- Thread starter
- #31
gerd
Retired Footballer
Re: The Belgium thread
It seems there are Belgian trolls too Frank...
It seems there are Belgian trolls too Frank...
BELGIUM thread
- Thread starter gerd
- Start date
MadbaLL
Interista per sempre!
Re: The Belgium thread
it seems januzaj chose belgium NT:
this is his dressing room photo.
it seems januzaj chose belgium NT:
this is his dressing room photo.
- Thread starter
- #33
gerd
Retired Footballer
Re: The Belgium thread
I wanted to post this picture too..it's all over the Belgian papers (madness if you think about it).
Not sosure if this means anything, might be some sort of prank by Januzaj who must see the irony of all these foolish speculations...
I wanted to post this picture too..it's all over the Belgian papers (madness if you think about it).
Not sosure if this means anything, might be some sort of prank by Januzaj who must see the irony of all these foolish speculations...
- Thread starter
- #34
gerd
Retired Footballer
Re: The Belgium thread
A picture from today's training in Genk.
20.000 fans for a training.
Home mtaches of the red devils are sold out in 10 minutes. It is simply impossible to find tickets.
Never seen a hype like this...
A picture from today's training in Genk.
20.000 fans for a training.
Home mtaches of the red devils are sold out in 10 minutes. It is simply impossible to find tickets.
Never seen a hype like this...
PLF
Legend
- 2 August 2004
Re: The Belgium thread
That's great! Happy to see football unite the nation and bring so much enthusiasm. It's exciting times!
That's great! Happy to see football unite the nation and bring so much enthusiasm. It's exciting times!
- Thread starter
- #36
gerd
Retired Footballer
Re: The Belgium thread
Yesbut in today's election the "separatist" Flemish party got 30%of the votes and is the biggest party in Flanders...
People are crazy about our national team and the same people vote for a party that wants the end of Belgium...
Yesbut in today's election the "separatist" Flemish party got 30%of the votes and is the biggest party in Flanders...
People are crazy about our national team and the same people vote for a party that wants the end of Belgium...
andy18cruz
Sth, sth ... dark side
Re: The Belgium thread
That's normal I guess, since a large part of the NT squad are flemish. The same occurs in Catalonia with the Spanish NT. There's a significant movement for the independence there, maybe the majoriry of the people want that (November there will be election for the independence), but still they support the squad because some of the best players are catalan.
That's normal I guess, since a large part of the NT squad are flemish. The same occurs in Catalonia with the Spanish NT. There's a significant movement for the independence there, maybe the majoriry of the people want that (November there will be election for the independence), but still they support the squad because some of the best players are catalan.
lo zio
International
- 24 October 2005
- Palermo
Re: The Belgium thread
it's kind of ironic (not to mention sad and pathetic) that bruxelles is, at the same time, the unofficial capital of the EU and the capital of the most dysfunctional country in western europe.
the EU is an amazing attempt to build a common pan-european identity, that transcends political, economic, linguistic and cultural differences; and yet, at its heart, in bruxelles, there's a community which hasn't been able to build a national culture and identity in over 180 years.
belgium's national football team might be perhaps the one thing left that still keeps the country united. that's beyond ridiculous, in my opinion.... we weren't able to give ourselves a linguistic identity, to create a homogeneous political system, to distribute wealth over our entire territory.... but hey, we were able to build a national football team..... and it took us less than 2 centuries!!!
for god's sake italy is a younger nation than belgium, and even as messed up as we are, we still managed to build a national conscience (sort of) in 150 years! and our short national history is about the best example of what not to do when u wanna establish a common national culture!
belgium is actually making italy look good.... do u know how messed up this is?!?!
anyway, back to football, i just heard naingolan didn't make the team.... how is that even possible!!! if there's anything anyone could agree on (even wallon anf flemish) is that naingolan is a better player than fellaini
it's kind of ironic (not to mention sad and pathetic) that bruxelles is, at the same time, the unofficial capital of the EU and the capital of the most dysfunctional country in western europe.
the EU is an amazing attempt to build a common pan-european identity, that transcends political, economic, linguistic and cultural differences; and yet, at its heart, in bruxelles, there's a community which hasn't been able to build a national culture and identity in over 180 years.
belgium's national football team might be perhaps the one thing left that still keeps the country united. that's beyond ridiculous, in my opinion.... we weren't able to give ourselves a linguistic identity, to create a homogeneous political system, to distribute wealth over our entire territory.... but hey, we were able to build a national football team..... and it took us less than 2 centuries!!!
for god's sake italy is a younger nation than belgium, and even as messed up as we are, we still managed to build a national conscience (sort of) in 150 years! and our short national history is about the best example of what not to do when u wanna establish a common national culture!
belgium is actually making italy look good.... do u know how messed up this is?!?!
anyway, back to football, i just heard naingolan didn't make the team.... how is that even possible!!! if there's anything anyone could agree on (even wallon anf flemish) is that naingolan is a better player than fellaini
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- Thread starter
- #40
gerd
Retired Footballer
Re: The Belgium thread
IMO Belgium is not dysfunctional.
We don't need a government to function. last government was formed after a world record period of formation.
During that period i was on holiday in France and the French were jealous. In fact our country did better without a government than France with one.
The separatistic party has over 30% of the votes in the part of the country with 60% of population. This means that 2 milion people out of 11 million want to end Belgium....
That still means that 9 million people want our country to continue to exist....
IMO Belgium is not dysfunctional.
We don't need a government to function. last government was formed after a world record period of formation.
During that period i was on holiday in France and the French were jealous. In fact our country did better without a government than France with one.
The separatistic party has over 30% of the votes in the part of the country with 60% of population. This means that 2 milion people out of 11 million want to end Belgium....
That still means that 9 million people want our country to continue to exist....
lo zio
International
- 24 October 2005
- Palermo
Re: The Belgium thread
what's wrong with belgium is not De Wever's clique... it's the fact that, over the last 180 years, u weren't able to build the political and social foundations of a democratic nation: flemish and waloons have their own political parties, their own newspapers, their own tv stations... in almost 2 centuries belgium wasn't even able to give itself a linguistic identity..... u simply cannot build a national conscience on theese premises.
2 months ago i was in bruxelles airport, waiting to catch a flight to berlin, and while i was waiting, this nice belgian school teacher was trying to explain to me the differences between the waloon socialist party and the flemish socialist party. i remarked how ridiculous it is that there's not even a single national socialist party.... that the very idea to have 2 socialist parties in the same nation goes against the very principles of socialism, but he just couldn't find anything weird about it.
france, during that period, was going through some troubles of their own, but regardless what french people may think, a nation which government makes mistakes still remains in a much better position than a nation which parlament isn't even able to name a government.
from a logical point of view, doing nothing might appear better than doing something wrong, but from a political perspective the situation is completely different; a democracy which government is going in the wrong direction is healthier than a democracy which can't even produce a government. that is a dysfunctional democracy by definition.
infact it worries me that u seem to not make a big fuss of that monumental meltdown. u should be furious with your politicians; during those 541 days they failed u.... they betrayed the mandate given to them by their own constituents. a politician whose ability to negotiate and compromise (which is the very essence of politics) is so non-existant that he can't even reach an agreement to avoid an institutional breakdown shouldn't even be sitting in parliament.
disclaimer: i hope my words don't insult u Gerd. i have no real restraints when it comes to politics and tend to talk very openly about it, because as i grew out of puberty i lost any shred of nationalism (or patriotism) still left in me (good riddance!). but because of that, some times people with a different charachter from mine may feel insulted by my opinions. so please bear this in mind and know that i have no intention to "bash on" belgium and its wonderful people. i'm just frustrated by the belgian situation and i sincerely hope belgians will find the courage to address their issues and find some common ground to build a country together.
