SPORTING LISBON’S YOUTH ACADEMY SETS IT APART
Recruitment policy one of Europe’s best with likes of Ronaldo and Figo among their biggest discoveries,
The way they tell the story at Sporting Lisbon, they did not even have to watch Cristiano Ronaldo play to know he was special. Seeing him with a ball at his feet, the quiet, skinny 12-year-old’s every effortless touch proof of his masterly control, was enough.
Pretty much everyone at Sporting knows the tale, which is part of the club’s folklore now; pretty much everyone tells it in the same way, with a cadence and cast of characters seemingly straight out of the Nativity. It even features three wise men.
Early in 1997, the president of Sporting’s fan club on the island of Madeira got in touch with Aurélio Pereira, the Lisbon club’s long-serving director of youth recruitment. There was, he said, a prodigiously gifted child in the academy ranks at Nacional, one of three professional clubs in the island’s capital, Funchal.
Pereira, wily and mustachioed, duly sent a scout to assess the claims. The prodigy in question was scheduled to play in a tournament for Nacional. When Sporting’s emissary arrived, though, he discovered his target was not slated to be involved. He found him, instead, on the sideline, alone with a ball, thoroughly absorbed as he went through his repertory of flicks and feints. He watched for a while.
He did not know then, of course, that Ronaldo would go on to become one of the finest players in history, a threetime winner of the World Player of the Year Award, a three-time winner in the Champions League, a champion of Europe with Portugal and, for a while, the world’s most expensive player. But he knew enough. The scout called Pereira and told him to invite Ronaldo to Lisbon, immediately, for a trial.
Nearly 20 years after Ronaldo’s arrival — and 13 since his departure — Sporting Lisbon remain tremendously proud of all that Ronaldo has become. His image has been emblazoned on a mural outside the dressing rooms deep inside Sporting’s Estádio José Alvalade, and the club’s fans will offer a lavish welcome when he takes to the field for Real Madrid, against Sporting, in the Champions League on Tuesday. He will be left with no doubt as to just how much he means to them.
An hour away, in Pereira’s office at Sporting’s youth academy at Alcochete, the reverence is similar. The walls are littered with pictures of Ronaldo, and two signed shirts, from his days at Manchester United, hang behind the director’s desk. Pereira still reels through his memories with glee.
He remembers giving a team talk, only to look to his side and find Ronaldo, bored and impatient, juggling a bottle of water with his feet. He recalls the nights when Ronaldo and his friend José Semedo would vault a wall and break into the gym to do some impromptu — and strictly forbidden — weight training.
His favourite memory, though, is the one involving a traffic light on Praca do Marques de Pombal. “It was near where the young players used to live,” Pereira said in an interview on Friday. “Ronaldo would go and wait by the stop sign. There is a ramp immediately after it. Ronaldo would tie weights to his legs, and wait for the light to turn green. Then he would race the cars up the ramp.”
But while Ronaldo might have a rare prominence here, he is not the only player whose photo graces that office wall. Dozens of other players are featured, too: curling, yellowing shots of Paulo Futre and Luís Figo, more recent images of Nani and Simão Sabrosa, as well as fresh printouts of Portugal’s victorious Euro 2016 team, the majority of players in full color, a handful rendered in gray.
Everyone at Sporting would know why, too: Of the 14 players Portugal used in that final against France, 10 were “made in Sporting.”
Ronaldo is Pereira’s greatest find, but he is far from the only one. Alcochete, as Sporting’s academy is known, is regarded by the International Centre for Sports Studies as a more productive academy than those at Barcelona, Real Madrid and Manchester United.
By one metric, only three clubs (Ajax, Partizan Belgrade and Dinamo Zagreb) have more graduates playing top-flight soccer in Europe than Sporting. The story of how Ronaldo came to Lisbon might be told like a fairy tale, but it is better read as a case study as to what, exactly, sets Sporting apart.
“We do not have any secrets,” Virgílio Lopes, the director of the academy, said. His actions back up his words: Clubs from across the world regularly visit Sporting to find out what lies behind its success rate. They are welcomed by Lopes, Pereira and Luís Martins, Alcochete’s technical coordinator.
“We tell them everything we can,” Lopes said. “Well, we tell them almost everything we can.”
They detail for them, for example, the atmosphere they seek to create: free-range players, not battery-caged ones, in Pereira’s chicken farming analogy.
“They are young people who play football; they are not just small footballers,” Lopes added. “We do not want them to be professional at 14. We want them to still be professional at 20.”
They tell them that they stick to what they do, what they have always done, rather than changing. And they open up their training models, too, explaining how everything is tailored to the individual. “We find the strong and weak points of each player,” Martins said. “Every player needs different things, so we change their training schedules to reflect that.”
That applies in the gym, where each player has a customized conditioning plan, and on the field. “If a player is having difficulty making good passes, we will change the training they do,” Martins said.
Sporting’s staff will incorporate less traditional elements, too. “We play football-squash and foot-volley using the walls,” Martins said. “It helps with open decision-making.”
There is no Barcelona-style template for what system or shape to play. “We don’t find that important,” Martins said. “Things get more complex as they get older. They need to be able to play in different scenarios because that is what professionals have to do.”