The missing link in player development? LA Galaxy announce USL PRO team LA Galaxy II “LA Galaxy II gives our young players, both in the academy and on the first team, additional playing time and opportunities to grow as players,” said Kirovski. “We see this as a pioneering effort in player development in North America and something that will advance our club on the field and in the community.” http://www.lagalaxy.com/news/2014/01/la-galaxy-announce-usl-pro-team-la-galaxy-ii The Elite Player versus the Player in Formation: It is necessary to commence by clearly distinguishing what is an elite player or a ‘developed’ player, and a player that is ‘developing’. Elite player: a player that is part of a team that participates in an elite professional competition. In Spain, this would be the top two football divisions. A player in formation (Young Talent): a young player that possesses sporting development potential that can enable them to reach a high performance level in the future, even though their current performance level is not one of the highest or distinguished ones. A ‘developed’ player is a mature being; here performance levels prevail over the learning process. In this case we find those players that can participate in official adult competitions at the highest level. This leads us to consider how necessary it is to differentiate between ‘performance’ and ‘potential’ or learning process. The youth that has natural or genetic physical sporting characteristics (Nature) will have more possibilities to reach future high performance levels than those less developed. But it seems that genes alone do not determine us; they only predispose us and it is necessary to pit the individual against adequate stimuli (Nurture) that enable the necessary interaction for the full development of individual potential. Additionally, the premature or early performance level does not guarantee future performance levels at a mature age. A clear example follows: if you analyze the first four senior teams in the World Cup finals, you will see that there is no correlation between those that reach the four privileged positions and their participation or not on the respective Under-17s, Under-19s, and Under-20s National teams. In an analysis of the age of optimum performance levels of FlFA’s ‘best players’ of the 2006 World Cup, we can see that during the tournament they were on average 29.9-years-old, and what is more important, they started to take part in the senior team on average when they were 22.65-yearsold. This research leads us to a process that suggests that the peak performance level is reached around the 22-year-old mark and that there is a clear possibility of seven continuous years of high performance levels. To not respect this principle and to be in a hurry to speed up performance levels, leads to, among other things, suffering what has been called the ‘Relative Age Effect’; that is to say, to have more children in a team that are born in the first semester of the year Normally these are children that have an advantage in their growth and maturity. At an early age that is a really important advantage in the “immediate performance”, but that is lost overtime as they start to reach maturity and they can even be overtaken by those children that have matured in the latter stages.
The boldest step since the A-League's Carolina Dynamo affiliated with the Tampa Bay Mutiny. (OK, it's actually pretty cool to have reserve teams with real game action.)