...afterall the very reason why i allowed myself to talk so openly about belgium (to the point of sounding harsh, perhaps) is because i know what a smart and open minded man u are.
don't get me wrong mate, i didn't mean to say belgian people don't wanna be belgian anymore. many countries have to deal with separatist minorities (here in italy we have the lega nord party, for instance, wich however, is nowhere near as powerful and influential as De Wever's pricks). in most cases theese political parties are nothing but democratic anomalies, wich are inconsequential, on a historical perspective.Gerd said:
what's wrong with belgium is not De Wever's clique... it's the fact that, over the last 180 years, u weren't able to build the political and social foundations of a democratic nation: flemish and waloons have their own political parties, their own newspapers, their own tv stations... in almost 2 centuries belgium wasn't even able to give itself a linguistic identity..... u simply cannot build a national conscience on theese premises.
2 months ago i was in bruxelles airport, waiting to catch a flight to berlin, and while i was waiting, this nice belgian school teacher was trying to explain to me the differences between the waloon socialist party and the flemish socialist party. i remarked how ridiculous it is that there's not even a single national socialist party.... that the very idea to have 2 socialist parties in the same nation goes against the very principles of socialism, but he just couldn't find anything weird about it.
u know i have the utmost respect for u Gerd, and i'm proud to consider u a friend, even though we never met in person (yet), but i gotta disagree with u on that. i wouldn't call that a world record period of formation of a government, but a world record period of istitutional paralisys. any democracy needs a government to function.... without a government u can survive, but u can't function as a democracy (at least as a modern democracy). the government is an essential instrument of rule; the government is what gives a parliament (and therefore a country) direction.Gerd said:
france, during that period, was going through some troubles of their own, but regardless what french people may think, a nation which government makes mistakes still remains in a much better position than a nation which parlament isn't even able to name a government.
from a logical point of view, doing nothing might appear better than doing something wrong, but from a political perspective the situation is completely different; a democracy which government is going in the wrong direction is healthier than a democracy which can't even produce a government. that is a dysfunctional democracy by definition.
infact it worries me that u seem to not make a big fuss of that monumental meltdown. u should be furious with your politicians; during those 541 days they failed u.... they betrayed the mandate given to them by their own constituents. a politician whose ability to negotiate and compromise (which is the very essence of politics) is so non-existant that he can't even reach an agreement to avoid an institutional breakdown shouldn't even be sitting in parliament.
disclaimer: i hope my words don't insult u Gerd. i have no real restraints when it comes to politics and tend to talk very openly about it, because as i grew out of puberty i lost any shred of nationalism (or patriotism) still left in me (good riddance!). but because of that, some times people with a different charachter from mine may feel insulted by my opinions. so please bear this in mind and know that i have no intention to "bash on" belgium and its wonderful people. i'm just frustrated by the belgian situation and i sincerely hope belgians will find the courage to address their issues and find some common ground to build a country together.
...afterall the very reason why i allowed myself to talk so openly about belgium (to the point of sounding harsh, perhaps) is because i know what a smart and open minded man u are.
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- Thread starter
- #42
gerd
Retired Footballer
Re: The Belgium thread
No problem, Ben.
No problem, Ben.
lo zio
International
- 24 October 2005
- Palermo
Re: The Belgium thread
so how about nainngolan? are people in belgium ok with him not making the team? or is it that serie a has fallen so deep into oblivion, that even belgians don't know how good this guy is?
so how about nainngolan? are people in belgium ok with him not making the team? or is it that serie a has fallen so deep into oblivion, that even belgians don't know how good this guy is?
Kanouté
#NewEra
- 26 April 2008
Re: The Belgium thread
oh serie a. how the mighty have fallen. it was the "premier league" for like twenty years or so(?). sorry for the ot.
oh serie a. how the mighty have fallen. it was the "premier league" for like twenty years or so(?). sorry for the ot.
- Thread starter
- #46
gerd
Retired Footballer
Re: The Belgium thread
Nobody in Belgium is really bothered about Nainggolan. He never played well for our national team (well, he scarcely played at all).
Getting to the second round is seen as a a success here in Belgium. In that second round Belgium should (logically) play Germany or CR7...that would mean the end...
Nobody in Belgium is really bothered about Nainggolan. He never played well for our national team (well, he scarcely played at all).
Getting to the second round is seen as a a success here in Belgium. In that second round Belgium should (logically) play Germany or CR7...that would mean the end...
- Thread starter
- #47
gerd
Retired Footballer
Re: The Belgium thread
About The political situation in my country: i am absolutely furious with our politicians. The separatist NVA uses flase arguments to win elections, but they get away with it because most people are fed up with politics in Belgium. Some (like me) don't want to vote extreme so they still vote for political parties that have made mistake after mistake.
Other people vote extreme. The NVA is right party who has won all the votes from the extreme right facist party Vlaams Belanf (our Front National).
Now about our national identity.
We definitely have a national identy, but it is very hard to define. Our national identity has to do with a deep rooted underdog feeling (that is why Belgian people Always sympathize with the underdog, in that way i'm very Belgian too). We have something very anarchic too wich is most Obvious in our arts: surrealism is an art form that was invented in Belgium. Look at the paintings of Tuymans for example (he is not a surrealist, he is a very important contemporary painter): at first look they are normal, unspectacular paintings. But when you watch closer, they have tiny litle elements of anarchy and discontent in them (same goes for Borremans, another Belgian contemporary painter). Listen to the music of dEUS or Marble Sounds, perfect pop music but with "weird angles" in it...pop music with barbed wire aspects...that is typically Belgium...
The drama of this country is that it is geographically situated in Europe where the North meets the South: in Brussels. Everything south of Brussels is Latin and everything north of it is Germanic...
Some people (the extremists) see this as an handicap, but much more Belgians are proud of the mix between different cultures. This is something unique...this mixed culture is our national identity but it isn't obvious and it is disputed by a very loud minority (but still a minority: 30% of 60% of the population).
About The political situation in my country: i am absolutely furious with our politicians. The separatist NVA uses flase arguments to win elections, but they get away with it because most people are fed up with politics in Belgium. Some (like me) don't want to vote extreme so they still vote for political parties that have made mistake after mistake.
