The Making of Soccer's Future

The path to becoming a professional soccer player in Europe isn’t paved with orange soda and pizza parties. Youth soccer is a serious business. At clubs like Ajax Amsterdam, the most famous growers of soccer talent in the world, scouts track players as young as five. Then, by the time they are 10 or 11, they are invited to join the hallowed ranks of the club’s talent academy where they live, eat, and breathe soccer with minimal schooling on the side. Through grueling practices and ruthless selection, they hope to be invited back for another year until one or two of them emerge as superstars. That’s when the club can finally capitalize on them. “I think that is the purpose of Ajax,” said one Ajax coach, “to develop players and bring them up to the first team as young as possible. And then we sell them, not for peanuts but for a lot of money.”