Other academies in Africa expressed surprise that Football Dreams hadn’t produced more high-profile players. “It doesn’t make sense,” said Joe Mulberry, the head of recruitment at Right to Dream in Ghana, during a visit to the academy in 2015. “There should be more successful outputs than there currently are.” Many suspected the biggest problem was Aspire’s failure to verify kids were 13 years old when they first tried out. They also pointed to the difficulties other foreign academies have had with the complexities of developing players in Africa. “A lot of academies have failed in Ghana because they have been European teams implementing European models,” said Mulberry. “How well do they understand the subtleties and nuances of an African child?”
He also suspected that exposing the Football Dreams kids to the opulence of Aspire could create a sense of entitlement and dampen the drive needed to make it. “One of the key benefits of African players is they are extremely hungry to succeed for obvious reasons,” said Mulberry. “As they enter the Aspire system, do they and could they ever maintain their hunger because they live in air-conditioned rooms and fly all over the world? It’s an extremely difficult mental transition to take a lad potentially sharing a one-bedroom home with his parents and five brothers and sisters to go live in Aspire.”
Aspire, on the other hand, maintains that critics of Football Dreams shouldn’t rush to judgment on the players selected by the program since the oldest graduates so far are only in their early 20s, at least officially, and many have yet to finish the academy. Aspire officials also point out that the first few years of such an ambitious talent search are bound to be the most challenging, and results may improve over time.
These are fair points, but the failure of the program to produce more successful players could also be chalked up to the inherent difficulty of identifying future stars at a young age, even with a pool of millions and seemingly unlimited resources. In fact, the numbers are a little deceptive. Aspire may have scouted over 5 million boys, but they reduced their chances of picking the right kids because they only took about twenty into the academy each year and mostly kept them until they graduated, regardless of their performance. That was better for the boys than the norm at most academies, where they cast off players along the way who don’t make the grade and replace them with more promising recruits. But it meant Aspire was stuck with its initial choices even if they didn’t seem to be panning out.
Diawandou’s success actually serves as evidence of just how challenging it can be to choose which player will make it to the big time. The Senegalese defender wasn’t the biggest, strongest, fastest, or flashiest player Colomer selected. He didn’t have Bernard’s technique, Ibrahima’s nose for goal, Anthony Bassey’s speed, or Samuel Asamoah’s game intelligence. He was certainly gifted with an impressive combination of many of these things, but the qualities that put him over the top were much harder to spot in a match or training session: his judgment, strength of character, self-discipline, and motivation. These attributes made him a great leader. They also helped him make smart decisions off the field that proved just as important as those on it.
Also, in what was supposed to be a rags-to-riches story of poor African kids desperate to succeed, Diawandou actually benefited from the fact that he came from a more comfortable background. That helped him resist agents and coaches dangling the promise of overnight wealth if he left the academy early, a temptation that tripped up both Bernard and Ibrahima, who initially seemed like they had more potential. Their fates showed how managing players’ hopes and fears can be just as challenging and important as picking the right recruits in the first place. The likelihood that Bernard and Ibrahima were much older than they said also fueled their impatience to make it to Europe. Even though Diawandou was kicked off his national team for lying about his age, he may have actually been one of the younger players in the first few classes. That allowed him to be more patient. It also meant his development potential was likely closer to what Colomer expected when the scout first spotted him at his old academy in Thiès.
Technology offers the possibility of more efficient youth scouting going forward, as the kind of data-driven analysis made famous by the book Moneyball becomes more common in soccer and also more sophisticated. One limitation of much of the analysis done so far, even with more advanced statistics like expected goals and expected assists, has been that it has largely focused on actions involving the ball rather than movement that takes place elsewhere on the field. That’s a big problem since 99 percent of what happens in a match occurs off the ball. This limitation has made the analysis much less useful, especially for assessing game intelligence. It’s difficult to evaluate whether a midfielder is making the most efficient passes or whether a defender is lining up in the right spots to thwart potential attacks without factoring in the other players on the pitch.
