The youth academy of the famed dutch soccer club Ajax is grandiosely called De Toekomst — The Future.

Set down beside a highway in an unprepossessing district of Amsterdam, it consists of eight well-kept playing fields and a two-story building that houses locker rooms, classrooms, workout facilities and offices for coaches and sports scientists.

In an airy cafe and bar, players are served meals and visitors can have a glass of beer or a cappuccino while looking out over the training grounds.

Everything about the academy, from the amenities to the pedigree of the coaches — several of them former players for the powerful Dutch national team — signifies quality. Ajax once fielded one of the top professional teams in Europe.

With the increasing globalisation of the sport, which has driven the best players to richer leagues in England, Germany, Italy and Spain, the club has become a different kind of enterprise — a talent factory.

It manufactures players and then sells them, often for immense fees, on the world market. “All modern ideas on how to develop youngsters begin with Ajax,” Huw Jennings, an architect of the English youth-development system, told me. “They are the founding fathers.”

In America, with its wide-open spaces and wide-open possibilities, they celebrate the “self-made athlete,” honour effort and luck and let children seek their own course for as long as they can — even when that means living with dreams that are unattainable and always were.

The Dutch live in a cramped, soggy nation made possible only because they mastered the art of redirecting water. They are engineers with creative souls, experts at systems, infrastructure and putting scant resources to their best use.

The construction of soccer players is another problem to be solved, and it’s one they undertake with a characteristic lack of sentiment or illusion.

The first time I visited De Toekomst happened to coincide with the arrival of 21 new players — seven- and eight-year-olds, mainly, all from Amsterdam and its vicinity — who were spotted by scouts and identified as possible future professionals.

As I came upon them, they were competing in a series of four-on-four games on a small, artificial-turf field with a wall around it, like a hockey rink, so that balls heading out of bounds bounced right back into play.

It was late November and cold, with a biting wind howling off the North Sea, but the boys skittered about in only their lightweight jerseys and baggy shorts.

Their shots on goal were taken with surprising force, which kept the coaches who were serving as goalkeepers flinching and shielding themselves in self-defense. The whole scene had a speeded-up, almost cartoonish feel to it, but I certainly didn’t see anyone laughing.

After a series of these auditions, some players would be formally enrolled in the Ajax academy. A group of men standing near me looked on intently, clutching rosters that matched the players with their numbers.

One man, Ronald de Jong, said: “I am never looking for a result — for example, which boy is scoring the most goals or even who is running the fastest. That may be because of their size and stage of development. I want to notice how a boy runs. Is he on his forefeet, running lightly? Does he have creativity with the ball? Does he seem that he is really loving the game? I think these things are good at predicting how he’ll be when he is older.”

Like other professional clubs in Europe and around the world, Ajax operates something similar to the US’s big-league baseball team’s minor-league system — but one that reaches into early childhood.

De Jong, a solidly built former amateur player, is one of some 60 volunteer scouts who fan out on weekends to watch games involving local amateur clubs.

(He works during the week as a prison warden.) His territory includes the area between The Hague and Haarlem — “the flower district, which is also a very good hunting ground for players” is how he described it.

He’ll observe a prospect for months or even years, and players he recommends will also be watched by one of the club’s paid scouts, a coach and sometimes the director of the Ajax youth academy.

But for some families, the first time they realise their boys are under serious consideration is when a letter arrives from Ajax requesting that they bring their sons in for a closer look, an invitation that is almost never declined.

To comprehend the impact of a summons from Ajax, imagine a kid who is crazy about their national sport, arriving home from school one day to learn that he has been asked to perform before the national coach.
One player that was de Jong’s discovery, an 8-year-old who, he said, had “talent that is off the charts.” But if this boy were to be accepted into the academy, it would mean he had completed just the first of a succession of relentless challenges.

Ajax puts young players into a competitive caldron, a culture of constant improvement in which they either survive and advance or are discarded.

Child-friendly environment

It is not what most would regard as a child-friendly environment, but it is one that sorts out the real prodigies — those capable of playing at an elite international level — from the merely gifted.

About 200 players train at De Toekomst at any given time, from ages seven to 19. (All are male; Ajax has no girls’ programme.)

Every year, some in each age group are told they cannot return the following year — they are said to have been “sent away” — and new prospects are enrolled in their place.

And it is not just the children whose performances are assessed. Just before my second trip to Amsterdam in March, several longtime coaches were informed that they had not measured up and would be let go. One of them was the coach of a boy I had been following, Dylan Donaten Nieuwenhuys, a slightly built, soft-featured 15-year-old who began at Ajax when he was seven.

