UEFA Champions Journal: Teenage Kicks - article with Simon
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In an interview with French sports paper L’Equipe in November, the venerable Real Betis coach Manuel Pellegrini reflected on how young players today arrive in a first team environment more equipped to face the challenge than ever before.
Pellegrini, La Liga’s oldest coach at 72, has seen plenty of change in his 37-year coaching career. While he laments seeing youngsters seldom without a phone in their hands, he noted in the interview that they have the benefits now of individual attention from nutritionists, psychologists, fitness trainers and more.
Jalland, a UEFA Technical Observer, sees players “growing up with a lot more knowledge”. He explains: “Now from a young age, they can see players from all around the world and see more clearly what the best players do. A lot of the players I’ve worked with have spent a lot of time on YouTube watching their favourite players, learning from them and then going out on the pitch and training on it.” Interestingly, while Pellegrini, a bookworm, complained that he sees his players reading little, Jalland is particularly impressed by the capacity of his Norway youngsters to digest information. “When I grew up, we had one or two TV channels, but now they’re used to taking in a lot of information. My experience with youth national teams is that the players get things very fast and can also handle maybe more information than expected.”
A current view of youth development in English football comes from Simon Clifford, a UK-based performance coach who mentors around 30 players, many of them at an early stage in their careers.
According to Clifford, the gap from U21 football to the first team remains vast – and the step between the two intimidating. One young player described it to him as “going into the wild”, owing to the intensity of the first-team environment where winning is everything. Yet he offers several reasons why the young generation profiled in these pages have been able to make that leap.
First, he sees “a different level of player technically than we had before”. Next, he has noted a greater focus on ensuring players are physically ready, which can be a challenge when their bodies are still maturing. “A big positive in recent years has been the evolution of strength and conditioning in clubs,” he says. “Players are in the gym four times a week and that’s made a big difference as, when they make the transition, they’re in a much better position.”
Clifford has also observed an effort to accustom players to the first-team environment. “There’s been a great push to get younger players involved in first team training,” he explains. In addition to providing an extra body on the training pitch, they may also get the chance to shadow the seniors on a matchday. “You might get put on the first-team bus a few times.”
And, on this note, we see the benefits of the UEFA Youth League, which often allows the youngsters at those clubs competing in the league phase the opportunity to travel to fixtures alongside their first-team counterparts, given the senior sides will have a Champions League assignment in the same city.
Crucially, Clifford has detected a stronger awareness that players need to progress quickly from under-age football – starting with loan spells. “What’s helped these last few years is players seem to have been put on loan far more readily and at younger ages than previously.” So far, so good.
*the above in an excerpt taken from UEFA Champions Journal 25