"Academia de Excelência"

"Producing talent is no problem for the Portuguese club but keeping hold of the prodigies long enough to build a winning side is proving more difficult.

THE TRANQUIL little town of Alcochete in the suburban district of Setubal was recently selected as the site for Lisbon's new £3.9bn airport but football careers have been taking off from there for some time now. Paulo Futre, Luís Figo and Simão Sabrosa all emerged from the system at Sporting Clube de Portugal before the actual bricks and mortar were put in place, but if a combination of Cristiano Ronaldo, Ricardo Quaresma and Nani is anything to go by, the immaculate 250,000 square metre development in the town which comprises the state-of-the-art Puma Sporting Academy will remain world football's finest finishing school.

Rangers could come up against no fewer than six of the latest fruits of the system this Thursday night, when the two teams meet in the quarter finals of the Uefa Cup at Ibrox. The leading protagonist on the list is the club's impish playmaker and captain, 21-year-old João Moutinho, although his more defensively minded countryman Miguel Veloso has already been scouted by Sir Alex Ferguson's brother Martin and consequently been linked with making the same move which took Ronaldo and Nani to Old Trafford.

If one totem of the club's domination of the domestic landscape was the fact that the 2005-06 season saw Sporting's youth team winning the league title in every category in which they competed (Under-9, Under-10, Under-11, Under-12, Under-13, Iniciados, Juveniles and Juniors), the really bad news for their competitors at home and abroad is that a further drastic expansion is being planned. Earlier this season Sporting started up a network of 14 soccer schools stretching from the north to the south of the country, and the contracts are all but signed for Sporting Africa, a South Africa-based academy which aims to exploit the best talent from that continent and is their first venture into the international marketplace.

So what is the big secret? According to Pedro Mil-Homens, the club's academy director, it is quite simply down to having the best scouts and the best coaches in the business.

"I would like to say that there isn't any secret, but if anything I think it is that we try to scout the best players, then we work them as hard as possible," Mil-Homens said. "I think I have a very good group of scouts and coaches working for me and there is a very good training programme here."

Alcochete has an indoor seven-a-side pitch in the unlikely event that the Portuguese weather is inclement, but some clouds on the club's horizon refuse to disappear. None of this youth development work comes cheap and even such prodigious teenage talents do not always automatically translate into a side capable of competing at the very top level of European competition. Sporting's current players share the Academy's facilities with the youngsters and Paulo Bento's current squad are so callow it can be hard to tell the difference at times.

Ronaldo may have been expertly plucked from the holiday island of Madeira as a teenager but he had only been at the Academy for a couple of years by the time Manchester United stole him away, and Nani and Ricardo Quaresma didn't last much longer. Sporting are well off the pace in the Portuguese Super Liga and indeed they have won the top league just four times in the last 25 years. Moreover, the club are still paying back major bank loans for the improvement of the Estádio José Alvalade for Euro 2004, and could be as much as £160m in debt by the time their current deal with Lisbon's local council expires.

"Yes, it is difficult to translate our young talent into real success, but what can you do?" Mil-Homens said. "You just try to make as many talented young players as possible for the first team. Of course we can't compete with the money that clubs such as Manchester United have. Such is life. But anyway we are relatively satisfied with the balance that we have been trying to achive, not only in sporting terms and financial terms."

Luís Martins, a youth coach who worked at the academy for its first seven years, prior to his departure 12 months ago, shares these concerns. "It is not possible to have a great, great team in European terms just with these guys from the academy," Martins said. "I think we have a very good process to get talent for the team, but I think you need some players who also have a lot of experience from the highest level and I don't think they have that yet. Also it is not easy every year at the academy to produce someone like Ronaldo, although Moutinho is another very good one. I think for Sporting it will be difficult for them to play against Rangers at this time, because the psychological level of the team is not a good one at this moment. They are often defeated, and are very inconsistent performers."

Simon Vuksevic's return from international duty with Montenegro this week with a shoulder injury could leave only academy graduate Yannick Djaló or Brazilian Rodrigo Tiui as options to share the striking duties with Liedson. It is changed days indeed from those of Ronaldo, who Martins fondly recalls scoring from his own half in a youth match against Estrela de Amadora, or finding the youngster in the academy's weights room at 11pm the night before a crucial Under-16 game against Benfica and having to admonish him for doing some extra strength sessions.

"I had to tell him that I didn't approve of this, on the night before the match," Martins said. "He told me that it was necessary to be extra fit before the game, and he needed extra strength. I had a very angry row with him, but in the morning against Benfica, he scored two goals and we won 5-0, so there was no problem. But the first years which Ronaldo had at the academy were not easy for him because he had some problems adjusting to the culture. Madeira is a very different culture."

First-team midfielder Adrien Silva is the first member of the next wave of recruits from Alcochete, a training camp which was the automatic choice as a base for Luiz Felipe Scolari's Portugal side for their run to the finals of Euro 2004.

Alan Hutton, and Allan McGregor may be the first proof of Murray Park's worth, but on this evidence that facility still has a long way to go to compete with Europe's finest."



Texto: www.sundayherald.com
Imagem: Academia de Talentos.

31.03.2008 14:25h | Ocultar ou Mostrar Comentários | Escolas/Academias