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By Rory Smith
Angel Di Maria never came home. The summer of 2007 had been good. He was 19 years old and had spent about a month in Canada, representing his country in the Under-20 World Cup. He had excelled, scoring 3 goals, as had his team: as in 1995, 1997, 2001 and 2005, Argentina won the tournament.
His star rose so fast that when the aircraft carrying the equipment landed back to Buenos Aires, Di María passed slightly passport control. “When we landed, he was delivered from our aircraft and taken to Europe,” Hugo Tocalli said. , the coach of the team. ” Actually, on that. “
Di María’s first prevention against Benfica, the way of an adventure that will take him to Real Madrid, Manchester United and now Paris Saint-Germain. He’s not the first member of this young team to cross the ocean. Three of his teammates – adding Sergio Aguero – had already been signed through European clubs, neither he last: in one year, nine other tocalli team members had retired from Argentina.
“It was the same on each and every occasion,” said Tocalli, who was on the training team for Argentina’s five victories in that period. “We went to Qatar and ended up as champions. We went to Malaysia, we finished champions. the players went to Europe, then went to the national team.
While looking for names, it is not difficult to see why: Walter Samuel, Esteban Cambiasso, Pablo Aimar from the 1997 team; In 2001, Nicolás Burdisso, Maxi Rodríguez and Javier Saviola; Fernando Gago, Pablo Zabaleta and, of course, Lionel Messi from the team that won in Holland in 2005. Argentina, those a few years old, seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of incredibly gifted teenagers, poised to conquer the world.
Tocalli still works on the development of young people, as a member of the technical staff of San Lorenzo. Take a look at countless perspectives. And he is still convinced that Argentina produces the most productive players. “The skill is still there,” he says. There are still players here. “
That might not have changed, but everything has changed. Ten years ago, 47 Argentine players were in Italian Serie A; this year, only 24 are registered lately. In 2014, the Premier League hired 23 Argentines; this season, which has been reduced to 11.
And, as Argentine journalist Juan Pablo Varsky has pointed out, a portion of them – including Aguero, Willy Caballero and Sergio Romero – are in the fall of their careers, their heirs have not yet materialized. Europe, not long ago, took the lead, players as fast as Argentina can simply expand them. Now, it seems, the production line has entered.
A few years ago, two watchmen from FCCopenhague, the Danish first team, arrived in Avellaneda, a city south of Buenos Aires, to see Racing Club play a hope. The only challenge they couldn’t imagine, exactly, to enter the stadium.
In Europe, there is an unspoken agreement between clubs to make special arrangements for Scouts: complimentary tickets that provide an intelligent point of view, regularly among their peers, or in the quieter parts of a stadium, such as the manager’s box or the press seats. In Argentina, the projection has been a bit more complex, finally the two Danish scouts, with their calls and unanswered emails to the club, still had no selection to buy tickets and sit among the fans behind the goal. position to compare a possible signature.
The incident led Racing to make life easier for visiting divers, but the club’s visitor coordinator, Diego Huerta, said it can still be “complicated” for European watchers to watch live matches in Argentina. This contrasts only with Europe but also, much, better, with the wonderful continental rival of Argentina, Brazil.
Brazil, partly because of its history, partly because of its extent, has long been the leading exporter of football. In May, a report from the CIES Football Observatory showed that 1,535 Brazilians played professional outdoor football in Brazil. I could never fit into a figure like that, of course, but it wasn’t that long ago that it was coming.
In 2014, Argentina sold more players than Brazil; in the previous years, Brazil stood at the forefront with the smallest of margins; now, however, while Argentina’s production line has collapsed, CIES has found that it exports only 78 players in 2019 – Brazil has risen again.