Dylan’s father, Urvin Rooi, served as a sort of guide for me. He was particularly useful in translating a culture that was nothing like I had ever seen in many years of reporting on American sports.

When I observed that for all the seriousness of purpose at De Toekomst, I was surprised that the players did not practice more hours or play more games, Rooi said: “Of course, because they do not want to do anything to injure them or wear them out. They’re capital. And what is the first thing a businessman does? He protects his capital.”

When the boys start at the youth academy, Rooi said, they are attached to the ideal of Ajax, whose senior team packs in 50,000-plus fans for its home games and still occupies a mythic place in world soccer because of the innovative style it established in the 1960s — a quick-passing, position-shifting offensive attack that became known as Total Football.

“The little boys drink their tea out of Ajax cups,” he said. “They sleep in Ajax pajamas under Ajax blankets.” As spring approaches, he continued, they get nervous about whether they will be permitted to stay for another year. “This is when they sometimes start to get bad school grades. They don’t sleep. They wet their pants.”

Over time, though, the academy hardens them mentally as well as physically.

Late one afternoon in the cafe at De Toekomst, I was talking with a coach, Patrick Landru, who works with the academy’s youngest age groups, when he asked if he could take my writing pad for a moment.

I handed it over, and he put down five names, then drew a bracket to their right. Outside the bracket, he wrote, “euros 80 million.” The names represented five active “Ajax educated” players, as he called them, all of whom entered the academy as children, made it through without being sent away and emerged as world-class players.

Eighty million euros (or even more) is what Ajax got in return for selling the rights to the players to other professional clubs. Once a team pays this one-time transfer fee, it then negotiates a new, often very large, contract with the player.

Wesley Sneijder, the first name on the list and probably the most accomplished young Dutch player at the moment, started at the academy when he was seven. At 23, Real Madrid acquired him for euros 27 millions.

(He now stars for Inter Milan, the current Italian champion and the winner of this year’s Champion’s League tournament, Europe’s highest club competition.) The other four players named on my pad were, like Sneijder, highly paid pros for clubs outside the Netherlands and prominent members of the Dutch national team that will compete in the World Cup beginning this week in South Africa.

Develop for sale

I asked Martin Jol, the coach of Ajax’s first team, if it was difficult for him to nurture young players knowing he would lose them just as their talent blossomed.

“I think that is the purpose of Ajax, to develop players and bring them up to the first team as young as possible,” he answered. “And then we sell them, not for peanuts but for a lot of money.”

In the US, money is said to be corrupting sport, especially youth sport. At Ajax, it is clarifying. With the stakes so high — so much invested and the potential for so much in return — De Toekomst is a laboratory for turning young boys into high-impact performers in the world’s most popular game.

The Ajax youth academy is not a boarding school. The players all live within a 35-mile radius of Amsterdam (some of them have moved into the area to attend the academy).

Ajax makes mistakes, plenty of them. It sends the wrong boys away, and some of them become stars elsewhere with no compensation returning to the club.

As a production line, it is grossly inefficient; only a small percentage of its youngsters become elite players.

But the club does not throw money after pure fantasy, encouraging visions of pro careers that never have a chance of materialising for children who do not have the foundational talent to reach such goals.

The club decides which boys have potential — “Please note,” its Web site advises, “Ajax’s youth academy cannot accept individual external applications” — and then exposes them to scientific training and constant pressure.

During training sessions at Ajax, I rarely heard the boys’ loud voices or laughter or much of anything besides the thump of the ball and the instruction of coaches.

It could seem grim, more like the grinding atmosphere of training for an individual sport — tennis, golf, gymnastics — than what you would expect in a typically boisterous team setting.

But one element of the academy’s success is that the boys are not overplayed, so the hours at De Toekomst are all business. Through age 12, they train only three times a week and play one game on the weekend. “For the young ones, we think that’s enough,” Riekerink said when we talked in his office one day.

“They have a private life, a family life. We don’t want to take that from them. When they are not with us, they play on the streets. They play with their friends. Sometimes that’s more important. They have the ball at their feet without anyone telling them what to do.”

There are two ways to become a world-class soccer player. One is to spend hours and hours in pickup games — in parks, streets, alleyways — on imperfect surfaces that, if mastered, can give a competitor an advantage when he finally graduates to groomed fields.

This is the Brazilian way and also the model in much of the rest of South America, Central America and the soccer hotbeds of Africa.
It is like baseball in the Dominican Republic. Children play all the time and on their own.

The other way is the Ajax method. Scientific training. Attention to detail. Time spent touching the ball rather than playing a mindless number of organised games.

Ajax is a fulcrum of the worldwide soccer market, exporting top players to the world’s best clubs, because they take very young players and shape them.
NY Times