We continue through your donation requests. David asked: “While raw talent is obviously important, training and education is also important. Some countries, clubs, etc. seem to do a better job of training young players than others. What analysis of soccer training and education has been done and what does it show?” Here is my answer!
When I think of youth development, my mind immediately goes to Athletic Bilbao. Why? Bilbao are competing in a global player market, but they have an unwritten club-wide policy that only allows them to employ players born in Basque country or schooled at a Basque club. There are a little more than 3 million people living in Basque Country. Given that a big majority of that population is made up of women, children, the elderly, and the ill or physically incapable, Bilbao are essentially choosing from a player pool of less than a million people, while everyone in Europe else can theoretically sign players from anywhere on the planet.
And yet! Since the creation of the Primera Division in 1929, Bilbao have never been relegated from the Spanish first division. Only Real Madrid and Barcelona can claim the same. This century, Bilbao have only finished below 12th three times. Right now, they’re sitting in10th, with a plus-9 goal differential. Perhaps their most famous recent result was a 3-2 road win over Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United -- the world’s most globalized, commercialized club, succumbing to its most provincial adversary:
If the top tier of European soccer was anything close to efficient -- in player development, player acquisition, managerial acquisition, and strategic implementation -- then Bilbao wouldn’t stand a chance. They’d be an honorable story, somewhere in the lower divisions of Spain -- or maybe they’d abandon the policy altogether. Instead, they’re constant proof that most high-level clubs don’t really know what they’re doing and are kept afloat competitively by all the money they have and, well, the fact that most of their competitors don’t really know what they’re doing, either.
Athletic are obviously doing something better than everyone else. It’s obviously not player acquisition, and I don’t think it’s a special devotion to a more efficient way of playing the game or a knack for finding value-adding managers, although they’ve had some: Marcelo Bielsa and Jupp Heynckes, to name a few. And so, it seems like the club has figured out a way to convert its youth players into professional, elite-level contributors at a rate that no other club has come close to matching. As of this time last year, the club claimed that north of 80 percent of its first-team members had come through the academy.
Murad Ahmed of the Financial Times went to Basque Country last year, in search of the special sauce. “Do we do something different [in training] from other teams? No,” said sporting director Rafa Alkorta. “Our methodology is more or less like any other team. Technically or strategically, we don’t invent anything magic. It is more than this. You need to love the team. You need to believe 100 per cent.”
Ahmed writes:
I express doubt that mere devotion is enough to be transformed into a world-class footballer. But Alkorta, 51, insists the club’s policies have intangible, advantageous effects. For one, youngsters know they are far likelier to become a professional footballer at Athletic than at any other club.
They know they represent a pyramid that is possible to scale, because the current team have already done so. Expensive foreign recruits will never supplant them. That encourages players to remain at the academy and the club.
Another powerful force is local feeling. “It is the most important thing for our families, for our friends, for anyone you know . . . if there is anyone that plays for Athletic in your circle, it is the greatest thing for everyone,” says Alkorta. “It is a religion.”
Frankly, I don’t doubt that this all helps, but I also doubt that there isn’t something else -- some competitive advantage Bilbao keeps bangning on -- beyond the feelings of belonging they’re able to create. A recent study showed that about 1 percent of kids playing for an English soccer academy will eventually become professional players at any level, and that two-third of the kids who receive pro contracts as teenagers will be completely out of the sport by age 21. Perhaps the presentation of a realistic pipeline encourages more of Bilbao’s players to stick with the sport, which gives the team more lottery tickets -- more potential to be turned professional -- within their own academy than most teams offer. Still, this doesn’t really explain why Bilbao nails it at such a high rate, and it doesn’t provide an answer for how to develop professional soccer players.
And well, there might not be one. The trendy new line of study is the idea of generality, put forth in David Epstein’s latest book, Range. Generally -- not sorry! -- the new thinking is that people who vary their interests and activities are more successful at the things they want to do. Based on my personal experience, it passes the smell test, and I imagine it does for most of you, too. Zeroed down to soccer, this would mean that the kids who played multiple sports for much of their adolescence would be the ones more likely to have successful careers as pros, compared to those who specialized into soccer early on. As Sean Ingle wrote for The Guardian last year: “As Epstein points out, most people think of football as a sport where early specialisation is important. But a 2014 study comparing the development of 52 top German footballers, including 18 national team players, with 50 who played in the fourth to sixth divisions found that emphatically was not the case.”
However, the research into what particular skills matter are murky. Some studies have found that children who become pros are more likely to be especially competent dribblers at a young age. To me, this suggests that there might be a baseline skill level that is required to become a top-level pro; you have to be able to function so comfortably with your feet that your mind can focus more on the decisions you wanna make with the ball, rather than deciding how to control the ball in the first place. However, other studies have found that the majority of youth players who rank in the 99th percentile of various physical and technical skills are still unlikely to make it to the highest level of the sport.
The best summary of the youth-development literature I’ve seen comes from Sebastian Abbot’s book, The Away Game. As Abbot outlines in the book, the most important studied skill for a soccer player -- the one thing that is essentially universal among all top-level players -- is game intelligence, or the ability to recognize individual on-field situations and then make the right decision for how to act on them. Perhaps in concert with that and with the idea of Range is the philosophy of differential training -- that it’s better to train a skill against a constantly changing set of variables rather than repeating the same task over and over again. Various studies show that skill is more quickly acquired this way. Wanna learn how to make constant contact with your 7-iron? Try one shot with your left shoe off, try the next one with your right eye closed, and keep mixing it up.
It’s not just me, the American David Leadbetter, either. There are disciples of differential training scattered all throughout European soccer. Thomas Tuchel and Jurgen Klopp both apply it in their training sessions -- Klopp has put blocks of wood on the field, while Tuchel has required defenders to practice with tennis balls in their hands. It’s been a tenet of how to do things at Barcelona’s La Masia, and Borussia Dortmund employs something called, I kid you not, the Footbonaut:
Epstein’s idea is, essentially, just an extremely broad version of differential training: developing new skills and resiliency by putting yourself in unfamiliar situations. (This is also one of the themes of The MVP Machine, a wonderful book about skill development in professional baseball by my former colleague Ben Lindbergh and Travis Sawchick.) While the development-mavens at Red Bull Salzburg and RB Leipzig are keenly aware of the importance of game intelligence and have focused on all kinds of cognitive testing for their players -- Red Bull’s head of development Ralf Ragnick has said, “The biggest untapped potential lies in a footballer’s brain” -- the key might actually just be something simpler.
In that 2014 study mentioned earlier, 18 of the German players appeared for the senior national team, and the thing that differentiated them from the other 34 players studied was that the national-team members played more unstructured pick-up soccer as kids. A number of other studies have found that the number of hours spent playing pickup soccer is predictive of professional performance. Brazil exports significantly more professional soccer players than any other nation on Earth, and guess what else they do more than anyone else? They play pickup soccer.