Other people vote extreme. The NVA is right party who has won all the votes from the extreme right facist party Vlaams Belanf (our Front National).
Now about our national identity.
We definitely have a national identy, but it is very hard to define. Our national identity has to do with a deep rooted underdog feeling (that is why Belgian people Always sympathize with the underdog, in that way i'm very Belgian too). We have something very anarchic too wich is most Obvious in our arts: surrealism is an art form that was invented in Belgium. Look at the paintings of Tuymans for example (he is not a surrealist, he is a very important contemporary painter): at first look they are normal, unspectacular paintings. But when you watch closer, they have tiny litle elements of anarchy and discontent in them (same goes for Borremans, another Belgian contemporary painter). Listen to the music of dEUS or Marble Sounds, perfect pop music but with "weird angles" in it...pop music with barbed wire aspects...that is typically Belgium...
The drama of this country is that it is geographically situated in Europe where the North meets the South: in Brussels. Everything south of Brussels is Latin and everything north of it is Germanic...
Some people (the extremists) see this as an handicap, but much more Belgians are proud of the mix between different cultures. This is something unique...this mixed culture is our national identity but it isn't obvious and it is disputed by a very loud minority (but still a minority: 30% of 60% of the population).
lo zio
International
- 24 October 2005
- Palermo
Re: The Belgium thread
about half an hour ago, while i was sitting in a cab driving me back home, i re-read the last page of this thread as if i didn't partecipate to the conversation, and suddenly i heard a little voice in my head saying "can u believe this italian douchebag is actually trying to lecture a belgian on belgium's national identity!?!".
i know i can be smug sometimes, but it's nice to know i can still surprise myself at least
anyway, since i'm quite interested in this topic, and since u had the patience to endure my condescending tone (i even wrote a "disclaimer", for fuck's sake!), i'd love to continue this conversation with u. however i'm afraid we'd bore everyone else, so before we drag this thread too much off topic, i'm gonna continue chatting with u on this via pm.....
... not tonight though.... it's late and i had a very long day, so i think i'm gonna get "drunk as a Bebo" now and then go to bed.
talk to ya soon Gerd (hopefully tomorrow, if i can find the time).
and to steer this thread back on topic, it's a real shame about nainngolan, coz this guy is really good!
about half an hour ago, while i was sitting in a cab driving me back home, i re-read the last page of this thread as if i didn't partecipate to the conversation, and suddenly i heard a little voice in my head saying "can u believe this italian douchebag is actually trying to lecture a belgian on belgium's national identity!?!".
i know i can be smug sometimes, but it's nice to know i can still surprise myself at least
anyway, since i'm quite interested in this topic, and since u had the patience to endure my condescending tone (i even wrote a "disclaimer", for fuck's sake!), i'd love to continue this conversation with u. however i'm afraid we'd bore everyone else, so before we drag this thread too much off topic, i'm gonna continue chatting with u on this via pm.....
... not tonight though.... it's late and i had a very long day, so i think i'm gonna get "drunk as a Bebo" now and then go to bed.
talk to ya soon Gerd (hopefully tomorrow, if i can find the time)
.and to steer this thread back on topic, it's a real shame about nainngolan, coz this guy is really good!
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- Thread starter
- #51
gerd
Retired Footballer
Re: The Belgium thread
No problem at all Ben.
I quite like those discussions.
While idon't agree with your view, i can understand it. If i read articles about Belgium in the foreign press, it seems as if they are talking about a different country.
And this even in quality papers like the Guardian. I guess we are a very complex country. And frankly, who cares about tiny litle Belgium.
In that sense the hype around our football players (wich is surely exagerated) is a good thing, people ar ebecoming interested in our country.
Secretly i hope our team can win the WC, that would be a bigboost for our country, but as a football fan, i think this is impossible. The team will be eliminated in the second round against Germany or Portugal and i'm not even sure we can end before Russia and South Korea in the group stage...this is still a young team...
About Nainggolan.
It seems he is doing wonderfull in Italy, but we never see him play here. There is much more attention for Dries Mertens in Napoli because Dries plays regularly for the national team and he is always very good (although he usually plays as a sub).
Against Luxemburg Wilmots has experimented with his team. He played De Bruyne (together with Witsel the mostimportant player of the team) as AMF and so there might be a place for Dries as a winger (but unfortunately Dries was injured against Luxemburg), but Mirallas might also play or Januzaj....
Can you imagine a team where Nainggolan isn't in the 23, and where players like Mirallas, Kanuzaj or Mertens are subs ? (Well two out of three). And then i forget Chadli. he hadn't the best of seasons for Spurs,but he always played very well as a winger too...in fact both Chadli and Mertens where a long time preferred to Hazard because they simply played better...
No problem at all Ben.
I quite like those discussions.
While idon't agree with your view, i can understand it. If i read articles about Belgium in the foreign press, it seems as if they are talking about a different country.
And this even in quality papers like the Guardian. I guess we are a very complex country. And frankly, who cares about tiny litle Belgium.
In that sense the hype around our football players (wich is surely exagerated) is a good thing, people ar ebecoming interested in our country.
Secretly i hope our team can win the WC, that would be a bigboost for our country, but as a football fan, i think this is impossible. The team will be eliminated in the second round against Germany or Portugal and i'm not even sure we can end before Russia and South Korea in the group stage...this is still a young team...
About Nainggolan.
It seems he is doing wonderfull in Italy, but we never see him play here. There is much more attention for Dries Mertens in Napoli because Dries plays regularly for the national team and he is always very good (although he usually plays as a sub).
Against Luxemburg Wilmots has experimented with his team. He played De Bruyne (together with Witsel the mostimportant player of the team) as AMF and so there might be a place for Dries as a winger (but unfortunately Dries was injured against Luxemburg), but Mirallas might also play or Januzaj....
Can you imagine a team where Nainggolan isn't in the 23, and where players like Mirallas, Kanuzaj or Mertens are subs ? (Well two out of three). And then i forget Chadli. he hadn't the best of seasons for Spurs,but he always played very well as a winger too...in fact both Chadli and Mertens where a long time preferred to Hazard because they simply played better...
lo zio
International
- 24 October 2005
- Palermo
Re: The Belgium thread
i gotta say, i'm very curious to watch belgium at the WC. it's a talented young outfit and it might be a breathe of fresh air.
i don't think i've seen them playing very often, so i don't know how they play as a team, but there's a lot of quality, from an individual standpoint.
to be honest, i could think of a few (italy, germany, spain), but i do get your point.
i gotta say, i'm very curious to watch belgium at the WC. it's a talented young outfit and it might be a breathe of fresh air.
i don't think i've seen them playing very often, so i don't know how they play as a team, but there's a lot of quality, from an individual standpoint.
- Thread starter
- #53
gerd
Retired Footballer
Re: The Belgium thread
Fantastic article about youth development in Belgium. This is what i've been doing until recently (not professionally, but in my free time).
