Football talent: strive to survive

Showing up is 80 percent.

Before I dive in, I want to characterize how I’m going to approach talking about youth soccer development in what will be a series of posts over the next few weeks.

My aim is not to provide a comprehensive, iron-clad argument for one series of approaches over another. I’m not going to say that countries should emulate X, Y, Z development pathways.

Rather, I want to share some casual observations I’ve made in the past four years or so as a dad of a kid in the system. This is not to make definitive claims about what is right or wrong but, hopefully, to provoke some discussion and sharing of knowledge and ideas on the subject.

That’s it! This is not a wildly ambitious project.

Okay, so I have had direct experience with exactly two football development environments: the Nova Scotia Soccer League (NSSL) and the Ontario Professional Development League (OPDL).

This is because my son is a goalkeeper. But he’s not the star of this post (goalkeeper development appears to be something of an odd duck and will be the subject of a future post).

My impression of both leagues is not that one is comprehensively better trained, coached or refereed than the other. Nor does one favour particular physical characteristics more than the other. OPDL is more expensive and includes more practices. While there are more skilled players in OPDL, this is a matter of volume rather than degree. The best kids that I’ve seen in NSSL, though fewer and further between, are about on par with the best kids I’ve seen in OPDL (crucially, they are not always on the best OPDL teams, but more on that later).

Counterintuitively, however, I believe that standout players in smaller player pools such as the NSSL have a better chance of accelerating their development than in bigger pools like the OPDL.

Nova Scotia native Jacob Shaffelburg provides a good case study.

Shaffelburg played for Valley United FC, a good but not exactly dominant NSSL club based in Wolfville. Here, the speedy winger, who likely could have also pursued a track career (dominance in several sports is usually a good indicator of a professional promise), stood out for his remarkable pace and technique and played up past his age group. He was a natural shoo-in for the provincial team, where his talent was even more distinct.

But what arguably set Shaffelburg on the path to a pro career was his father’s connections to the coach of FC Nashville Heroes, a man who had coached Jacob’s older brother Zach (who is also a very good soccer player and now a rheumatologist in the NS south shore area—what a family!). An invitation to play for FC Nashville Heroes during a highly successful cup run when he was a mere 13 years old set Jacob down a path that took him to a highly regarded soccer school in Massachusetts, a pro career in MLS and a core place in the Canadian men’s national team.

Would Shaffelburg’s pro-pathway have been replicated had he grown up in Ontario?

If you believe in such a thing as objective standout talent—that ‘development’ matters less than innate gifts, you’d probably say yes.

But interestingly, Toronto FC didn’t see Shaffelburg as a real prospect. In fact, his experience with Toronto was so bad he contemplated leaving MLS altogether. It was his old family connection to Nashville that set the Nova Scotian on the way to greatness.

But in OPDL, being “developed” by Toronto FC is often seen as the pinnacle of a potential career (I have more thoughts on that subject later on as well).

I believe that kids like Shaffelburg are not destined to go pro. No one is. Going professional, particularly in a North American environment, is as much a story of happy accidents, valuable interpersonal connections, and individual drive as it is about innate talent. It can come down to one coach seeing something in you that another doesn’t.

I also think for this reason that in environments like Nova Scotia, if you’re a truly standout player, your chances of going professional are likely higher than if you had chosen to play in OPDL, just based on the volume of elite players in Ontario alone.

If, for example, you’re a Shaffelburg-like phenom playing in the OPDL, you might be asked to play an age level above. You may get “asked” to try out for a more skilled OPDL team. You might make the Ontario provincial team.

But you’re not going to be earning any headline articles. Your dad might have connections to an American coach, but so do your teammates’ dads (actually, if you play at a top OPDL club, chances are the coaching staff has experience with Canada’s national team in some capacity).

You might wend your way through this remarkable maze, only to end up at Toronto FC and not be given any direction or advice on how to improve, because about ten kids are waiting to take your place.

There is, however, an exception to this, and that is Brampton, a suburb of Toronto that produces a disproportionate number of Canada’s best players for reasons that, in my opinion, have little to do with OPDL. But that’s for my next post.