The Away Game

by Sebastian Abbot

  Diambars has six well-maintained fields, five of which are artificial turf and the sixth natural grass. The rest of the academy has the feel of a no-frills resort located a few blocks from the ocean. Colorful wildflowers line the sidewalks, and sprinklers run constantly to keep the grass a lush green under Senegal’s baking sun. The players are housed four to a room in two-story, cream-colored concrete villas topped with red tile roofs. The rooms are equipped with ceiling fans, not air conditioning like Doha, so they can get extremely hot in the often sweltering weather. The academy also has a cafeteria, a nice gym, and even a pool where the kids can cool off. There are also several rooms where the Diambars’ players attend class, while the Football Dreams kids travel by bus to an independent private school in town.

  The players are kept under much tighter lock and key than the boys at Aspire in Doha. They’re only let out of the academy to roam around town one afternoon a week, perhaps a good thing since Saly is conspicuously known as a sex tourism destination for French men and women, and prostitutes abound in the town’s bars and restaurants. Saly served as a Portuguese trading post long ago and first started attracting large numbers of tourists in the mid-1980s, many of them middle-class vacationers from France. Hotels and restaurants catering to foreigners have sprung up since then, places like Le Petit Zing, a restaurant bar that serves pizza and steak frites to sunburned tourists during the day and then plies them with Flag beer and Western pop long into the night. Most of these spots are located along the town’s sandy beach, where fishermen push their long wooden boats out to sea in the morning and locals play pickup soccer in the late afternoon once the heat begins to abate.

  Moving inland from the paved beach road, which buzzes with tourists on ATVs, Saly begins to look more familiar. This is the part of town where the locals actually live, and the dirt roads are lined with crudely built concrete houses topped with rusty metal roofs. Goats roam the streets looking for something to eat, and horses walk by pulling beaten-up wooden carts. Almost every male above the age of about 5 seems to be wearing a knockoff European jersey, just like the ones sold down on the beach road next to fake Ray-Bans and Rolexes. There’s Messi adjusting the straps on a donkey, Ronaldo patching a fishing net in the shade of a tree.

  Behind the high concrete walls that surround Diambars, Ibrahima, Diawandou, and the other Football Dreams players battled to become the next name emblazoned on jerseys sold around the world. The kids may not have had all the trappings of Aspire in Doha but did have Colomer and the experience he brought from Barcelona. They saw him as the link to that unknown world of high-end European soccer they so desperately wanted to join.

  The kids meant plenty to Colomer as well. There was, of course, the tantalizing prospect that one of them could become the world’s next superstar. Colomer was proud of the role he had played in jump-starting Messi’s career, but he couldn’t take credit for actually discovering him back in Argentina. Football Dreams was different. If one of the Africans ended up taking the soccer world by storm, nobody would get more credit than Colomer. An African Messi would be his Messi. A player like that would mark him as one of the world’s greatest producers of talent, a reputation he had been looking to cement ever since he was a teenager searching for skilled young recruits for his soccer school back in his hometown of Vic.

  But the kids weren’t just a means to an end. Colomer genuinely cared about them. “For them, this is a chance,” he said, “for them, for their families, for their towns, for Africa.” Colomer may have been relatively cut off from Bernard and the other Football Dreams players in Doha, but in Saly he could often be seen offering encouragement and a few words of wisdom to the boys after a match. He was especially close to the players in the first class and became a father figure to many of them. “I always think Colomer is a messenger from God because he came to Africa to pick talented players,” said Anthony Bassey, a striker the Spanish scout found in Nigeria the first year. Colomer also got to know the kids’ parents, who visited the academy once a year, and often intervened if he noticed a player had problems on the home front.

  Colomer sharing a laugh with the Nigerian goalkeeper John Felagha at the Football Dreams academy in Senegal.

  Out of all the boys, Colomer grew closest to Diawandou, the captain of the first class and a recognized leader among everyone. “Colomer is like my father,” said Diawandou. “He never tells me something that I don’t do.” There were flashier and more physically imposing players at the academy and others who were more vocal off the field. But none commanded the kind of respect Diawandou did during the heat of a match or in a team meeting. “He was a born leader, a very strong character on and off the pitch,” said Wendy Kinyeki, a Football Dreams staff member from Kenya. “He knows how to get people to listen to him. Even when there was discontent, when they lost a match, or the coach was being unfair, he was always bringing people together, acting as a mediator and buffer to make people see both sides, make sure nobody blew off their lid.”

  Over time, Colomer increasingly relied on Diawandou’s leadership and often communicated messages to other boys at the academy through the Senegalese captain. “Colomer only had my number,” said Diawandou. “Whenever he wanted to tell something to a player, he called me.” Diawandou relished his close bond with Colomer, but it didn’t go down well with everyone at the academy. “Some players got jealous,” said Ibrahima. In such a competitive environment, kids started to worry that Colomer’s close relationship with Diawandou and others in the first class meant the Spanish scout might do more to help them become top players in Europe. After all, not everyone was likely to make it. The stakes were so high and the margins so thin, everyone was looking for that edge that could mean the difference between success and failure.