Belgium’s blueprint that gave birth to a golden generation
The team of stars travelling to Brazil as fifth favourites are the result of a coaching revolution that started in 1998
The Guardian, Friday 6 June 2014 22.00 BST
Not everything that Michel Sablon writes down goes to plan. At Italia 90, Sablon was part of Belgium’s coaching staff, and a couple of minutes before the end of extra time in their last-16 match against England, he compiled a list of the penalty-takers. He had just finished scribbling the names when David Platt, in one of those iconic World Cup moments, spectacularly hooked the ball past Michel Preud’homme. “A great goal by Platt. But I was so disappointed,” Sablon says. “I threw the list away.”
A little more than a decade later Sablon started with another blank piece of paper, this time with the intention of revolutionising Belgian football in his role as the federation’s new technical director. At its headquarters in Brussels, Sablon proudly hands over a copy of the original blueprint, dated September 2006 and titled “La vision de formation de l’URBSFA”. He smiles when asked whether going to this summer’s World Cup finals as fifth favourites was what he had in mind. “For sure, no”.
Belgium’s emergence as one of the strongest nations in world football has exceeded all expectations. A country with a population of only 11m, with just 34 professional clubs competing across two leagues, has produced – and there are no reservations in Belgium about using this term because it is widely accepted as the only description befitting of their talent pool – a golden generation of footballers.
Marc Wilmots’ 23-man squad for the World Cup is replete with stellar names, players who have changed hands for hundreds of millions of pounds and in the majority of cases belong to Premier League clubs. It is also a group that could stay together for years to come – all but six are aged 27 and under. Daniel van Buyten, the Bayern Munich defender, is the only player in his 30s. “It’s excellent,” Sablon says. “But when those guys come together in one group, I think it’s a little bit lucky also.”
For the federation, the watershed moment came in 1998 when Belgium were eliminated at the group stage at the World Cup finals in France. Bob Browaeys, who has coached Belgium youth teams at every level and played a major part in putting together Sablon’s blueprint, says there was “no unified vision on youth” at that point. He remembers 30 federation coaches, drawn from the Dutch- and French-speaking parts of the country, meeting to discuss a radical change in approach.
“You have to know that at the end of the 90s in Belgium, they all played with individual marking, sometimes with a sweeper, it was 4-4-2, it was even 3-5-2, we got a lot of results with our A team, because we played very organised. But it was defensive, a culture of counter-attack,” Browaeys says.
Tapping into philosophies and training methods in the national setups in Netherlands and France, their neighbours in the north and south, as well as at clubs such as Ajax and Barcelona, Browaeys and his colleagues proposed that every Belgium youth team would play 4-3-3 and that work should begin on producing a totally different type of player.
“It was a massive shift but we believed that 4-3-3, at that moment, was the strongest learning environment for our players,” Browaeys says. “We felt that we had to develop dribbling skills, we said at the heart of our vision was 1v1, the duel. We said when a boy or girl wants to start playing football, you must offer first the dribble, let them play freely.”
By the time Sablon took over as acting technical director in 2001, there was a playing philosophy but little in the way of structure. Sablon provided that and more. His arrival was also well-timed. Belgium had just co-hosted Euro 2000 with the Netherlands and, although they played poorly and failed to get out of their group, they made a tidy profit off the field.
Sablon made sure a chunk of that money was invested in youth development. A new national football centre was built in Tubize, on the outskirts of Brussels. The number of people enrolling on the entry-level coaching course increased tenfold after the federation made it free. Double PASS, a subsidiary of the University of Brussels, were appointed to audit all the youth systems at club level and make recommendations (the Premier League started using the same company nine years later).
Around the same time Sablon commissioned the University of Louvain to carry out an extensive study on youth football in Belgium, which involved filming 1,500 matches across different age groups. He had worked closely with the clubs for some time, holding regular meetings with academy directors to exchange ideas and encourage them to contribute towards the changing face of Belgian football, but not everyone was convinced.
The university’s results, Sablon says, were a turning point. “That’s why we started with scientific analysis. If we showed the clubs the figures of young boys and girls playing at under-eight and under-nine, and they touched the ball twice in half an hour, no one can say that it’s good. We had the proof. We had the figures. And this was people who were known in football. The guy who made the analysis, Werner Helsen, was a player and a coach in the second division, so he’s a professor in university but also a real football man.”
One of the findings in the university research was that there was far too much emphasis on winning and not enough on development. There was also evidence to support the federation’s theory that 2v2, 5v5 and 8v8 were the best small-sided games to encourage children to practise the skills – dribbling and diagonal passing – that were central to their philosophy of playing 4-3-3.
Determined to get the message through at all levels of the game, Sablon delivered more than 100 presentations. “I gave an explanation with videos and everything. And then I went to the pitch with the coaches who were preparing the boys. It was about four hours in total,” he says.
“On one occasion I said to a president: ‘I don’t start [this presentation].’ He said: ‘What’s happened?’ I said: ‘I asked the clubs not to put up the rankings for the small boys, from under-7 and under-8.’ Can you imagine what it was like with 300 people in the hall waiting? They moved the rankings with hammers and nails. I said to them afterwards: ‘Rankings is the wrong way. Make the development of your players the first objective.’”
There were also problems to contend with inside the federation when results suffered. “I was responsible for all national teams and we played 4-3-3 from one season to another,” Sablon says. “We lost games, people said: ‘Why did we change it?’ I was once a member of the executive committee, it was an advantage – I could convince people at the top of the federation. Some would shoot me of course, they said: ‘You are crazy.’ They said: ‘We play European Championship and you pay more attention to the playing system than to be qualified.’
I said: ‘Yes, you are completely right.’”
Although Eden Hazard, Thomas Vermaelen and Jan Vertonghen left Belgium as teenagers to continue their football education abroad, crucially the federation was able to have a direct influence on the development of the majority of the country’s elite players.
A joint initiative with the government saw eight Topsport schools introduced between 1998 and 2002, with the aim of providing the most talented boys and girls, aged between 14 and 18, with additional training during the normal curriculum to increase their chances of reaching the top. Those sessions – four mornings a week and two hours at a time – continue to be taken by coaches that work for the federation.
The premise behind it is not dissimilar to the Football Association’s former national school at Lilleshall, which closed in 1999 because of the introduction of Premier League academies, except the Belgian system has a couple of major advantages. With eight Topsport schools dotted around a small country, the players selected are able to commute from home, the corollary being that they are free to train with their clubs four times a week in the evening.
All of which meant that the selected players were receiving twice as much coaching as they did before. As for the success rate, seven of the World Cup squad – Thibaut Courtois, Dries Mertens, Kevin de Bruyne, Mousa Dembélé, Steven Defour, Axel Witsel and Nacer Chadli – came through a system that many of Belgium’s leading clubs have now replicated by collaborating with local schools to increase contact time with their own players.
Jean Kindermans provides a tour of one of the two schools in Brussels that Anderlecht use as part of their “Purple Talents” project, which was launched in 2007 and counts Romelu Lukaku among its graduates. Kindermans, Anderlecht’s director of youth, says that the three-times-a-week one-hour training sessions at school, which are exclusively based on the development of technical skills, have made a huge difference.