But that’s now possible as well. One of the leading soccer analytics companies, Prozone, introduced game intelligence modeling in 2015 that uses player tracking data to analyze action on the entire field. The data come from cameras around the pitch that track the players and the ball every tenth of a second, producing around 6 million pieces of data every match. To understand the complex interactions between players, the models interpreting the data employ the same principles scientists use to evaluate dynamic systems like schools of fish or flocks of birds. “The whole idea is if we look at football, particularly when it’s speeded up, we get the same types of swarming patterns as we get in nature,” said Paul Power, a former coach who helped design the models at Prozone before the company was acquired by STATS LLC. The models measure player intelligence through actions that alter the stability of the system, or match, much like a shark might scatter a school of tuna. Instability is key to creating attacking opportunities, while stability helps thwart them.
“A great example is a 1 v 1,” said Power. “It might be Lionel Messi vs. Jerome Boateng. At first, you have a stable relationship. If Messi goes left, Boateng goes right, and so forth. But suddenly you add in Luis Suárez who makes another run, and this then perturbs the system,” perhaps by freeing up space for Messi to dribble or giving him a passing option. Traditional metrics would never give Suárez credit for making the run since he never touched the ball. But the game intelligence models can calculate how much space he created for Messi and the amount he increased the chance of a goal. More broadly, they can show which players are particularly good at pulling defenders out of position to create attacking opportunities and, conversely, which defenders are best at shutting them down. Think how many defenders typically converge on Messi in an attempt to stop him every time he begins a run with the ball. “He soaks up the defenders just like a paper towel soaks up milk,” the TV commentator Ray Hudson once said of Messi.
The game intelligence models can also reveal how effective players are when dealing with this type of defensive pressure. “When players are pressed, are they forced into errors, into taking safe options, or will they complete the high risk but high reward options?” said Power. The models can figure out the best dribbling, passing, or shooting options based on player positions and evaluate the wisdom of a particular choice. “Using this type of data, we are then able to provide simple scores on intelligence and decision making, which is obviously what people want. We can see how a player compares to the rest of the population and his age group as well.” This is potentially a huge leap forward, and the models are bound to increase in sophistication over time. Think how much more effective they are at capturing game intelligence than showing players clips of match footage, asking them to play brain games in a lab, or simply relying on a scout’s subjective judgment.
Since the technology is so new and represents a significant leap in sophistication, it’s not yet being widely used. “People don’t really know what to make of it,” said Chris Anderson, the author of The Numbers Game. He believes much of the data analysis employed in soccer is still no more sophisticated than the use of leeches in medicine. “I think it’s
still relatively early in terms of providing actionable intelligence, but it’s clear if we really truly want to understand the game, it has to be the next step. But it’s incredibly data intensive, so the amount of time you have to spend processing the data in order to then use it and analyze it is really intense. Clubs generally have no infrastructure and no interest in doing that, which is why companies like Prozone are well positioned to take that off the clubs’ hands. But I don’t think there has been enough acceptance of it within clubs to pay for that because they are still barely beyond the leeches.”
Most club youth operations are even farther behind the curve in terms of using data, partly because robust statistics still aren’t available for many young players. It would cost serious money to collect the data. The biggest innovation at many clubs in the last decade is the development of databases to track young players of note anywhere in the world. “So, if somebody says, ‘I saw this really great 14-year-old in Montenegro last week,’ somebody can type it in, find the name, and find the kid,” said Anderson. “They will have the basics like what position they play, how many minutes they played, and if they scored a goal. But it’s not much more than that.”
That may be the status today, but it’s easy to imagine how much more refined youth scouting operations could become once tracking data of young players is more widely available and scouts have access to technology like game intelligence modeling or even more powerful tools. This is likely to happen as the hardware and software needed become cheaper and more ubiquitous. That doesn’t mean it will be a silver bullet since predicting the future always entails uncertainty. Simply producing Messi by algorithm will remain a dream. But youth scouting, like soccer more broadly, is poised for a potentially dramatic shift in the balance between art and science, especially at the biggest clubs in the world.
