Where are all the great players? Australia paying price for ignoring development | John Davidson

Football is, according to the old commentator’s cliché, a game of two halves. Considering the state of football in Australia at the moment, this seems particularly apt: on the one hand, the game appears to be flying – the Socceroos are reigning Asian champions, more people are playing the sport than ever before at grassroots level and the A-League’s future is assured thanks to a new TV deal – but scratch beneath the surface, and it’s clear Football Federation Australia faces myriad problems.

One of those, a deep issue underpinning many others, is the question of where all the great players have gone. Where will the next Harry Kewell and Mark Viduka come from? Australia’s pipeline of quality football talent has begun to dry up.

Many have started to ask questions as a perfect storm develops over just how young players are developed in this country. Failures at youth international level, where Australia used to excel, are causing alarm. The Olyroos have not qualified for an Olympics since 2008 and the Joeys and Young Socceroos both failed to qualify for their respective World Cups this year.

Few exciting youngsters are emerging in an A-League dominated by veterans and foreigners. Australians plying their trade regularly in the best European leagues are now rare. Ange Postecoglou might have taken the Socceroos to bold new heights under his tenure, but he has largely done it with a pool of players inferior to those enjoyed by his predecessors.

Capping it off is the controversial decision by FFA to close down Canberra’s Centre of Excellence (COE), formerly the AIS’s football program. This was the program that helped produce Viduka, Ned Zelic, Craig Moore and many of Australia’s finest footballers. For more than three decades it was the finishing school for the best and brightest 16, 17 and 18-year olds in the land.

The decision sparked anger from within the football community. Ron Smith spent 14 years with the program, as assistant and then head coach, and to him FFA’s reasons for the closure – to put A-League, W-League and National Premier League clubs at the heart of player development and better use its resources – are valid.

“Times have changed, the program is not what it used to be,” believes Smith, who now runs his own football consultancy. “Also a number of kids these days choose not to go there. When you look at the cold hard facts you can understand why the decision was made. The whole horizon has changed and the interesting thing for me is what’s going to be put in its place.”

Opponents of the closure argue that A-League clubs are not yet ready to take up the slack. Not all have their own academies and those that do are some time away from replicating the standards of the COE. They continue to bleed money and their focus, understandably, is on financial survival and first-team results as opposed to youth development.

Part of the problem remains that Australian kids do not play or train enough year round compared to their peers in other parts of the world. “The ‘golden generation’ will tell you they spent so many hours practicing on their own or with a mate, or whatever they did was football-based,” Smith says. “They didn’t have iPads, tablets, the internet. They’re recent innovations that now kids have to decide, ‘what do I do?’ There’s a major competition for time and interest in developing players.”

Smith pinpoints the end of the NSL in 2004 and the introduction of the A-League as the turning point in the crippling of Australia’s production line. The dismantling of the National Youth League, which was re-introduced in a limited form in 2008, and the disenfranchising of NSL clubs meant less opportunity for youngsters.

“We’ll never be competitive at a serious level with people that only train and play six months of the year, we’ve got to change that,” the 67-year old says. “If you think from 1989 to 2005 when we qualified for the World Cup and that generation of players, it was after introducing summer football and opportunity for kids to train and play all year around. And then we took it away and we haven’t replaced it.”

Australia is now paying the price for this colossal change. Ignoring player development for so long has left us in a situation where players like Tom Rogic and Aaron Mooy are rare diamonds. Another factor has been the alienation of many successful coaches from the old school – those from the NSL days who didn’t fit into FFA’s breakaway of “new football”. They include Steve O’Connor, Les Scheinflug and Raul Blanco, with many years of vital experience thrown away.

Former A-League player Zenon Caravella, who now runs his own academy in north Queenlsand, believes skill acquisition in Australia starts at too late an age, as good habits needed to installed as early as possible. “It starts younger than what most people think,” he says. “It’s very difficult to change at 12. At 13, 14 if you’re still doing things that aren’t right technically, then you’re behind the eight-ball. It’s very difficult to change at that age.”

The introduction of the national curriculum and its impact is another thorny talking point. The curriculum was only introduced in 2009, with a second edition released in 2013. The jury is still out on what influence it has had. Perhaps the bigger problem with the curriculum is the way in which some coaches rely on it as the be-all and end-all of football.

Smith believes many junior coaches take the curriculum too literally. “The danger is you teach players a system rather than teach players how to play football,” he says. “Experienced people will able to say, ‘OK I understand all the rationale of playing a 4-3-3’, but we still have to teach people how to play football. To some degree that has been missed by a lot of coaches who don’t have that much experience so they’ve come system-based, as opposed to player-based.”

Caravella agrees, and points to what he has seen in regional areas. “For the people with no experience in the game that look at it and say this is what it says, so this is what I have to do. The only view they have is this book. When these people read it they regurgitate it exactly as it is in the textbook. In reality it’s just a template.

“But these people take it so literally. For me that’s not right. I think it can become dangerous when you produce a player that’s not free-thinking. It hampers the player’s ability to find other solutions or different scenarios in a game that they can adapt to.”

There is no straight-forward solution to Australia’s development dilemma, no magic switch to start churning out the next generation of Kewells and Cahills. Problems such as the amount of training and competitive football being played, and the move away from serious to “fun” games for juniors, along with the process of talent identification, parent education and the grassroots interpretation of the national curriculum all need fixing.

But some issues are not easily resolved. Australia has unique challenges when it comes to its geography and population spread. What works in Holland, Germany, Uruguay or Italy won’t necessarily work here. Solving the infrastructure puzzle is a huge part of the predicament. At the end of the day young players need opportunity to develop and thrive.

“The problem is we have a massive country and you don’t know where the talent is going to pop up,” Smith says. “You can’t just say it’s OK to do this overseas when you can fit some of these countries into Australia 50 times. That’s the reality. Small sometimes is great when it comes to providing opportunity and seeing things and getting things done at minimum cost. In this country it’s a massive cost. Without opportunity, people just don’t get better.”