Playing underage footballers is just about marketing and nothing else
Football never stops surprising you. Watching it over the last few years, you could see many different new “trendy” things. False nine, free first pass from a goal kick inside the box, obscure tight VAR offside decisions, five substitutions … you name it. But one thing caught my eye again. It was the (unnecessary) introduction of young, underaged players.
I have to be honest. I was thinking about it during the Euro 2020. But after everything settled, it somehow slipped my mind when I started writing more often.
Why on the Euro 2020 do you ask? First, because of Jude Bellingham, the youngest English player to have ever played in the European Championship. At the age of 17 years and 349 days, he beat the record of Wayne Rooney. Did he deserve his chance? Maybe, maybe not. He did not play a significant role in the Three Lion’s conquest of almost winning the tournament, so it’s somehow irrelevant to the end result to be fair.
But it was just a couple of days later when the Poland midfielder Kacper Kozlowski broke his record. He was aged only 17 years and 246 days. And then it hit me. I thought to myself: ‘Oh my god, you are competing with each other in that area as well. Not just on the pitch, but also off it.’
To be fair, we can all understand why. Everybody who ever worked in football knows that catching people’s attention is not just through a team’s results. That’s far from being enough. You also have to pull together other tricks.
One of them is the fact that people read, listen … and eventually buy … stories. Great ones, unusual ones … mostly the ones that resonate positively with them. So, things that have more chances of being remembered and later shared.
Therefore, putting a 16, or 17 … year old player in play, in a senior match, possibly in a major tournament, serves only marketing purposes. It is a story that will be widely spread. Nothing else.
Is that harsh? Maybe, but let’s explain the facts in more detail. A player aged 16, or 17 … surely has a lot of potential if a manager decides to put him in play. By selecting them, managers give hope to other peers that such achievements or dreams of becoming a part of a senior team are possible. On the other hand, such decisions bring questions among them. Are selected ones really that better than the rest? Are they rightly given the chance or is something else behind it? Keep in mind that differences among footballers are not as wide as later in their careers.
Moreover, by playing a bad game, such young players can collapse and never recover. Pressure on such a stage is enormous, so underperforming young talents may need more time in bouncing back than they normally would. And by »destroying« them, a chance of earning money on a transfer market disappears. So, it is a bigger gamble than you might have foreseen.
That being said, how about the rest of the squad? There are players that are regular first-team players but may have been given less chance to prove themselves. Or they are coming back from the injuries. They are eagerly waiting for a chance, but then an underaged player comes in and gets to play instead of them, just so the club or country can show how they are giving chances to young(er) footballers.
Finally, I have saved my favorite example for the end. Remember Haris Vučkić, former Newcastle United midfielder? As a Slovenian, he was playing for Domžale in younger categories. He was the youngest player to have ever made a debut in the Slovenian top-flight division. At the time he was aged only 15. That was illegal since the entry point was at 16 years. It was the first example, so the club officially stated that it was their mistake and got away with it quite mildly. But Haris was hosted in one of the sports TV shows lately and publicly expressed that it was down to the marketing and the club knew the consequences. He later made a great career, despite all the injuries, but could easily have waited until everything was legal.
All in all, I think great and exceptional talents should be given chance earlier than their peers (if the latter of course get it in the first place). But these chances should be given to them when a player matures a little more or is involved with the first team longer. Definitely, these examples should not serve only to boost the marketing department. Unfortunately, I think the latter prevails in most cases. It shouldn’t.