Diawandou was riding high at Barcelona. Life got even better only a few days after he arrived when the club’s sporting director, Zubizarreta, came to see him at the hotel where he was staying. He was scheduled to begin training in a few days, but the sporting director told him he wouldn’t be starting with the B team. The club wanted him and a few others from the reserve squad to train with the senior team, since so many players were still on vacation after the 2014 World Cup, including many of Barcelona’s biggest stars like Messi and Neymar. Gerard Piqué was absent as well, so Diawandou lined up in central defense beside La Masia graduate Marc Bartra and impressed coach Luis Enrique enough that he kept the Senegalese defender with the first team even after the entire squad returned.
It was almost too much for Diawandou to believe. The stuff of dreams. He would share the training pitch with some of the biggest names in international soccer, an achievement millions of players around the world could only fantasize about. It was the kind of thing Diawandou himself had imagined as a child when he was playing pickup soccer in the dirt street in front of his house in Thiès. “I said to myself this dream is coming true because I’m training with the best players in the world,” said Diawandou. “People travel from all over the world to see Messi play or get an autograph, and I was sharing the same changing room with Messi. It was an amazing time for me.”
Barcelona’s captain and mesmerizing playmaker, Xavi, welcomed Diawandou to the group with a few words of wisdom. “Xavi is the master of the team,” said Diawandou. “He said, ‘Just play how you normally play. If you’re at Barcelona, a hundred percent it means you’re a good player.’ ” Diawandou took up his position in the locker room next to fellow defender Jordi Alba. There was Xavi slipping on his captain’s armband, Iniesta lacing up his boots. Diawandou had actually moved into Iniesta’s old apartment, thanks to the agent they both shared. The Senegalese defender quickly discovered that the Brazilians were the life of the party in the locker room, especially Neymar and Dani Alves. “They were always joking in the changing room, always dancing,” said Diawandou. Not Messi. He may have dominated play on the field, but in the locker room he rarely spoke.
It was actually a reunion of sorts since Diawandou had met Messi over half a dozen years ago inside Aspire’s massive dome in Doha. Someone even posted a photo of them from that day online. The Argentine star smiled easily into the camera, as his shoulder-length brown hair spilled onto his white dress shirt. Diawandou, skinny and baby-faced, looked a little tentative standing next to Messi in his blue and white Nike training jersey. It was also a chance to reunite with Neymar, whom Diawandou defeated on one of Aspire’s outdoor fields only a couple months after the picture with Messi was taken. None of them had any idea back then that they would all meet again at Barcelona’s hallowed training ground one day.
There was a downside to all this, though. It was no mystery why Messi, Neymar, and Suárez invoked fear in the hearts of defenders. They were outrageously difficult to mark, and now it was Diawandou’s job to do just that in training. “To take the ball from them you need to kill yourself!” said Diawandou. Suárez was as strong as an ox and would do anything to win, including bite his opponents. For Neymar, simply beating defenders wasn’t enough. Sometimes he sought to humiliate them by rainbowing the ball over their heads as they stood rooted to the ground.
But there was no doubt which of the three presented the greatest threat. Imagine having to face Messi dribbling at you at full speed, or standing still with his foot on the ball, daring you to come get it, knowing that with one flick of his hips, he could make you look like a fool, a mere spectator to his brilliance. “With Messi, sometimes you just want to watch him play because the things he can do are so amazing,” said Diawandou. “You cannot stop him.” Diawandou clearly held his own, though, because he was one of only two B team players to make Luis Enrique’s squad for the group stage of the Champions League that year. He also started nearly every game for the B team once he finally joined the squad two months after arriving at the club.