“My ambition was to have more hours to develop young boys,” he says. “Lukaku, you have to know, we took him when he was under-13. He was a good player but not very good technically. He was fast and strong but we had to polish him.”
Education, though, is not allowed to suffer. At the start of the morning session Kindermans welcomes back a group of academy players who were prevented from training at school for a period because their grades dropped off. He explains how he believes Anderlecht have a duty of care that stretches beyond trying to produce another Vincent Kompany or Lukaku.
“In Anderlecht, every day 220 young guys, from under-six to under-21, are dreaming about a future professional career. Explain to me how many from the 220 are going to reach professional level? Maximum 10%. When you are not a good educator, you say the 200 guys that will not reach a professional level is not my problem. I say: ‘Yes, it is my problem.’ We have to tell them that if they don’t reach professional level, because of injury, confidence, bad development, a family situation, if you stay in Anderlecht as long as possible, you will have a degree at school that will give you the opportunity to find a job, to be a human being with intellectual skills.”
While Kindermans praises the work that has gone on within the national setup – he describes Sablon as a “brilliant visionary” – he believes “there is no unique factor that is influencing the good period of the Belgian team”. He is also quick to stress – and these views are later repeated at Genk – that Anderlecht “don’t blindly follow what the federation is asking us”.
By way of example, Kindermans points out that Anderlecht play 3-4-3, rather than the federation’s favoured 4-3-3, up until the age of 14. He offers an interesting explanation for that decision. “Every time we play a match we try to have 70% of possession. So it means if you are going to play with four defenders, you are going to put them at an early age in a comfortable situation. We are playing with three defenders at a lower age to put them in difficulty.”
His commitment to developing footballers, in the purest sense, is absolute. “You have to know that tackling is forbidden in Anderlecht. You can only anticipate or intercept, till they come to Under-21 team, in the second team of Anderlecht,” Kindermans says. “Our main motivation is we want to create technically skilled football players. If our centre-backs try to provide a solution by tackling and putting the ball out, I don’t like it. I want to educate as good as possible: ‘When do I have to anticipate? When do I have to drop off?’ I want to create intelligent players, not butchers.”
He also wants to be able to keep hold of those intelligent players for longer – something that has become increasingly difficult over the last few years, when Belgium’s rise to prominence has coincided with foreign clubs, in particular those from the Premier League, trying to sign the next generation of stars earlier and earlier. The worry is not just for the club that loses the player but what the long-term implications are for the national team if a promising talent is denied the chance to play first-team football at a young age.
“Our philosophy in Anderlecht is to be a trampoline for Europe. We only ask one thing: let us educate,” Kindermans says. “Let us have one, two, three years of sportive reward before leaving. Not leaving at 14 or 15 years old, because I think you [the player] take a big risk and we are disappointed.
“We lost a player [Ismail Azzaoui] recently. We proposed him a contract for three years at the age of 16. I felt he was waiting. And in March I received a message from his father, thanking us for the good job we did with him for the last four or five seasons, telling us he’s leaving the club immediately for a foreign club. Now we know that it is Tottenham. So I have difficulties with that.
“Today the difficulty for young Belgian players is to resist ... when I see [Adnan] Januzaj has left, [Charly] Musonda has left to join Chelsea, Mathias Bossaerts has left to Manchester City, Azzaoui left to Tottenham, I am afraid that if every year Anderlecht is losing one, two or three players of our youth education, we are going to work hard but not get the rewards.
“The compensation is small. For Januzaj it was €550,000. It’s Uefa rules. And Manchester United were quite polite, because they gave more than they had to give, because it was an amazing talent. I remember that people from the [Anderlecht] board said: ‘Oh, nice job for a 16-year-old boy.’ I said: ‘Today, this may be good, we are proud that we can take €550,000. But what if within two, three or four years he will play in the Manchester United first team?’ And today maybe you can ask for 50 times more.”
At Genk, Roland Breugelmans, who has worked for the club for 25 years and been in charge of the youth setup for the majority of that time, echoes Kindermans’ sentiments. An entire corridor on the ground floor of Genk’s academy building is decorated with pictures of players who have come through their youth system, including three of the World Cup squad – Defour, De Bruyne and Courtois – yet so many are gone in the blink of an eye. Siebe Schrijvers, a talented 17-year-old forward, could be the next off the production line.Breugelmans is frustrated but also realistic.
“When a young player has an offer from England, we cannot win. We try to say to our players, stay until the end of school in Belgium, when you are 18, and after you have your diploma you can go to other countries when you have a lot of qualities. But we also have young players going to England at 16 years old, when the parents think: ‘Oh, it’s a lot of money.’ And it is a lot of money, €100,000 for one year. We give €10,000 for one year.”
In terms of the broader picture, Breugelmans maintains that the contribution that certain clubs have made to the health of Belgian football should not be overlooked. “I don’t like the federation saying: ‘With the system of our sport schools, that is the basis of the success now of our national team,’” he says. “I think everybody tried to give something to the player, the club and the federation.”
In Droixhe, a desperately poor neighbourhood on the northern fringes of Liège, another side to the story behind Belgium’s footballing renaissance is told – one that just about everyone in the country agrees has had a major impact on the fortunes of the national team.
First impressions are bleak when the No17 bus reaches the end of its journey from the centre of Liège. Ugly high-rise flats circle the area, rubbish litters the streets and a pushchair is half-submerged in a pond. One of the tower blocks is empty after being declared unsafe. Another two have been demolished, leaving a pile of rubble and an area of wasteland where a group of young boys are showing off their ball-juggling skills.
Droixhe is an area largely home to immigrants, chronically lacking in investment, high in crime and low in prospects – apart from when it comes to football. The gravel court where four teenagers are tearing around in the sunshine is the same makeshift pitch that Christian Benteke, Witsel and Zakaria Bakkali played on when they were growing up in Liège. All three have gone on to play for Belgium. All three also have multicultural roots, which is the case with so many of the players whoWilmots has taken to Brazil. They are inspirational figures to the children playing football in the streets and help to unite what can often feel like a fragmented country.
“It’s not easy for the kids here,” says Kismet Eris, a former community worker in Droixhe, who runs his own football academy in Liège and also represents Benteke. “They don’t have the same chances as the other ones, and that’s why they’re so proud of the national team, because now they are also accepted as Belgian people, because they see some of their own playing for the national team. A few years ago it was not like that. Now it is more open. With the national youth teams, you can see that you’ve got a lot of children of immigrants, or former refugees, representing Belgium. It’s also the country – the country is people like Christian, [Marouane] Fellaini, Axel Witsel, [Jan] Vertonghen, who is Flemish, Courtois, a Walloon. That’s the typical image of Belgium.”
Belgium, as those involved in football in the country are quick to point out, have achieved nothing yet other than qualify for their first major tournament in 12 years and restore some pride. Their progress, though, is indisputable and, furthermore, everything seems to be in place to ensure they keep getting better. Brazil may just be the start.
