For Real in Salt Lake, Barca style is the model

By Simon Evans

MIAMI, March 17 (Reuters) - Most of the money and attention in the growth of soccer in the United States has been focused on Los Angeles and New York but the unlikely setting of Utah is where the game has developed in the most attractive way.

Real Salt Lake, founded just seven years ago, coached by a 38-year-old from Nebraska and playing in the suburb of Sandy, made their mark by winning the MLS Cup in 2009.

This year they have reached the last four of the CONCACAF Champions League which is the premier club competition for North, Central America and the Caribbean.

They are winning admirers, such as ex-France striker Thierry Henry, as much for the way they play as for their results. Real have adopted the Barcelona style of aesthetically-pleasing football based on a short passing game and swift movement.

“I believe in soccer being played that way, it’s the way I like to watch it, it’s what attracts me about the game when teams play a possession-orientated style, ” head coach Jason Kreis told Reuters in an interview.

“It is something that I wanted to do but it is something also where you need the right tools to be able to do it.

“It has taken some time for us to get a critical mass—the right number of players that are technically gifted enough and smart enough to play the way that we are trying to,” he said.

While Kreis has never played or coached outside the U.S., his influence is drawn mainly from Spain and, despite his club’s name reflecting a cooperation deal with Real Madrid it is their Catalan rivals’ way of playing that has made its mark in Utah.

TOTAL FOOTBALL

“Barcelona have probably been playing that way since (Johan) Cruyff,” he said, referring to the Spanish club’s former Dutch forward and manager who brought ‘Total Football’ to the Catalan side from his days with the national team.

“I think we try in a lot of ways emulate that style, I think it would be very fair to say that we have Latin American players on our team who like to play that style and it is more a natural fit,” added Kreis.

It is an approach which stands in contrast to the perhaps rather dated view of MLS as a physical league with teams who prefer to play a direct form of the game.


“I hope it continues to change in that direction,” said Kreis. “I always think it is going to be a physical league because we have very good athletes, we have strong, big guys that can get the job done and can stretch their bodies maybe a bit further than in other places.

“But I would also say that some of the physical side of our game is because we haven’t raised our technical ability as high as it probably should be—the average player in our league is definitely not as technically gifted as the average player in the Premier League or La Liga or the Bundesliga.

“Because of that we have had a lot of poor first touches and poor tactical decisions on the ball which means that defenders can really jump into things,” he said.

Salt Lake’s approach is based around the cool play of deep lying midfielder Kyle Beckerman whose astute positional sense, vision and composed passing ensure that Real start moves on the floor from the back.

Kreis acknowledged that a direct approach can bring results but would like to see more teams in MLS play a short pass and move style. He believes that would require a major change in the way young players are developed in North America.

“There are lots of ways to look at soccer (it’s) just that (the direct style) isn’t particularly mine. If all soccer was to be the way I like to see it I think it would have to start well before college soccer. We need to start implementing that in our youth teams and our youth national teams,” he said.

How a Soccer Star Is Made

By MICHAEL SOKOLOVE
Published in The New York Times

The youth academy of the famed dutch soccer club Ajax is grandiosely called De Toekomst — The Future. Set down beside a highway in an unprepossessing district of Amsterdam, it consists of eight well-kept playing fields and a two-story building that houses locker rooms, classrooms, workout facilities and offices for coaches and sports scientists. In an airy cafe and bar, players are served meals and visitors can have a glass of beer or a cappuccino while looking out over the training grounds. Everything about the academy, from the amenities to the pedigree of the coaches — several of them former players for the powerful Dutch national team — signifies quality. Ajax once fielded one of the top professional teams in Europe. With the increasing globalization of the sport, which has driven the best players to richer leagues in England, Germany, Italy and Spain, the club has become a different kind of enterprise — a talent factory. It manufactures players and then sells them, often for immense fees, on the world market. “All modern ideas on how to develop youngsters begin with Ajax,” Huw Jennings, an architect of the English youth-development system, told me. “They are the founding fathers.”

In America, with its wide-open spaces and wide-open possibilities, we celebrate the “self-made athlete,” honor effort and luck and let children seek their own course for as long as they can — even when that means living with dreams that are unattainable and always were. The Dutch live in a cramped, soggy nation made possible only because they mastered the art of redirecting water. They are engineers with creative souls, experts at systems, infrastructure and putting scant resources to their best use. The construction of soccer players is another problem to be solved, and it’s one they undertake with a characteristic lack of sentiment or illusion.

The first time I visited De Toekomst happened to coincide with the arrival of 21 new players — 7- and 8-year-olds, mainly, all from Amsterdam and its vicinity — who were spotted by scouts and identified as possible future professionals. As I came upon them, they were competing in a series of four-on-four games on a small, artificial-turf field with a wall around it, like a hockey rink, so that balls heading out of bounds bounced right back into play. It was late November and cold, with a biting wind howling off the North Sea, but the boys skittered about in only their lightweight jerseys and baggy shorts. Their shots on goal were taken with surprising force, which kept the coaches who were serving as goalkeepers flinching and shielding themselves in self-defense. The whole scene had a speeded-up, almost cartoonish feel to it, but I certainly didn’t see anyone laughing.

After a series of these auditions, some players would be formally enrolled in the Ajax (pronounced EYE-ox) academy. A group of men standing near me looked on intently, clutching rosters that matched the players with their numbers. One man, Ronald de Jong, said: “I am never looking for a result — for example, which boy is scoring the most goals or even who is running the fastest. That may be because of their size and stage of development. I want to notice how a boy runs. Is he on his forefeet, running lightly? Does he have creativity with the ball? Does he seem that he is really loving the game? I think these things are good at predicting how he’ll be when he is older.”

Like other professional clubs in Europe and around the world, Ajax operates something similar to a big-league baseball team’s minor-league system — but one that reaches into early childhood. De Jong, a solidly built former amateur player, is one of some 60 volunteer scouts who fan out on weekends to watch games involving local amateur clubs. (He works during the week as a prison warden.) His territory includes the area between The Hague and Haarlem — “the flower district, which is also a very good hunting ground for players” is how he described it. He’ll observe a prospect for months or even years, and players he recommends will also be watched by one of the club’s paid scouts, a coach and sometimes the director of the Ajax youth academy. But for some families, the first time they realize their boys are under serious consideration is when a letter arrives from Ajax requesting that they bring their sons in for a closer look, an invitation that is almost never declined. To comprehend the impact of a summons from Ajax, imagine a baseball-crazed kid from, say, North Jersey arriving home from school one day to learn that he has been asked to come to Yankee Stadium to perform for the team brass.

One player there was de Jong’s discovery, an 8-year-old who, he said, had “talent that is off the charts.” But if this boy were to be accepted into the academy, it would mean he had completed just the first of a succession of relentless challenges. Ajax puts young players into a competitive caldron, a culture of constant improvement in which they either survive and advance or are discarded. It is not what most would regard as a child-friendly environment, but it is one that sorts out the real prodigies — those capable of playing at an elite international level — from the merely gifted.

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Michael Sokolove, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the author of “Warrior Girls,” about the injury epidemic among young female athletes.