was eerily similar to a small Argentine who has grown into a giant of the game.

  Messi wasn’t as famous back then as he is now. He placed third in the Ballon d’Or and second in the FIFA World Player of the Year voting in 2007. He was only 20 years old, and his dominance of the sport was yet to come. As his fame increased, many people began to see similarities between Bernard and Messi. But there was one person at the field who already knew Messi’s skill and style of play intimately. He was standing in the middle of the pitch with a notebook in his hand.

  Komey believes he knows the exact moment when Colomer decided Bernard was a special talent. The speedy midfielder received the ball on the right side of the field near the halfway line. He sprinted inside with the ball on his left foot, as Messi has done so many times. A defender approached as he neared the center of the field. Bernard did a quick step-over and called out to a teammate on his left, pulling the defender with him. With the defender off balance,
he played a no-look pass to a teammate on his right. Colomer jotted something down in his notebook and came to speak with one of his assistants on the sideline.

  Komey told the people around him he was sure Bernard had been selected as one of the top 50 players in Ghana who would participate in the next set of tryouts in Accra. They disagreed. There was no way he could know, they said. Plus, Bernard was so small. But anyone who simply focused on physical characteristics like his size, or even his speed, was making a mistake. They could be forgiven, though. It’s a mistake scouts around the world make all the time, potentially missing out on the next Messi.

  Youth scouting has long been a fairly subjective process, with coaches and scouts relying mostly on instinct to determine which kids have the most potential. But in recent years, researchers have increasingly investigated whether there’s a better way. They’ve tried to identify which specific characteristics are most useful in determining whether a young player has what it takes to make it. How much should scouts focus on size and strength? What about speed and agility? How about technique and game intelligence? The aspiration of this research is to make youth scouting more science than art.

  In some sports, scouts can simply focus on a small number of key physical traits like size or speed to get a good idea of whether an athlete has the potential to be world-class. These sports are often described as more nature than nurture since genetics play an outsized role in determining who has the ability to succeed. One example is rowing. In 2007, the United Kingdom launched a program called Sporting Giants to identify tall men and women who could potentially become Olympic athletes in rowing, volleyball, and handball, all sports in which height plays a powerful role in determining success. Men had to be a minimum of six feet, three inches tall, and women five feet, eleven inches. Candidates also had to be between 16 and 25 years old and have some sort of athletic background, but not necessarily in the sports being targeted. One of those picked in 2008 out of more than 4,000 applications was Helen Glover, a 22-year-old PE teacher who had never rowed before. She was just below the required height but stood on her tiptoes when measured to make the grade. Four years later, she won a gold medal at the 2012 Olympics. She repeated the feat in 2016 and has won a slew of other international competitions, catapulting her to the number one ranked female rower in the world.

  Australia achieved a similar feat in the winter sport of skeleton, which certainly isn’t for the faint of heart. An athlete begins by running down the ice with one or two hands on a sled, dives on board, and then careens down the track headfirst at more than 70 miles per hour. Officials at the Australian Institute of Sport learned that the beginning sprint accounts for about half the variation in total race time, so they conducted a nationwide hunt for new female athletes in 2004, based largely on a 30-meter sprint test, according to David Epstein’s book The Sports Gene. The women had never tried the sport before but were recording the fastest runs in Australian history within three slides. One woman beat half the field at the Under-23 skeleton world championships only 10 weeks after she first set foot on the ice and won the title in her next try. Another made it all the way to the 2006 Winter Olympics.

  But soccer is different. The calculus for scouts is much more complex. First of all, they could never target adults who haven’t played soccer before. Researchers have shown that elite soccer players across the world start playing from a very young age, often around 5 years old, and accumulate thousands of hours of playing time before they even turn 16 years old. Players who haven’t put in this time have no hope of ever competing at the highest levels. That means scouts trying to identify the sport’s next stars have to focus on children, a more difficult prospect given how much kids change physically and mentally during childhood. Clubs have compounded this complexity by focusing on younger and younger kids, with many academies targeting children as young as 5 years old. That gives coaches more time to train them and prevents other clubs from snatching them up. But the younger a player is, the more difficult it is to assess his potential.

  Physical traits like height and speed can certainly help soccer players, but scouts need to be careful about how much they weigh these factors when evaluating kids. Height can be especially important in certain positions like goalkeeper and central defense, but it’s not a prerequisite in soccer like it is in rowing or volleyball. The sport is much more democratic. A pair of Australian scientists found that 28 percent of men have the height and weight combination that could fit in with professional soccer players, even as athletes’ bodies have become more specialized over time. That’s over five times the number they found could play in the NBA.

