Angel de Maria never went home. The summer of 2007 was good. He was 19, and spent a month or more in Canada, representing his country at the Under-20 World Cup. He excelled, scored three times, and was on his team: as in 1995, 1997, 2001 and 2005, Argentina won the tournament.
His star grew so fast that, when the team returned and landed the plane in Buenos Aires, De Maria barely made it through passport control. “When we landed, he got off our plane and went to Europe,” said Hugo Tokalli, the team’s coach. “Really, straight on it.”
De Maria’s first stop was Benfica, the initial step of the tour that would take him to Real Madrid, Manchester United and now, Paris Saint-Germain. He was not the first member of the youth team to cross the sea. Three of his teammates – including Sergio Aguero – were already signed by European clubs. Neither was it the last: Within a year, nine more members of Tokalli’s team were lured away from Argentina.
“He was the same every time,” said Tokalli, who was part of Argentina’s coaching staff for all five victories during that period. “We went to Qatar and became champions. We went to Malaysia, finishing as champions. And after each, the players go to Europe, and then they go to the senior national team. “
As it turns out the names, why not be hard to do: the 1997 squad included Verter Samuel, Esteban Combiaso, Pablo Imar Mir; Nicolas Berdiso, Maxi Rodriguez and Javier Saviola in 2001; Fernando Gago, Pablo Zabaleta and, of course, Lionel Messi from the team that won in the Netherlands in 2005. In those years, Argentina seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of impossibly gifted teenagers, ready to take the world by storm.
As part of the technical staff at San Lorenzo, Tokalli still works in youth development. He still keeps an eye on the countless possibilities. And he is still confident that Argentina makes the top players. “The talent is still there,” he said. “There are still players here.”
It may not change, but there is something. A decade ago, 47 Argentine players were featured in Italy’s Serie A; Only 24 are currently registered this year. In 2014, 23 Argentines were employed in the Premier League; Which is down to 11 this season.
And, as a journalist from Argentina Juan Pablo Versky Notably, almost half of them – Aguero, Willy Caballero and Sergio Romero – are in the fall of their careers. His heirs are yet to be realized. Europe, not long ago, was able to develop players as fast as Argentina could. Now, it seems, the product line has been captured.
To judge what you cannot see
A few years ago, FC Copenhagen, two leading Danish teams, two scouts, arrived in a city south of Buenos Aires – la Valenida, to see the possibility of playing for the Raven Club. The only problem was how they got to the stadium, couldn’t work out exactly.
In Europe, there is a clear agreement between clubs to make special provisions for scouts: usually in their teammates, or in more quiet parts of the stadium, such as director box boxes or press seats, well-endured supply tickets. In Argentina, scouting has always been a little more complicated. Eventually, the two Danish scouts – in response to their calls and emails to the club – had no choice but to buy tickets and sit among the fans behind the goal. It was hardly the best place to evaluate a potential signature.
The incident inspired visiting scouts to make life easier for the scouts, but the club’s scouting co-ordinator Diego Hurta said it could still be “complicated” to see European scout games live in Argentina. It is not only with Europe, but also with the great continent of Argentina, Brazil.
Brazil – partly history based on history, partly. On a sharp basis – has long been a great exporter of soccer. In May, a report by the CIES Football.l Observatory showed that 1,535 Brazilians play professional soccer outside of Brazil. Argentina has never been able to match this type of statistic, but it was only recently that it was getting closer.
In 2014, in fact, Argentina sold more players abroad than Brazil. In its earlier years, Brazil was ahead by only the smallest margin. Now, however, as Argentina’s production line has collapsed – CIES has discovered that it has exported only 78 players in 2019 – Brazil has risen again.
Those involved in recruitment in Europe are credited with those two trends. One is the standard of youth coaching in Brazil, which many now equate to those available in Europe. There is relative ease in doing business with other Brazilian clubs. “They invite you, give you a visit to the academy, give you coffee, talk about the players,” said the head of recruitment to a large European team. “They’re more practical.”