When Barcelona first signed Diawandou, some supporters suspected it was simply done as a favor to Colomer because of his history with the club and Qatar’s multimillion-dollar sponsorship of the team. “People weren’t very happy with that signature because a lot of fans thought he wasn’t a player prepared to play in the second team of Barcelona,” said Ángel Iturriaga Barco, who has written several books about the club’s history. “But at the beginning of the campaign, he started to play very well and convinced people.” Even Colomer was impressed by how much playing time Diawandou got so quickly with the B team. “He knows it’s very difficult to play at Barcelona,” said Diawandou. “There are so many good players. He told me he didn’t think I would play all the games I was playing.”
They were clearly heady days for Diawandou, but the biggest thrill during his first year at Barcelona was finally being called up for a match with the club’s senior team. Although he had made Luis Enrique’s 25-player squad for the Champions League, he never dressed for a match in the tournament. Instead, he first donned a blue and red Barcelona jersey and walked into the Camp Nou with the rest of the senior team for the second leg of a Copa del Rey playoff against a lower league side, SD Huesca.
Diawandou during a match with Barcelona’s B team.
For most fans, it was a night like any other night. As they streamed toward the stadium, they passed booths selling all manner of Barcelona souvenirs: striped blue and red flags bearing the club’s crest, colorful scarves stitched with the team’s motto, “Més que un club,” and jerseys emblazoned with the names of stars like Messi, Neymar, Xavi, and Iniesta. Some fans lingered over beer and tapas at bars outside the Camp Nou or stopped to snap photos in front of the stadium. But for Diawandou, the night was anything but routine. He had been dreaming of this moment his whole life.
The match itself didn’t hold much drama, since Barcelona was already up 4-0 after the first leg, and the coach decided to rest several of the club’s stars, including Messi. But that didn’t dent the thrill Diawandou felt as he warmed up with the rest of the squad under the stadium’s lights, pinging the ball back and forth with his Barcelon
a teammates, just like he had done with friends back in Thiès all those years ago. As a reminder of the amazing journey he had taken, all Diawandou needed to do was look up at the stands to see the name of the club’s sponsor spelled out in gold, Qatar Airways.
It was undoubtedly a special moment for Colomer as well. Over a decade earlier, the Spanish scout had been the one to tell a shaggy-haired, 16-year-old Messi he was getting his debut with Barcelona’s first team. Now he proudly watched as Diawandou followed in his footsteps. Of course, the players were in no way equal. In fact, Diawandou never even made it off the bench that night against Huesca and failed to fully break into the senior team over the remainder of the season. He would eventually end up back in Belgium the following year, where he finally helped Eupen get promoted to the first division.
There was certainly no shame in that. Given where Diawandou started and the odds of ever making it as a professional in Europe, his success was striking. But he wasn’t that once-in-a-generation player Colomer hoped to find when he first set off across Africa nearly a decade earlier. The Spanish scout wasn’t disheartened, though. The fact that Diawandou had made it to Barcelona at all fueled his belief that Football Dreams was working. Despite the ups and downs, Colomer was still convinced his wildly ambitious search could produce a player of superstar status someday and was determined to keep looking. “What Diawandou has achieved is only the beginning,” he said.
Epilogue
Diawandou’s jump to Barcelona may have felt like the beginning of Football Dreams’ success, but in reality, it may have been closer to the end. At the close of 2016, two years after Diawandou walked into the Camp Nou with the rest of Barcelona’s senior team, Aspire decided to halt the Football Dreams search a decade after it first began.
Ironically, financial concerns may have helped drive the decision. It turned out there were limits to Qatar’s wealth after all. Like many countries in the Gulf, Qatar was buffeted by a severe drop in oil and gas prices that started in 2014 and ultimately led to a decline of roughly 70 percent in both markets. Prices eventually rebounded to some extent but were still far below their highs by the end of 2016. The plunge erased hundreds of billions of dollars from Qatar’s wealth and led to drastic cuts in government spending across the country, including at Aspire. That meant the academy needed to figure out what to put on the chopping block, and Football Dreams offered the possibility of significant savings.
The Away Game Page 25