  The schedule at the academy was grueling. A typical day might begin with an hour and a half of training at 7 a.m., followed by breakfast and three and a half hours of school. The players would then return to the academy for lunch, have a rest, and do a second training session around 4:30 p.m. The boys would end the day with two more hours of school, dinner, and then it was off to bed. They followed this routine for four or five days a week and also had a game on the weekend. Much of the training mirrored what Colomer had used at Barcelona’s academy. In fact, he told the BBC his goal was to build “the new La Masia for football talents from developing countries.”

  La Masia was the brainchild of the revered Dutch striker Johan Cruyff. He and his coach at Ajax, Rinus Michels, had revolutionized soccer in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Together, they created the beautiful, flowing blend of attacking soccer that came to be known as Total Football. Teams struggled to deal with Ajax’s fluid system in which players constantly switched positions during matches, and the club won the European Cup three times on the trot in the early 1970s. Cruyff was so creative in his manipulation of space that he has been described as “Pythagoras in boots.” The slender striker was also famous for his delightfully gnomic expressions, like “playing football is very simple, but playing simple football is the hardest thing there is.”

  Michels and Cruyff eventually brought their captivating brand of soccer to Barcelona, and the striker won the Ballon d’Or twice while he was at the club. Even more important, Cruyff suggested starting a youth academy modeled after the one at Ajax. The club’s president agreed, and Barcelona started housing young players in 1979 at La Masia, a craggy old Catalan farmhouse near the team’s Camp Nou stadium. Cruyff further strengthened the academy when he returned to Barcelona as coach in 1988 and ensured all youth teams played in the same fluid, attacking style. This system formed the bedrock of the success Barcelona had twenty years later under coach Pep Guardiola and Messi at his goal-scoring greatest.

  Colomer wanted his academy teams to play the same kind of soccer that Barcelona executed so beautifully. Training methods had evolved since the time he spent at Clairefontaine in the 1990s. The repetitive exercises used by the French academy to build technique had fallen out of favor because they
didn’t improve game intelligence, one of the most important skills needed to become a professional. The coaches at La Masia, and many other academies, now use small-sided games instead because they train technique and game intelligence at the same time. Barcelona is also well known for honing its players’ touch, vision, and passing in tight spaces by using games of keep-away, known as rondos or toros in Spanish.

  Some coaches believe small-sided games are so useful for training because they replicate the kind of pickup soccer that researchers have proven is most useful in developing game intelligence. “They don’t work on technique at Barcelona,” a French national team coach, Erick Mombaerts, told The Blizzard. “They just play games on reduced pitches, adopting the same principles as the street football you see in Brazil and Africa. Even the 12-year-olds play matches all the time. For six years, they work solely on collective play, so it’s little wonder they can pass to one another with their eyes closed.”

  But how does game intelligence work exactly? It’s clear that the ability to analyze the situation on the field and execute the right decision almost instantly is the mark of a good player, both young and old. The colorful TV commentator Ray Hudson often talks about the game’s stars having “kaleidoscope eyes.” But how does street soccer actually help a player develop game intelligence? What’s going on in a player’s brain that gives him the ability to shoot through pockets of space that don’t seem to exist and feed the ball into passing lanes that others can’t see?

  The Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman provided valuable insight into the inner workings of game intelligence in his best-selling book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, even though it wasn’t primarily focused on sports and didn’t mention soccer at all. For simplicity’s sake, he described the brain as two different systems. System 1 operates quickly and automatically, with little or no effort. It can do things like detect one object is farther than another and answer the math problem 2 + 2 = ?. System 2 is slower and more taxing but better at complex problem solving. It can park a car in a narrow space and fill out a tax form.

  A soccer player dribbling at high speed and evaluating his next move as teammates and opponents shift around him needs to do System 2 thinking but execute at System 1 speed. That’s where the thousands of hours of training come in. With enough practice, players can transform what would be System 2 thinking for a novice, like deciding whether to dribble, pass, or shoot in the face of an onrushing defender, into a System 1 process. It can even seem effortless, a state psychologists often refer to as flow, or more colloquially, as being in the zone.

  Kahneman doesn’t call this type of thinking game intelligence but labels it expert intuition. He gave the example of chess masters to show what System 1 can accomplish with the right training since they can often come up with a strong move only seconds after looking at a board. He cited the work of another Nobel laureate, Herbert Simon, who published a seminal study in 1973 with fellow psychologist William Chase, looking at how chess masters process the game so quickly. Their findings led to a pivotal theory applicable not just to chess but also to sports in general.

  They proposed that chess masters perceive the board in chunks, clusters of positions they have seen before. That way they don’t have to grapple with a large number of individual pieces, and a quick glance at a board is often all it takes to recognize a layout. Grandmasters have a mental database of millions of arrangements of pieces broken down into at least 300,000 chunks, allowing them to quickly process what they see and make a decision. “What was once accomplished by slow, conscious deductive reasoning is now arrived at by fast, unconscious perceptual processing,” wrote Chase and Simon. “It is no mistake of language for the chess master to say that he ‘sees’ the right move.”