  In fact, being short can actually be an advantage in soccer. One study published in 2012 found that shorter players with lower centers of gravity are better at performing the sharp changes of direction top players use to elude defenders. Shorter legs and lower mass are also advantageous for acceleration, as Epstein pointed out in The Sports Gene. That may be why NFL running backs and cornerbacks have gotten shorter over the last 40 years, even while humanity has grown taller, Epstein speculated.

  Speed can, of course, be a big advantage for a soccer player. Look no farther than the winning goal Real Madrid winger Gareth Bale scored against Barcelona in the 2014 Copa del Rey final. With the score tied 1-1 in the 85th minute, Bale, one the fastest players in the sport, received a pass at midfield near the left sideline and kicked the ball into open space far down the pitch past Barcelona defender Marc Bartra. Then he turned on the afterburners. Even though Bartra shoved Bale several yards out of bounds at one point, the winger proved far too fast and was several feet ahead of the defender by the time he collected the ball just outside the penalty box. With a few more touches, Bale put the ball between the goalkeeper’s legs and into the back of the net. Even Usain Bolt, the fastest man in history, was impressed. “It’s a goal any sprinter in the world would like to score one day,” he told a Spanish newspaper.

  Multiple studies looking at youth academy players of different ages have found that kids who eventually become professionals tend to be faster than others. Researchers have also found they tend to have greater endurance, agility, and leg power, although the differences were often relatively small and the utility of the measures differed depending on a child’s age.

  But scouts can’t rely on these physical traits to predict who will become a star like they do in rowing or the skeleton. Speed may be the most useful metric of the bunch, but even it has relatively little predictive power to reveal which kids will make it. That’s because coaches are producing soccer players, not track stars. Choosing the fastest kid in a group would, of course, always make sense if the players were equal in every other way, but that’s rarely ever the case.

  At the other end of the spectrum, players may require some minimum level of speed, endurance, and agility, especially as the game has gotten faster and more physically rigorous. But it’s unclear what those minimums might be, and players can often compensate for relative weaknesses by having better technique or game intelligence. Those skills are bigger differentiators at the top level of the sport than a player’s time in the 50-yard dash. Technique and game intelligence come from putting in thousands of hours of training, not from simply having a predetermined genetic build.

  “As one example, I’m sure Messi isn’t the greatest athlete in the world,” said A. Mark Williams, editor of the book Science and Soccer and chair of the Department of Health, Kinesiology, and Recreation at the University of Utah. “He’s probably a decent athlete, but he’s not a super athlete. Maybe what stands him out is he spent all those hours training, a lot of it initially in street football, developing the key technical competencies that are important to progress.”

  Soccer is thus much more nurture than nature, and simply picking the biggest, fastest, and strongest kids on the field wouldn’t be a very successful strategy for a scout. But many make precisely this mistake. One way to see this is to look at when professional players were born. The relative a
ge effect is a widely recognized problem in talent identification. It basically means coaches and scouts often choose young athletes born earlier in a sport’s selection year because they are more physically mature, and this advantage can result in better performance at an early age. After all, a gap of up to twelve months can make a huge difference in the height, weight, and speed of a 13-year-old boy. These older kids are often the ones who receive the best training opportunities, potentially leaving behind an athlete who has greater potential but just needs to catch up physically.

  Many studies have shown the relative age effect is a big problem in soccer. There’s significant overrepresentation of players born early in the selection year on top youth and professional teams across the world. For example, around 60 percent of professional soccer players in England were born in the first quarter of the selection year. Scouts seem to be choosing current performance over future potential by picking older and more physically mature players, potentially missing out on the next big star. “In this way, talent spotting becomes an attempt to avoid failure rather than an ambitious quest to find truly exceptional raw material.” That’s how former soccer coach Rasmus Ankersen put it in his study of elite athletes, The Gold Mine Effect. He pointed out that the club Flamengo passed on future Brazilian superstar Ronaldo in the early 1990s when he was 15 years old because coaches thought he was too small and slight. Ronaldo was born in September. To find the next star, scouts must be prepared to take greater risks than many have in the past.

  Younger and smaller players who do make it into the right training environment may have an advantage when they get older because they have developed skills to compensate for their size. Think of Messi. When he first showed up at Barcelona as a 13-year-old, he was only four feet, ten and a quarter inches tall. The young Argentine had been drawn to Barcelona because his hometown club couldn’t afford the expensive hormone treatment needed to battle a growth disorder. He was so little that when Barcelona’s future sporting director, Txiki Beguiristain, ran into Messi and his father in the elevator that first day, he ruffled the young player’s hair and said, “This boy must be good, he is small,” according to Guillem Balague’s biography, Messi.