They say Italian football began losing its talent — its Baggios, its Del Pieros, its Tottis — when footballs stopped bouncing in the dust, in squares and side streets, on urban pitches more or less held together. That alone was enough to put extra obstacles in children’s way, especially on the creative side of the game. Obstacles to overcome: thinking, inventing, letting themselves go. Something that no longer happens in modern academies. And if Italy’s old No. 10s are now a dying breed, elsewhere they have realised that things are hardly any healthier. There may be more quality — there certainly is — but it is increasingly standardised, and over time that leaves little to distinguish one player from another when they come up against opponents with much the same characteristics.
That is why Europe’s best academies have been trying to address the problem for some time. As the Times reports in this lengthy feature, street football is taking up an increasing amount of space in elite player development — or, rather, conditions designed to recreate something of what the spontaneity of the street can offer. The players themselves are perhaps the clearest way into the problem. Lamine Yamal, the teenage world champion, may be among the last of a generation to have grown up between pavements and pitches, on the small grounds of Rocafonda, outside Barcelona. Today’s children, the Barcelona star points out, are brought into the structure of a football academy from the age of four and immediately find themselves faced with rigid instructions. Position by position: the centre-back has certain tasks, the midfielder has others, the winger others again. Footballers in miniature. These sporting and educational structures provide useful reference points, but they can also dry up spontaneity before it has had the chance to take root.
So, as the young players of the post-Yamal generation begin to come through the academies, coaches themselves are starting to recognise the side effects of these methods. The new generation is highly disciplined, tactically impeccable. But they rarely make the wrong play because they rarely take risks. And against the best teams in the world, sooner or later, that becomes a problem. So from Barcelona to London, those working in the game are gradually bringing back the parts of football that have recently been neglected: one-on-ones, the search for creativity, uneven playing surfaces, opponents of wildly different ages — as if anyone ever checked an ID card at the local pitch? The underlying aim is to bring together two essential qualities: invention and discipline, courage and caution, the instinct to dribble and the ability to play the simple pass. Street football forces a player to read and solve problems that cannot be predicted. Academy football provides an orderly set of instructions, a way of avoiding unnecessary risks.
Only by combining the two, alongside an unprecedented emphasis on physical conditioning, do the academies hope to produce the great players of the future. Xavi and Iniesta, to take two Barcelona examples, would surely have jumped at the chance to have the facilities La Masia has today when they were children. And yet today’s prodigy can find himself longing for the freedom they had. Somehow, Lamine has managed to combine the two. Perhaps that is why he is already among the very best.