Look after those vulnerable young stars

I hit a luck, as they say, when I was asked to attend FIFA’s Cosafa Regional Workshop for technical directors this week, and write an article on it for the Fifa.com website.

The money wasn’t bad, but it was one of the two topics dealt with that really caught my eye –the running of Elite Youth programmes in the various national football federations.

The other topic was coaches education, at which they spoke about the things we studied in teaching diploma year – teaching and learning theory and practice.

It was what the world body is telling the technical directors of the various countries about how they should run their elite youth programmes that I found fascinating. I’ve often wondered why, in the disruption that has followed the professionalisation of the game of rugby, and its filtering down into schools, we don’t look at other sports where this sort of thing has been going on for years.

The professional soccer clubs in England, for example, still follow an apprenticeship system, in which vocational education and training is as important as football skills acquisition. Why are our professional rugby unions not following something similar with their annual signings?

And FIFA, I learned, has invested in loads of research on the best ways of identifying the best young talent, and have policies and procedures in place on how elite youth programmes should be run.

The national technical director who, nominally, is in charge of all the coaches in the national system should, among the others things he has to do, look out for the interests of the young talented players.

“The club youth coaches won’t do that” was a frequent refrain in the presentations. Their concern is to produce players who can graduate to the club’s 1st team. Players in the system who don’t cut it are discarded.

You have a responsibility to the game not individual clubs the technical directors were told, and players are people - not robots - they were reminded more than once.

I’ve heard some worrying stories about the way that those scores of talented young players who are signed by the rugby unions in this country are looked after when they leave school and go to the provincial unions. They are pretty much left on their own in some cases, it’s one of the reasons why so many of the gifted black players we see in action for their schools, or at the Craven Week never make it through to the senior professional ranks.

Without the special care that’s required to help them thrive in a strange new world they flounder, and drop out.

Without disclosing names, to prevent embarrassment, I can tell you an amazing story I heard the other day. One of the brightest young stars in Super Rugby, who had disappeared for a year after making his debut, has been taken into the home of his former school 1^st team coach, who went looking for him and found him hanging out in the wrong places, with the wrong crowd. Watch him go now!

That’s the sort of thing that needs to be done to realise the potential in brilliant, but vulnerable young players.

It’s something the football people have been aware of for years: the nature of that game is that the greatest talent is often found amongst the poorest of the poor.

The national directors at the FIFA workshop were told how to develop a policy to deal with this, to familarise themselves with the emotional, psychological and legal issues around vulnerable youth. It was the most valuable thing to come out of the three days, I thought.

It’s an area where our schools that are, in effect, morphing into elite youth academies should have an edge. Teachers are in the business of dealing with people, not robots. Those who keep it ethical and educational, and in the hands of people who care, deserve the success that comes their way.

Those that don't are doing no-one any good in the long run. That's FIFA's lesson to those who are running its game around the world.