“It’s going to be the first time this team is going to play in that type of environment,” says Steven Martens, the secretary general at the Belgium FA. “Can they do that? Absolutely they can. Will they do that? It’s very hard to say. Will they do something remarkable over the next two, three World Cups and European Championships? I am absolutely convinced.”
Fantastic article about youth development in Belgium. This is what i've been doing until recently (not professionally, but in my free time).
Belgium’s blueprint that gave birth to a golden generation
The team of stars travelling to Brazil as fifth favourites are the result of a coaching revolution that started in 1998
The Guardian, Friday 6 June 2014 22.00 BST
Not everything that Michel Sablon writes down goes to plan. At Italia 90, Sablon was part of Belgium’s coaching staff, and a couple of minutes before the end of extra time in their last-16 match against England, he compiled a list of the penalty-takers. He had just finished scribbling the names when David Platt, in one of those iconic World Cup moments, spectacularly hooked the ball past Michel Preud’homme. “A great goal by Platt. But I was so disappointed,” Sablon says. “I threw the list away.”
A little more than a decade later Sablon started with another blank piece of paper, this time with the intention of revolutionising Belgian football in his role as the federation’s new technical director. At its headquarters in Brussels, Sablon proudly hands over a copy of the original blueprint, dated September 2006 and titled “La vision de formation de l’URBSFA”. He smiles when asked whether going to this summer’s World Cup finals as fifth favourites was what he had in mind. “For sure, no”.
Belgium’s emergence as one of the strongest nations in world football has exceeded all expectations. A country with a population of only 11m, with just 34 professional clubs competing across two leagues, has produced – and there are no reservations in Belgium about using this term because it is widely accepted as the only description befitting of their talent pool – a golden generation of footballers.
Marc Wilmots’ 23-man squad for the World Cup is replete with stellar names, players who have changed hands for hundreds of millions of pounds and in the majority of cases belong to Premier League clubs. It is also a group that could stay together for years to come – all but six are aged 27 and under. Daniel van Buyten, the Bayern Munich defender, is the only player in his 30s. “It’s excellent,” Sablon says. “But when those guys come together in one group, I think it’s a little bit lucky also.”
For the federation, the watershed moment came in 1998 when Belgium were eliminated at the group stage at the World Cup finals in France. Bob Browaeys, who has coached Belgium youth teams at every level and played a major part in putting together Sablon’s blueprint, says there was “no unified vision on youth” at that point. He remembers 30 federation coaches, drawn from the Dutch- and French-speaking parts of the country, meeting to discuss a radical change in approach.
“You have to know that at the end of the 90s in Belgium, they all played with individual marking, sometimes with a sweeper, it was 4-4-2, it was even 3-5-2, we got a lot of results with our A team, because we played very organised. But it was defensive, a culture of counter-attack,” Browaeys says.
Tapping into philosophies and training methods in the national setups in Netherlands and France, their neighbours in the north and south, as well as at clubs such as Ajax and Barcelona, Browaeys and his colleagues proposed that every Belgium youth team would play 4-3-3 and that work should begin on producing a totally different type of player.
“It was a massive shift but we believed that 4-3-3, at that moment, was the strongest learning environment for our players,” Browaeys says. “We felt that we had to develop dribbling skills, we said at the heart of our vision was 1v1, the duel. We said when a boy or girl wants to start playing football, you must offer first the dribble, let them play freely.”
By the time Sablon took over as acting technical director in 2001, there was a playing philosophy but little in the way of structure. Sablon provided that and more. His arrival was also well-timed. Belgium had just co-hosted Euro 2000 with the Netherlands and, although they played poorly and failed to get out of their group, they made a tidy profit off the field.
Sablon made sure a chunk of that money was invested in youth development. A new national football centre was built in Tubize, on the outskirts of Brussels. The number of people enrolling on the entry-level coaching course increased tenfold after the federation made it free. Double PASS, a subsidiary of the University of Brussels, were appointed to audit all the youth systems at club level and make recommendations (the Premier League started using the same company nine years later).
Around the same time Sablon commissioned the University of Louvain to carry out an extensive study on youth football in Belgium, which involved filming 1,500 matches across different age groups. He had worked closely with the clubs for some time, holding regular meetings with academy directors to exchange ideas and encourage them to contribute towards the changing face of Belgian football, but not everyone was convinced.
The university’s results, Sablon says, were a turning point. “That’s why we started with scientific analysis. If we showed the clubs the figures of young boys and girls playing at under-eight and under-nine, and they touched the ball twice in half an hour, no one can say that it’s good. We had the proof. We had the figures. And this was people who were known in football. The guy who made the analysis, Werner Helsen, was a player and a coach in the second division, so he’s a professor in university but also a real football man.”
One of the findings in the university research was that there was far too much emphasis on winning and not enough on development. There was also evidence to support the federation’s theory that 2v2, 5v5 and 8v8 were the best small-sided games to encourage children to practise the skills – dribbling and diagonal passing – that were central to their philosophy of playing 4-3-3.
Determined to get the message through at all levels of the game, Sablon delivered more than 100 presentations. “I gave an explanation with videos and everything. And then I went to the pitch with the coaches who were preparing the boys. It was about four hours in total,” he says.
“On one occasion I said to a president: ‘I don’t start [this presentation].’ He said: ‘What’s happened?’ I said: ‘I asked the clubs not to put up the rankings for the small boys, from under-7 and under-8.’ Can you imagine what it was like with 300 people in the hall waiting? They moved the rankings with hammers and nails. I said to them afterwards: ‘Rankings is the wrong way. Make the development of your players the first objective.’”
There were also problems to contend with inside the federation when results suffered. “I was responsible for all national teams and we played 4-3-3 from one season to another,” Sablon says. “We lost games, people said: ‘Why did we change it?’ I was once a member of the executive committee, it was an advantage – I could convince people at the top of the federation. Some would shoot me of course, they said: ‘You are crazy.’ They said: ‘We play European Championship and you pay more attention to the playing system than to be qualified.’
I said: ‘Yes, you are completely right.’”
Although Eden Hazard, Thomas Vermaelen and Jan Vertonghen left Belgium as teenagers to continue their football education abroad, crucially the federation was able to have a direct influence on the development of the majority of the country’s elite players.
A joint initiative with the government saw eight Topsport schools introduced between 1998 and 2002, with the aim of providing the most talented boys and girls, aged between 14 and 18, with additional training during the normal curriculum to increase their chances of reaching the top. Those sessions – four mornings a week and two hours at a time – continue to be taken by coaches that work for the federation.
The premise behind it is not dissimilar to the Football Association’s former national school at Lilleshall, which closed in 1999 because of the introduction of Premier League academies, except the Belgian system has a couple of major advantages. With eight Topsport schools dotted around a small country, the players selected are able to commute from home, the corollary being that they are free to train with their clubs four times a week in the evening.
