Roundup: Foreign soccer clubs share youth training experience with China

As the 10th Luneng Weifang Cup International Football Tournament, held from July 24 to 30 in Weifang city of east China's Shandong province, wrapped up, not only did the participating teams play a series of attractive games, but the coaches of each team also shared their youth training models and experience.

INTEGRATION AND SPECIFICATION

The Dutch club FC Heerenveen, which sent two youth team coaches to the tournament to scout for players, is a small club, but their youth camp has nurtured such great Dutch legends as Ruud van Nistelrooy and Klass-Jan Huntelaar.

According to Robin Veldman, coach of Heerenveen's U-13 team, their youth training system includes a football school for kids aged from seven to 11, plus five teams ranging from U-11, U-13 and all the way to U-19.

Veldman said one of the advantages the club can offer is that they have private coaches for individual players playing particular positions on the pitch, such as striker coach and winger coach. In addition, all the coaches in Heerenveen have spent at least 10 years playing for or working with the team, according to Veldman.

"They (have spent) way long (a time) in the club to know how we work ... and since we are so small, everybody knows what everybody is doing," he said, adding that a small club in which coaches, though in charge of different divisions, assist each other and work only with talents is good for developing the young players.

The Portuguese league champions Benfica, like Heerenveen, have taken a similar approach in specialized training, and their focus is on goalkeepers.

In the 2011-12 season Benfica created a special department to train goalkeepers and named it "Eagle One". The department's methodology is applied to all teams in club's youth training system with the mission of "cultivating goalkeepers with professional skills for Benfica."

DETAILS MATTER

One thing that has led to the Brazilian club Desportivo Brasil wining this year's Weifang Cup championship is their pursuit for perfection in details.

Every time before the training session started, the coach would hand out a form to each players asking whether they ate and slept well, how their physical conditions were, and whether they felt exhausted. The information would in turn help the coach design different training plans for individual players.

For VfL Wolfsburg, whose first team has always been a competent contender for Germany's Bundesliga title, they had dispatched a team of personnel to Weifang in advance to do the preparation work.

One unique thing they did was that they bought three dustbins and put ice and water in them. The players were asked to go into the dustbin, immerse their bodies in the icy water and hold on for one minute at the end of each game -- a method that has proven to be effective in helping players recover quickly from highly intensive games.

Kashima Antlers coach Kumagai Koji had always used the water break time - a short break arranged in the middle of each half of the game during which players of both sides were allowed to drink water so as to keep form in the hot weather - to comment on his players performance and give further instructions by drawing tactic sketches on a board..

In addition, the Japanese players were gathered together after each game to do yet another five minutes of stretching under the scorching sun heat.

AN INTEREST-ORIENTED APPROACH

With a totally different aim, the Ronaldo Academy, a franchise of football schools set up in 2015 by retired Brazilian footballer Ronaldo Luis Nazario de Lima to train kids aged between six and 18, doesn't see itself as an institution that trains professionals, but as one that nurtures young kids' interests in football and teaches them values they can carry on to their later life.

The Academy now has branches spreading over Brazil and the United States.

Paulo Swerts, who manages the Academy's business in China, said by doing so, they are focused not only on the professional part of the game, but also on the "leisure and learning experience" that football can provide.

"Through our academies, even though our goal is not to make professional football players, we will be able once we reach big numbers of students to allocate the students that are very gifted into professional football clubs like (Shandong) Luneng or Beijing Guoan and so on," Swerts said.

According to Swerts, by September, they will open schools not only in metropolises like Beijing and Shanghai, but also in provincial capitals including Chengdu, Zhengzhou, Zhangjiakou and Nanchang, and even in third-tier cities of Mianyang in the southwestern province of Sichuan province and Yiwu in the southeastern province of Zhejiang as well.

The Academy's business model is to forge cooperation with elementary and middle schools that have big numbers of students, build infrastructure in the cities, and bring in their coaches and the administrative structure to the schools that they partner with. "So the students come naturally to join our program," Swerts said.

Since the Academy currently doesn't have campuses of its own, they will also cooperate with football field owners in each of the cities to provide training fields.

Tuitions vary from city to city. "For third-tier cities, it would be something around 80 yuan (12 US dollars) per class," Swerts said, adding that the number of class will range from two to four per week to fit into the different realities of the partner schools. Endit