San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
DANES PROVIDE HINT FOR SDFC
San Diego MLS team will share template of FC Nordsjaelland
Last spring, England’s Premier League sent a group of its top youth coaches and directors for a six-day “study trip” to Denmark, to a town of 20,317 on the country’s easternmost island with a stone church built in 1100.
They weren’t there to see the church.
They were there to see FC Nordsjaelland, a soccer club with a distinguished history that rarely fills its 10,000seat stadium and has an average player age of 22 but just finished second in the Danish Superliga behind giant FC Copenhagen, which is based in a city of 654,000 with a stadium that seats 38,065. A club that produced Mohammed Kudus, who scored a pair of goals for Ghana in the 2022 World Cup and now is one of the Premier League’s hottest young players at West Ham United.
“Really enlightening,” one of the English coaches said later.
FC Nordsjaelland, or FCN for those not inclined to proper Danish pronunciation, might be unique as a professional club in Europe, or perhaps anywhere. The Wild Tigers also provide a window into what San Diego Football Club, the Major League Soccer expansion franchise scheduled to launch next year, could look like.
FCN offered a closer view this month, coming to San Diego for a two-week training camp over the Danish season’s annual winter break and hosting several dozen of the area’s top coaches for an informational session and open practice at the Elite Athlete Training Center in Chula Vista.
“Not many,” Flemming Pedersen says, “are doing it the way we are doing it.”
Pedersen is the chief football officer for Right to Dream, the residential, fully scholarshiped youth academy founded in 1999 by former Manchester United scout Tom Vernon in Ghana that has morphed into a burgeoning soccer empire on three continents. In 2015, Vernon and Right to Dream purchased FCN to provide a final, in-house professional step for graduates of their academies.
Most pro clubs have youth academies, but they
were created by the parent club as the perfunctory base of its developmental pyramid — a top-down approach. Never has the youth academy owned the senior club.
“The other way around of thinking,” Pedersen says.
A similar dynamic exists with San Diego FC. The connection is Mohamed Mansour, an Egyptian billionaire who partnered with the Sycuan tribe to purchase MLS’S 30th team. In 2021, Mansour invested $120 million in Right to Dream and recently opened an academy in Egypt.
In October, before securing office space for the club, before signing any firstteam players, before hiring a coach or general manager, SDFC broke ground on a $150 million Right to Dream academy on 28 acres of Sycuan land in East County. It ultimately will house 120 to 160 youth players between ages 12 and 16 who, Vernon says without blinking, will one day comprise as much as 90 percent of SDFC’S roster.
“The revolution of youth football in America and globally,” Vernon calls it.
Few paid attention when Vernon purchased FC Nordsjaelland and converted its existing youth teams into a Danish version of Right to Dream. He hired Pedersen as technical director and then head coach, including a clause in his contract requiring a certain percentage of the roster be filled with Right to Dream graduates.
There were what Vernon calls “integration pains” for a few years, merging the cultures of Denmark and Ghana. But FCN started winning despite being one of the youngest teams in Europe, and people started paying attention. And paying money for its players.
Kudus, who joined Right to Dream in Ghana at age 10, was initially sold by FCN to Dutch club Ajax for $10 million and three years later to West Ham for $46 million. Kamaldeen Sulemana went to France’s Stade Rennais for $18.5 million. Ernest Nuamah went to France’s
Lyon for $32.5 million, shattering the transfer record for a player from the Danish Superliga.
On Friday, Scottish power Rangers acquired Mohamed Diomande, a midfielder from Ivory Coast who was also part of the Right to Dream academy in Ghana before making his pro debut at 18 with FCN.
"They are a team that everybody follows," Rangers coach Philippe Clement told media in Scotland. “It’s not easy to get a player to Rangers from that team because there’s a lot of competition.”
So what is it exactly about that team?
It is rooted in the statistic that, on average, pro soccer coaches at the highest levels last an average of 16 months. They sculpt a roster to fit their desired style of play, then they get fired and the new coach overhauls the roster to fit his preferences. He gets fired after 16 months, and the cycle repeats.
“Our logic is we don’t want to be part of that system,” Mads Davidsen, Right to Dream’s global head of football, told the assembled local coaches Thursday in Chula Vista. “We believe that having a specific style of play, we can change the head coach but we don’t change the style of play. We try to keep that continuity.
“Our style of play, we consider it our competitive edge. … Our style of play is our context.”
It is also rooted in their bottom-up approach. They wanted a style that works for 17-year-old pros playing
against grown men, and a style equally relatable to the 12-year-old midfielder in the academy.
“When you are an experienced player, you are better at anticipating,” says Pedersen, FCN’S former head coach who last year transitioned to a broader role with Right to Dream. “You are more clever, and you are stronger in the duels because you probably weigh (10 or 15 pounds) more than a 17-year-old, where the body has not been completely built.
“We figured out these differences. Then we said, ‘What kind of game should be play?’ For example, how can we avoid duels? Keep the ball on the ground and have as few stops in the game, as few set pieces, as possible. So that’s why we press the ball in our half away from the touchlines, where 99 out of 100 teams force the ball outside.”
The field is divided into eight phases, four offensive, four defensive. The number of options for a player with the ball is reduced from eight or 10 to maybe four or five, digestible for younger players instead of filling their heads with complexities, allowing them to play faster.
Then they implement it across all levels of the club — the new arrivals at Right to Dream culled from a network of scouts who evaluate tens of thousands of 9-, 10and 11-year-old prospects to fill a dozen or so spots; the players who graduate to the International Academy for their late teens; and those on FCN’S senior roster currently comprised of 70 percent Right to Dream alums.
“Accelerated learning,” is their term for it.
“When we have a 20- or a 21-year-old player, he should play as a 27- or 28-year-old player in the (Danish) Superliga,” Pedersen says. “We have 10 years to do 16 years of work.”
The other major difference noticed by the Premier League coaches is what one calls cultural architecture.
It is not a star system so prevalent in American sports, where the team is constructed around one or two big-money players and not everybody is created
equally.
At FCN, players will break into position groups at halftime to devise secondhalf strategies. Two-way dialogue is encouraged at practice.
Pedersen puts it like this: “There’s no hierarchy, no egos, a lot of psychological safety. People can express themselves. We are always working on that.
“Because young coaches, players, they have so much potential. They have so many opinions and thoughts, and we need to get all this out. We don’t know if it’s the 16-year-old who has the best idea we’ve ever heard about. This is important.”
And they do it without cuts, the bane of the youth soccer culture in the United States and elsewhere. Once you’re selected into the Right to Dream academy, you remain whether or not you’re tracking to be a pro. Those who aren’t have the option of attending U.S. prep schools with the goal of playing college soccer, then returning to work in the organization in an administrative capacity.
The Right to Dream academy on a golf course in East County is within 50 kilometers of the border, which, under FIFA recruitment rules, allows it to reach into Mexico for players. San Diego FC will put its own slant on the model, and the single-entity business model of MLS creates different challenges than Denmark or other European leagues.
But much of the template will be the same.
“Now we have players excelling consistently in the Premier League and we believe we’re starting to make a case for a new idea in football,” says Vernon, Right to Dream’s founder. “We’re not saying it’s the solution here. In a country this big, you need multiple strategies and approaches.
“But this could be the string to the bow of U.S. soccer, and hopefully within that there will be commercial momentum behind SDFC and the Right to Dream academy.
“We think we’re onto something.”