All of which meant that the selected players were receiving twice as much coaching as they did before. As for the success rate, seven of the World Cup squad – Thibaut Courtois, Dries Mertens, Kevin de Bruyne, Mousa Dembélé, Steven Defour, Axel Witsel and Nacer Chadli – came through a system that many of Belgium’s leading clubs have now replicated by collaborating with local schools to increase contact time with their own players.
Jean Kindermans provides a tour of one of the two schools in Brussels that Anderlecht use as part of their “Purple Talents” project, which was launched in 2007 and counts Romelu Lukaku among its graduates. Kindermans, Anderlecht’s director of youth, says that the three-times-a-week one-hour training sessions at school, which are exclusively based on the development of technical skills, have made a huge difference.
“My ambition was to have more hours to develop young boys,” he says. “Lukaku, you have to know, we took him when he was under-13. He was a good player but not very good technically. He was fast and strong but we had to polish him.”
Education, though, is not allowed to suffer. At the start of the morning session Kindermans welcomes back a group of academy players who were prevented from training at school for a period because their grades dropped off. He explains how he believes Anderlecht have a duty of care that stretches beyond trying to produce another Vincent Kompany or Lukaku.
“In Anderlecht, every day 220 young guys, from under-six to under-21, are dreaming about a future professional career. Explain to me how many from the 220 are going to reach professional level? Maximum 10%. When you are not a good educator, you say the 200 guys that will not reach a professional level is not my problem. I say: ‘Yes, it is my problem.’ We have to tell them that if they don’t reach professional level, because of injury, confidence, bad development, a family situation, if you stay in Anderlecht as long as possible, you will have a degree at school that will give you the opportunity to find a job, to be a human being with intellectual skills.”
While Kindermans praises the work that has gone on within the national setup – he describes Sablon as a “brilliant visionary” – he believes “there is no unique factor that is influencing the good period of the Belgian team”. He is also quick to stress – and these views are later repeated at Genk – that Anderlecht “don’t blindly follow what the federation is asking us”.
By way of example, Kindermans points out that Anderlecht play 3-4-3, rather than the federation’s favoured 4-3-3, up until the age of 14. He offers an interesting explanation for that decision. “Every time we play a match we try to have 70% of possession. So it means if you are going to play with four defenders, you are going to put them at an early age in a comfortable situation. We are playing with three defenders at a lower age to put them in difficulty.”
His commitment to developing footballers, in the purest sense, is absolute. “You have to know that tackling is forbidden in Anderlecht. You can only anticipate or intercept, till they come to Under-21 team, in the second team of Anderlecht,” Kindermans says. “Our main motivation is we want to create technically skilled football players. If our centre-backs try to provide a solution by tackling and putting the ball out, I don’t like it. I want to educate as good as possible: ‘When do I have to anticipate? When do I have to drop off?’ I want to create intelligent players, not butchers.”
He also wants to be able to keep hold of those intelligent players for longer – something that has become increasingly difficult over the last few years, when Belgium’s rise to prominence has coincided with foreign clubs, in particular those from the Premier League, trying to sign the next generation of stars earlier and earlier. The worry is not just for the club that loses the player but what the long-term implications are for the national team if a promising talent is denied the chance to play first-team football at a young age.
“Our philosophy in Anderlecht is to be a trampoline for Europe. We only ask one thing: let us educate,” Kindermans says. “Let us have one, two, three years of sportive reward before leaving. Not leaving at 14 or 15 years old, because I think you [the player] take a big risk and we are disappointed.
“We lost a player [Ismail Azzaoui] recently. We proposed him a contract for three years at the age of 16. I felt he was waiting. And in March I received a message from his father, thanking us for the good job we did with him for the last four or five seasons, telling us he’s leaving the club immediately for a foreign club. Now we know that it is Tottenham. So I have difficulties with that.
“Today the difficulty for young Belgian players is to resist ... when I see [Adnan] Januzaj has left, [Charly] Musonda has left to join Chelsea, Mathias Bossaerts has left to Manchester City, Azzaoui left to Tottenham, I am afraid that if every year Anderlecht is losing one, two or three players of our youth education, we are going to work hard but not get the rewards.
“The compensation is small. For Januzaj it was €550,000. It’s Uefa rules. And Manchester United were quite polite, because they gave more than they had to give, because it was an amazing talent. I remember that people from the [Anderlecht] board said: ‘Oh, nice job for a 16-year-old boy.’ I said: ‘Today, this may be good, we are proud that we can take €550,000. But what if within two, three or four years he will play in the Manchester United first team?’ And today maybe you can ask for 50 times more.”
At Genk, Roland Breugelmans, who has worked for the club for 25 years and been in charge of the youth setup for the majority of that time, echoes Kindermans’ sentiments. An entire corridor on the ground floor of Genk’s academy building is decorated with pictures of players who have come through their youth system, including three of the World Cup squad – Defour, De Bruyne and Courtois – yet so many are gone in the blink of an eye. Siebe Schrijvers, a talented 17-year-old forward, could be the next off the production line.Breugelmans is frustrated but also realistic.
“When a young player has an offer from England, we cannot win. We try to say to our players, stay until the end of school in Belgium, when you are 18, and after you have your diploma you can go to other countries when you have a lot of qualities. But we also have young players going to England at 16 years old, when the parents think: ‘Oh, it’s a lot of money.’ And it is a lot of money, €100,000 for one year. We give €10,000 for one year.”
In terms of the broader picture, Breugelmans maintains that the contribution that certain clubs have made to the health of Belgian football should not be overlooked. “I don’t like the federation saying: ‘With the system of our sport schools, that is the basis of the success now of our national team,’” he says. “I think everybody tried to give something to the player, the club and the federation.”
In Droixhe, a desperately poor neighbourhood on the northern fringes of Liège, another side to the story behind Belgium’s footballing renaissance is told – one that just about everyone in the country agrees has had a major impact on the fortunes of the national team.
First impressions are bleak when the No17 bus reaches the end of its journey from the centre of Liège. Ugly high-rise flats circle the area, rubbish litters the streets and a pushchair is half-submerged in a pond. One of the tower blocks is empty after being declared unsafe. Another two have been demolished, leaving a pile of rubble and an area of wasteland where a group of young boys are showing off their ball-juggling skills.
Droixhe is an area largely home to immigrants, chronically lacking in investment, high in crime and low in prospects – apart from when it comes to football. The gravel court where four teenagers are tearing around in the sunshine is the same makeshift pitch that Christian Benteke, Witsel and Zakaria Bakkali played on when they were growing up in Liège. All three have gone on to play for Belgium. All three also have multicultural roots, which is the case with so many of the players whoWilmots has taken to Brazil. They are inspirational figures to the children playing football in the streets and help to unite what can often feel like a fragmented country.
