— THE Touchline —
The Coach's view
Photography Hannah Edwards
Manchester City’s Mike Rigg reports on some surprising findings from his recent trip to Brazil
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as technical director
of Manchester City, part of my job is to oversee the club’s worldwide scouting and recruitment network. South America is, of course, a very big market for football, but up to this point Manchester City have had no player identification presence there. My trip to Brazil was intended as the first step in developing this, but, during the week I spent there, it became more of a fact-finding mission. I didn’t over-research the trip and went there with an open mind. And I’m glad that I did, as I was completely blown away by what I found. I expected a ‘street football’ mentality, with clubs having sub-standard facilities and offering limited opportunities to players – instead I found facilities that, at least, match the best available in the UK. I visited a total of nine clubs, but I will concentrate here on my experiences at São Paulo (which were fairly typical of what I came across throughout the trip). I was expecting good training facilities – my brief time in Brazil had already taught me that this was more or less a ‘given’ – but what I found was way beyond that. In addition to the normal training amenities, the complex housed conference and education facilities, dentistry, podiatry, nutritional support,
medical support and pastoral care. What’s more, the club was in the middle of a building programme that will soon deliver an enormous medical rehabilitation centre to rival the best of the UK’s private hospitals. São Paulo have a simple explanation as to why so much time, money and attention to detail have been invested in the club’s youth development programme. Not having access to the revenue streams that major European clubs enjoy, São Paulo (like all Brazilian clubs) survive by selling players; player development is, therefore, a necessary part of what is, in effect, an export business. To feed this business, the club (like its rivals) scours all of Brazil and even some neighbouring countries (Uruguay and Argentina, for example) to find the best available talent. Some of this talent comes from some of the most deprived regions in the world, so football is often the only way to escape. The academy team at São
the manager SPRING 2010
Paulo therefore see their job to develop them, not just as players, but as people. The flipside of this is that the standards they set for the kids are extremely high – no matter how good a player might be, if they don’t meet the behavioural standards, they’re out. This work and investment has definitely paid off, as there’s something in the region of 1,000 Brazilians playing professional football around the world. My overwhelming feeling at the end of my trip was that all of us involved in English football have to take a long, hard look at how we develop players. Okay, we’re severely restricted by regulation, but even within those parameters we have to think about how we invest in player development. I wasn’t sure what I was going to find when I set off for Brazil, but what I certainly didn’t expect was to find a system that put almost everything that I’ve seen in the UK in the shade. The truth is that if you were to take a player out of any one of the academies that I saw in Brazil and drop them into a UK academy, in nine out of ten cases it would be a backward step for them, while if you took a kid from this country and put them in São Paolo’s academy they would feel that they’d hit the jackpot. Left to right: Mike meets (the original) Ronaldo, undergoing treatment at the Corinthians facility; one of the dentists at the São Paulo Academy; part of the Santos medical centre, built with funds generated by the sale of Robinho to Real Madrid