Gaining ground on top soccer teams
ST PETERSBURG: As with every one of these journeys that is transformed by hindsight into a road map, Belgium’s route to the World Cup semi-finals started out in bitter disappointment.
Twenty years ago, the country sent an industrious, unremarkable team to France for the 1998 tournament. Belgium did not lose a game, but its three draws – with the Netherlands, Mexico and South Korea – were not enough to escape the group. It was hardly a grand humiliation, but it was enough to convince the Belgian soccer authorities that something had to change.
And so they set out to transform the way Belgium produced soccer players. They spent years studying how the country trained its young stars, comparing the experiences those players had with those of their peers at the top clubs – Barcelona and Ajax, soccer’s gold standard for youth development.
They identified where they were failing and drew up a blueprint to address it. A national soccer centre was constructed in Tubize, not far from the border with France. Methods at club academies were overhauled, a squadron of coaches trained and specialist schools opened.
It took less than a decade before a generation of talented teenagers began to emerge: first, the likes of Jan Vertonghen, Toby Alderweireld and Axel Witsel, followed quickly by Kevin de Bruyne, Romelu Lukaku and Eden Hazard.
Suddenly, Belgium was a case study. National associations all over Europe – and farther afield – wanted to pick their brains to find out how they had done it. They were invited to seminars to explain the secrets of their success. They gave a presentation at St George’s Park, home of the England national team, on the Belgian model.
Though the details were different, adapted for Belgium’s circumstances, the basic outline was the same as it was for Germany, Spain and France – for all those countries that have followed such a path.
Germany won the World Cup in 2014 thanks to a programme instituted in the late 1990s, when the national team was at its lowest moment. Spain’s 2010 triumph was rooted in an overhaul, particularly of Barcelona’s youth system, a couple decades previously. France established its national training center at Clairefontaine in 1988 and won its first World Cup 10 years later.
Belgium, now, stands two games from joining that list. Should Roberto Martínez’s team get to the final in Moscow on Sunday and win it, the road map would be complete.
Belgium would not just be world champion, it would be the smallest nation to wear that crown since Uruguay in 1950. It would be a beacon to others, proof that smaller nations can compete with the superpowers, a paradigm of how to make the most of comparatively little.
As Belgium was crashing out at the group stage 20 years ago, Croatia was on its way to the semifinals. It was the country’s first trip to the finals as an independent nation; what that team achieved has remained the benchmark for every group of players in its wake.
“We had this famous generation, and now we are close to them,” defender Vedran Corluka said. “We are in the semi-final again, after 20 years. That is something special in our country,” he said yesterday.
In many ways, Croatia’s story is even more remarkable than Belgium’s.
Croatia has a population of just 4 million, and many members of its current team grew up during, or in the immediate aftermath of, the bloody, internecine war that accompanied the collapse of the former Yugoslavia. That it has twice come so close in the years since independence is, by any standard, extraordinary.
Yet nobody invites representatives of the Croatian Football Association to explain the secrets of their success; as countries like Spain, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy pick over their various failures at or before this World Cup, none will talk about the need to follow the Croatian model, to find their own Luka Modric, Ivan Rakitic and Mateo Kovacic.
There is a good reason for that: Croatian soccer is in a state of near-permanent chaos. Two players – Modric, the captain, and Dejan Lovren, a defender – have been accused of perjury in the case of Zdravko Mamic, the former president of the Croatian club Dinamo Zagreb. For years, Mamic ran the country’s soccer programme as his own personal fief; last month, he was sentenced to 6½ years in prison for embezzlement and tax fraud.
The country’s clubs exist handto-mouth: Hajduk Split, one of the traditional giants, has twice come close to bankruptcy; Dinamo’s business model, under Mamic, was to use the Champions League as a stage on which to advertise its young players before selling them off to the highest bidder.
There is no road map here. There is no state-of-the-art facility to gather together the very best young players in Zagreb and Split and Dubrovnik. Croatia’s place in the World Cup semi-finals is not the natural conclusion of an intelligent, long-term project.
For those tasked with finding a way to consistently produce outstanding young players, it is much more difficult to put the same question to Croatia. What can be taken from the Croatian model? That sometimes exceptionally gifted players emerge because of the challenges they face, not despite them; that truly transcendent talent, like that of Modric, does not require immaculate training fields or a perfectly plotted development pathway to shine; that, sometimes, there is no order in the chaos.
Besides, there is perhaps a greater truth in Croatia’s origin myth than there is in Belgium’s. De Bruyne was unlikely to win many friends at his country’s association when he offered his own explanation for how this generation came together: “Because we were given the chance to play in other countries,” he said.
This Belgium team is not a uniquely Belgian creation: Its genesis is European. France, the Netherlands and England have all played a role, too, in allowing it to flourish.
The same could be said of Croatia: Modric, Rakitic and Ivan Perisic are the players they are because of the teams they have played for and the players they have played with and the coaches who have trained them.
It is soccer’s open market, its porous borders and, most of all, its glorious arbitrariness that explain best why Belgium, and Croatia, are close to immortality when bigger, richer nations have long since departed.
That is the lesson both can teach those nations who see in them a map to be followed, a blueprint to be adopted: that sometimes, there is no signal. Occasionally, it is just noise. – New York Times
Smith is the chief soccer correspondent for the New York Times