The effect, at the top level, is obvious. As of 2014, Serie A had more Argentines than Brazilians. From 2014 to 2018, the same was true in the Premier League. Now, even in Spain, where a shared language has always made it easier for Argentine players to settle down, Brazil does not climb. In 2018, 39 Argentines played in La Liga, and 21 Brazilians. This season, the split is significantly linked: 25 Argentines and 20 Brazilians.
It’s amazing to explain that explanation is accessibility. Brazil’s best teams invite scouts to tour; Argentina, in some cases, does not respond to emails. In a fast-moving market, clubs will instinctively favor the player they know best; They cannot judge what they cannot see. Argentina’s downfall is not a failure but a failure of the organization.
Hurton, however, has a flaw in that argument. “It was all true even 10 years ago,” he said. “It’s complicated now, but then it was complicated. And the deals are still done. “
Expansion of the horizon
A list of comparable strengths of dozens of leagues around the world, in front of office fees for most of the leading teams, somewhere on their encrypted recruitment software. On most lists, the Premier League and La Liga advance to supremacy; Germany ranks third.
The roster in the list is a crib sheet and an equation, a way to weigh the qualifications of the players in terms of country and surroundings. If a team is looking at two forwards, one in France and one in Portugal, the list enables the team to see what each player’s data profile is in relation to the other.
The analytics company 21st Club – which provides data and insights to a number of teams in Europe – has its own model. Brazil’s top flight, Serie A, comes in sixth; Argentina’s Super League is in eighth place. “We rate Argentina’s best teams marginally better than Brazil’s, but there is more strength in depth at the top of Brazilian soccer,” said Omar Chowdhury, the club’s chief intelligence officer.
For recruiters, it makes Brazil an easier market to operate. “It can be difficult to scout a league with a big spread in quality,” Choudhury said. “When you look at Boca Juniors, say, against a weaker opponent, it can be difficult to determine how impressive an individual performance really is.”
The problem was exacerbated in 2015 when the Super League expanded to 30 teams. Although that number has now dropped to 24, it is set to rise again in response to the financial impact of the coronavirus epidemic.
“It’s impossible that the level doesn’t go down,” Hurta said of the league. “When teams watch games here, they will see eight or 10 teams and besides that the level is really low.”
In Argentina, at least to some extent, as an issue of the country’s own construction, the problem that has arisen in Argentina is peculiar. Hurta draws attention to a variety of factors – from various economic issues to the clubs being forced to cut development budgets to the loss of Tokalli and his mentor, Jose Pekerman, from the country’s youth system. Tokalli is due to a lack of foresight in Super League teams.
“There are only a few groups of clubs with projects,” he said. “For many, the result, even at the youth level, is all that matters, not the development of the players. They think about today, not about tomorrow. ”
The demise of Argentina is not entirely attributed to self-inflicted damage. The existence of those data-driven matrices compared to leagues is a testament to the new market reality: the horizons of clubs have expanded far beyond traditional markets. Teams known as cutting edge – Udinese, Lyon, Porto and all the rest – now consider Argentina as a premium market, just like Brazil. They believe it is worth better in Chile, Colombia and Uruguay.
And they know how to find it: to go through the rims of data provided about historically low leagues, and then to watch as many games as they like using services like ViceCout. That technological shift has widened the horizons of soccer: Nigeria now exports more players than the Netherlands. Ghana has more foreigners than Belgium.
At the same time, Europe has developed its own youth development. “In the past, you didn’t have high-tech German players, English players, Spanish players of this level,” Hurta said.
European soccer was turning to Argentina – and Brazil – for its magical lack. Now, Hurta said, he tends to source South American “combatant” players. Talent? It can grow on its own.
He hopes that Argentina’s decline in exports will be just a dip in the cycle, before players begin to emerge once again. “Here are some interesting pay generations, with players numbering 15, 16 and 17,” Hurta said.
Tokli is true, in that sense: Argentina has never stopped producing players. It’s just that, these days, Europe doesn’t need them very much.