“It’s not easy for the kids here,” says Kismet Eris, a former community worker in Droixhe, who runs his own football academy in Liège and also represents Benteke. “They don’t have the same chances as the other ones, and that’s why they’re so proud of the national team, because now they are also accepted as Belgian people, because they see some of their own playing for the national team. A few years ago it was not like that. Now it is more open. With the national youth teams, you can see that you’ve got a lot of children of immigrants, or former refugees, representing Belgium. It’s also the country – the country is people like Christian, [Marouane] Fellaini, Axel Witsel, [Jan] Vertonghen, who is Flemish, Courtois, a Walloon. That’s the typical image of Belgium.”
Belgium, as those involved in football in the country are quick to point out, have achieved nothing yet other than qualify for their first major tournament in 12 years and restore some pride. Their progress, though, is indisputable and, furthermore, everything seems to be in place to ensure they keep getting better. Brazil may just be the start.
“It’s going to be the first time this team is going to play in that type of environment,” says Steven Martens, the secretary general at the Belgium FA. “Can they do that? Absolutely they can. Will they do that? It’s very hard to say. Will they do something remarkable over the next two, three World Cups and European Championships? I am absolutely convinced.”
Last edited:
spektarm
Premier League
- 6 October 2006
- Manchester United
Re: The Belgium thread
Could you please fix the link, Gerd? I'm really interested in this article.
Could you please fix the link, Gerd? I'm really interested in this article.
- Thread starter
- #55
gerd
Retired Footballer
Re: The Belgium thread
I just copied the article.
There are some mistakes in it (but minor): Benteke is also a Genk Youth product (just like Divock Origi and Monaco's Ferreira Carrasco).
Courtois is Flemish (his father was French speaking).
Sablon's plan started right after the elimination at Euro 2000, this elimination as guest land was perceived as very embarassing over here.
I just copied the article.
There are some mistakes in it (but minor): Benteke is also a Genk Youth product (just like Divock Origi and Monaco's Ferreira Carrasco).
Courtois is Flemish (his father was French speaking).
Sablon's plan started right after the elimination at Euro 2000, this elimination as guest land was perceived as very embarassing over here.
YoungGun_UK
20 TIMES!
Re: The Belgium thread
hoping Januzaj has an impact, hoping he can do something similar to Ronaldo in 2004 by starting on the bench and making an impact to force himself into the first team.
hoping Januzaj has an impact, hoping he can do something similar to Ronaldo in 2004 by starting on the bench and making an impact to force himself into the first team.
- Thread starter
- #57
gerd
Retired Footballer
Re: The Belgium thread
It's way too soon for Januzaj...but i sincerly hope he does it, that woud mean he would be better than players like Mirallas, Mertens, Chadli or Hazard... (I didn't mention De Bruyne because i think he will play as AMF). All of the mentioned players have been immense for the national team...
It's way too soon for Januzaj...but i sincerly hope he does it, that woud mean he would be better than players like Mirallas, Mertens, Chadli or Hazard... (I didn't mention De Bruyne because i think he will play as AMF). All of the mentioned players have been immense for the national team...
Steve-O21
Championship
Re: The Belgium thread
gerd, I read that article yesterday. Fantastic insight into youth development in Belgium! Not to turn this into a US Soccer thread, but I really relate to a lot of the things you post because you are also a coach. Anyway, I want to show you the curriculum the United States Soccer Federation released in 2011 to develop our youth players. I'm not asking you to read all of it (or even most of it), but I'm curious to hear your opinion about it. It seems that Belgium's Golden Generation have benefitted immensely from not only playing and developing within a system that is predicated on ball mastery, but also because this system was implemented before the majority of the players on the World Cup roster hit puberty (e.g., Chadli, 9; Witsel, 9; Mirallas; 11, etc.). The latter point is important because it tells me that the younger the age at which you can emphasize to a player the importance of keeping the ball and feeling comfortable moving with it, the greater the likelihood that player will continue to develop in a positive way -- perhaps even becoming a professional player. That is why it is so important that football federations around the world invest in excellent coaches at the grassroots level. If those coaches can instill a love of the game and the ball in young players at the age of 5, 6, 7, etc., imagine the odds of one day being able to field team upon team loaded with talent and able to play multiple positions -- just like Germany and Belgium are doing. I can already see some positive developments with our youth national teams and I fully expect the United States to consistently reach the quarter finals of the World Cup (or better) by 2022. I believe Belgium will also get better and I wouldn't be surprised to see them reach the semi-finals of the European Championships or the World Cup in 2020 and 2022 respectively (possibly even sooner than that).
gerd, I read that article yesterday. Fantastic insight into youth development in Belgium! Not to turn this into a US Soccer thread, but I really relate to a lot of the things you post because you are also a coach. Anyway, I want to show you the curriculum the United States Soccer Federation released in 2011 to develop our youth players. I'm not asking you to read all of it (or even most of it), but I'm curious to hear your opinion about it. It seems that Belgium's Golden Generation have benefitted immensely from not only playing and developing within a system that is predicated on ball mastery, but also because this system was implemented before the majority of the players on the World Cup roster hit puberty (e.g., Chadli, 9; Witsel, 9; Mirallas; 11, etc.). The latter point is important because it tells me that the younger the age at which you can emphasize to a player the importance of keeping the ball and feeling comfortable moving with it, the greater the likelihood that player will continue to develop in a positive way -- perhaps even becoming a professional player. That is why it is so important that football federations around the world invest in excellent coaches at the grassroots level. If those coaches can instill a love of the game and the ball in young players at the age of 5, 6, 7, etc., imagine the odds of one day being able to field team upon team loaded with talent and able to play multiple positions -- just like Germany and Belgium are doing. I can already see some positive developments with our youth national teams and I fully expect the United States to consistently reach the quarter finals of the World Cup (or better) by 2022. I believe Belgium will also get better and I wouldn't be surprised to see them reach the semi-finals of the European Championships or the World Cup in 2020 and 2022 respectively (possibly even sooner than that).
- Thread starter
- #59
gerd
Retired Footballer
Re: The Belgium thread
And suddenly we are all pessimistic. Our team doesn't score enough, we have a shaky defense...we won't make it thtrough the group phase...
My prediction for the first match: Belgium-Algeria 0-1. We will dominate the game but Algeria will score on the counter...our domination will be sterile....
It's funny but suddenly all the Belgian fans are convinced that after all, our team is useless. After all the euphoric moments, the Holland win against Spain made us see that our team is not good enough...
Steve-O21. I forgot about your post. I will answer, but later, if you don't mind. I apologize...
And suddenly we are all pessimistic. Our team doesn't score enough, we have a shaky defense...we won't make it thtrough the group phase...
My prediction for the first match: Belgium-Algeria 0-1. We will dominate the game but Algeria will score on the counter...our domination will be sterile....
It's funny but suddenly all the Belgian fans are convinced that after all, our team is useless. After all the euphoric moments, the Holland win against Spain made us see that our team is not good enough...
Steve-O21. I forgot about your post. I will answer, but later, if you don't mind. I apologize...
Steve-O21
Championship
Re: The Belgium thread
Don't worry about it. I look forward to reading your response when you have time. I'll be cheering for your team tomorrow (though I have nothing against Algeria). #WarPig