  Soccer is likely no different. Elite players have developed their game intelligence by building the same kind of mental database as chess masters through thousands of hours of training, except they’re chunking midfielders and defenders, not knights and pawns. Training may even change the physical structure of a player’s brain. One study of high-level athletes found that they had increased cortical thickness in certain areas of their brains compared to nonathletes and that it was correlated with training. One of these areas is associated with biological motion perception. In soccer, this would relate to the ability to anticipate an opponent’s movements in a match, an absolutely essential skill.

  Some of the top clubs in the world have started using innovative training methods off the field in an attempt to improve the cognitive skills that underpin game intelligence. Manchester United spent $80,000 to install a system called NeuroTracker that requires players to track digital yellow spheres as they bounce around a 3D screen, much like they would track teammates and opponents moving around the field. At Bayern Munich, they use a device called the SpeedCourt that can be set so that players have to run to different electronic sensors in the floor, following a sequence that flashes on a screen in front of them for a short time at the beginning of the test.

  The rival German club Borussia Dortmund employs a system called the Footbonaut, which consists of a 150-square-foot artificial turf surface surrounded on four sides by 72 square panels. Machines send balls hurtling at a player standing in the middle of the turf from any of the four sides of the room. A beep alerts the player where the ball is coming from, and he must quickly turn, receive the ball, and pass it into whichever of the panels surrounding him lights up. These training methods have their supporters and critics, but none of them can substitute for the thousands of hours of training a player needs on the field to make it to the top.

  Colomer certainly knew the importance of logging plenty of training hours. In fact, he boasted that by having his players train in the morning and afternoon, they racked up twice as many hours as the kids back at Barcelona. Many academies have shied away from holding two training sessions a day for various reasons, including concern over physical wear and tear. But how many hours of training does a player actually need to make it in the world of professional soccer?

  The youth development plan adopted by the Premier League in 2011 promoted the so-called 10,000-hour rule popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his best-selling book Outliers. He called it “the magic number for true expertise,” and many in the media have interpreted the idea as meaning 10,000 hours of practice is necessary and sufficient to make anyone an expert in anything. The concept is based on work done in the 1990s by K. Anders Ericsson and two other psychologists, who studied the amount of practice by violinists and pianists at the Music Academy of West Berlin. They found that aggregate practice time, not innate talent, determined a musician’s skill level, and top violinists and pianists had accumulated an average of 10,000 hours of practice by the age of 20. They extended their conclusions to sports in a paper led by Ericsson, and he came to be known as the father of the 10,000-hour rule, although he never called it a rule himself. He said the genes necessary to be a pro athlete “are contained within all healthy individuals’ DNA.” They just need to practice.

  But the reality is more complicated, as David Epstein outlined in The Sports Gene. He pointed to a subsequent study that looked at the number of hours required to become a chess master. It found that while the average was about 11,000, similar to what Ericsson predicted, the range was 3,000 to 23,000. That meant some people had to practice nearly eight times more to become a master. Others trained for 25,000 hours and never made it at all.

  Studies now indicate that practice only accounts for a low to moderate amount of the difference in skill between athletes, musicians, and others. What accounts for the rest? At least part of it is genetic differences, said Epstein. Genes help to determine not only things like height and speed but also an athlete’s response to training and willingness to work hard. An elite athlete therefore needs both the right genes and the right training, a combination of “innate hardware and learned software,” according to Epstein. Nature and nurture.

  Despite this complexity, the Premier League fo
cused on the 10,000-hour rule in its youth development plan and encouraged English academies to increase the number of training hours to catch up to their European counterparts. But the truth is that players at major European academies get nowhere near 10,000 hours of training. The authors of the book Youth Development in Football surveyed six major European clubs, including Ajax, Barcelona, and Bayern Munich, to find out the number of training hours that kids get from the Under-9 level until they graduate at around the age of 18.

  The highest number was 4,700 hours at the French club AJ Auxerre. They found the number to be about the same at Aspire in Doha, which ran training sessions twice a day like Colomer in Senegal. Of course, not every player needs 10,000 hours to make it. In general, though, the authors speculated that the number of hours of training at European academies meant many players aren’t ready to represent top-level teams when they graduate and still need time to progress. But in the cutthroat world of professional soccer, they often don’t get it, and many wash out of the game.

  These figures don’t take into account the number of hours spent playing matches and, more importantly for some kids, time spent training in more informal settings like the street. Rasmus Ankersen, the author of The Gold Mine Effect, found that it wasn’t unusual for Brazilian kids to log 10,000 hours by the time they turn 13, taking into account the time they spent training at school, at their club, and on the street. In contrast, he estimated the average English player wouldn’t reach that number of hours until he hit the age of 30, or perhaps a few years earlier if he got into an academy. This difference helps explain why Brazilian players have dominated the soccer world for so many years.