The recruitment of players in Europe is characterized by two trends: the first is the popular training for young people in Brazil, which many are now comparable to that in Europe, and the other is the relative ease of doing business with Brazilian clubs. “They invite you, they show you around the academy, they offer you a coffee, they tell you about the players,” said the recruiter of a giant European team. “They’re more transactional. “
The effect, at the highest level, is clear. Until 2014 there were more Argentines in Serie A than Brazilians; from 2014 to 2018 the same was the case in the Premier League; now, even in Spain, where a shared language has facilitated the installation of Argentine players, Brazil is booming. 2018, 39 Argentines played in La Liga and 21 Brazilians. This season, the gap has been considerably reduced: 25 Argentines and 20 Brazilians.
It’s tempting that the explanation is accessibility. Brazil’s most productive groups invite scouts on a tour; Argentina, in some cases, does not even respond to emails. In a fast-converting market, clubs will instinctively favor the player they know best; they can’t make judgments about what they don’t see. Argentina’s fall is a failure not yet of organization skill.
For Huerta, however, there is a flaw in this argument. “This is all true also 10 years ago,” he said. “It’s confusing now, but confusing at the time. And the agreements are still made.
Most top control group headquarters have, somewhere in their encrypted recruiting software, a list comparing the relative strengths of dozens of leagues around the world. On the top charts, the Premier League and La Liga compete for supremacy; Germany tends to rank third.
The list works like anything between a crib leaf and an equation, a way to weigh the merits of players in all countries and contexts. If a team looks at two strikers, one in France and one in Portugal, the list allows the team to see what the player’s knowledge profile means in relation to the other.
The 21st Corporate Analytics Club, which provides knowledge and data to various groups in Europe, has its own model. Brazil’s first flight, Serie A, came in sixth place; The Argentine Super League is eighth. “We believe that Argentina’s most productive groups are a little larger than Brazil’s, but there is greater strength in the most sensitive in Brazilian football,” said Omar Chaudhuri, Director of Intelligence at Club 21.
For recruiters, this makes Brazil a market where it is less difficult to work. “High-quality leagues can be harder to detect,” Chaudhuri said. “When you look at Boca Juniors, for example, opposed to a weak opponent, it can be difficult to measure how impressive individual functionality is. “
This challenge was exacerbated in 2015, when the Super League expanded to 30 teams. Although this number has now been reduced to 24, it is expected to increase again in reaction to the monetary effect of the coronavirus pandemic.
“There is no way the point is not getting across,” Huerta said of a league this size. “When the groups watch the games here, they see 8 or 10 groups to watch, and the point is low. “
This is typical of how the challenge is explained in Argentina, as a factor at least in component due to the country. Huerta cites several points, ranging from broader economic challenges that force clubs to cut their progression budgets to the loss of Tocalli and his mentor. , José Pékerman, before him, of the country’s youth system. Tocalli regrets the lack of foresight of Super League teams.
“There are only a few clubs with projects,” he says. “For many, the result, even at the youth level, is the only thing that matters, the development of the players. They are thinking about today, tomorrow. “
Argentina’s disappearance, however, cannot be attributed entirely to self-inflicted damages. The lifestyles of these knowledge-based matrices comparing leagues is evidence of a new market reality: club horizons have expanded far beyond classic markets. be at the forefront – Udinese, Lyon, Porto and everyone else – now Argentina, like Brazil, as a high-end market. They think there is a higher price in Chile, Colombia and Uruguay.
And they know how to locate it: sift through the wealth of knowledge provided in those traditionally smaller leagues, and then use it as Wyscout to watch as many matches as they want. This technological substitution has broadened the horizons of football: Nigeria now exports more players Ghana has more expats than Belgium.
At the same time, Europe has industrialized its own development of young people. “In the past, there were no highly technical German players, English players, Spanish players of this level,” Huerta said.
European football turned to Argentina – and Brazil – because of the magic it lacked. Now, Huerta said, he has a tendency to place “combative” players in South America. Talent? You can grow it on your own.
He hopes the fall in Argentine exports will be just a dive into the cycle, an herbal hole before players start emerging again. “Here are attractive generations, players of 15, 16 and 17 years. ” Huerta said.
Tocalli is right, in this sense: Argentina has never stopped generating players, it is that, nowadays, Europe does want it so much.
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