Truth be said, the new administration is on the right track. From media interviews with the players you can tell they are more motivated and very willing to sweat it out for the national team. kudos Nick and team
Shida iko huku chini kwa grassroots, Nick needs to read up on how football powerhouses like Germany got to the top, the talent huku chini is phenomenal, enough to have vibrant leagues for all levels.
Mr Black, juzi I was in Vihiga and I can assure you the provincial chairmen are doing really well. We now have active grassroot level leagues and players are doing so with promises of joining nationwide leagues (I don’t know much about this though). But what I noted is that for the first time Harambee stars players are yet to complain about allowances etc. My question is, why did nyamweya used to subject these young poor guys to such yet yeye ni mbirionea
Nyamweya’s businesses got grounded ages ago, running FKF was a ruse to sustain a lifestyle that he couldn’t afford by any other means. Anyone questioning his style of leadership was quickly shown the door including the executive committee members of FKF elected by the delegates.
Truth be told, Nick is doing something differently.
That guy helped Kariobangi Sharks sana. So many youths would have been killed due to crime but now they are playing in the Nationwide league.
There is still no youth development. Until we become serious about youth development, we will remain a joke team.
Where do
you think the likes of olunga have come from? I know my village now has a club dedicated to developing young talent which in turn is sold to nationwide clubs, that’s a start
Olunga is one of the few Kenya players with refined skills. Thats why he is able to succeed in Europe. Most Kenya players today fail European trials because they learned football mitaani. Look at all the talented Kenya players who flopped in Europe.
Successful football countries have dozens of youth schemes all over the country to tap talent at an early age. If Kenya did this, we would have multiple players succeeding in Europe instead of just two: Olunga and Wanyama. A country cannot depend on just two refined players. Kenya needs to have dozens of players in Europe
Also the quality of play in the Kenya league is low and the pace is too slow because the players have poor technical skills. The Kenyans who went to play in Zambia and South Africa have admitted that the standard of play in those countries is much higher than KPL. No wonder KPL teams do poorly when they go abroad.
I know of very many talented Kenyan players who would have scaled greater heights but INDISCIPLINE has been their main undoing. Same applies to South African, Senegalese, Ghanian and mostly west African players who go to Europe. Instead of treating soccer as a proper career they indulge in side shows that eventually derail their soccer. I don’t want to imagine how good the likes of, Adebayo, Diouf etc would have been with a little bit of discipline, Tusiende mbali, look around and help me count on one hand players in the Kenyan league who are conductingthemselves professionally outside the pitch. Wanawake na pombe tu, don’t pay attention to diet, don’t train well and generally poor physical management. I always contrast them to Kenyan rugby players who seem to do better. Why the difference?could it be that Kenyan soccer players are not managed well or are they less educated hence poor decision making and judgement. No easy answers
Yes Kenya players are indisciplined and some do not fulfill their potential. But this is true all over the world. In America there are numerous basketball players who fluffed their chances by making poor decisions.
But that is not the root cause of Kenya’s mediocre results. The problem in Kenya is that most players are not been exposed to proper coaching starting at a young age. So they spend their formative years playing with ball ya jwala on bad fields. In the process they learn bad football habits which stick with them. The lack of structured youth development is the biggest problem in Kenya.
If you put young players in youth development schemes then the problems of indiscipline that you mentioned will go away because they will have mentors and coaches to guide them.
If I was in charge of FKF, I would identify 10 to 15 counties that produce talent. Then I would work with Sportpesa to establish youth schemes in the 10 counties with U13, U16 and U19 teams. And Nairobi is huge so I would have several youth schemes in places like Kibera, Mathare, Eastlands and so forth.
Though Kenya has beaten DR Congo and drawn with Zambia, I was completely unimpressed. The calibre of Kenya players was well below their Congolese counterparts.
Just last month, almost half of the AFC Leopards players were diagnosed with an Sti… wait for it, acquired from the same woman.
thanks mathaais,trying to explain to elba but haelewi
I don’t think Maathais is agreeing with you.
Nobody denies that Kenya players are undisciplined. But this is not the root cause of Kenya’s mediocrity.
Remember the famous USA basketball player Magic Johnson. He said that by the time he was 28, he had slept with over 3000 women. This kind of womanizing is common among famous players.
Even European players are womanizers, beer drinkers et al. Some of the world’s greatest footballers were heavy drinkers
The 11 Biggest Drinkers in Football | Lords of the Drinks
Some are heavy smokers including Lionel Messi
http://www.thesportster.com/soccer/top-10-soccer-stars-who-smoke/
Other heavy drinkers include Peter Crouch, David Luiz, Craig Bellamy, Podolski
And here is a list of the world’s most undisciplined world class players.
http://www.thesportster.com/soccer/top-20-soccer-players-with-attitude-problems/
So yes I agree that lack of discipline is a problem in Kenya. But it is a problem elsewhere and is not the main reason Kenya is useless. The main reason is Kenya players lack technical skills which come with structured youth development.
shocking:eek::eek:
Boss hauna point. Was wanyama, oliech, olunga, mariga etc exposed to those systems you’re talking about? People like you want to make football seem like rocket science and it’s not. It’s simple, whether unajua ball or not. England have the best systems <---- what you’re talking about, how are they doing? I’ll wait
Haki hujui chochote. And you cannot even read.
Firstly you are wrong when you say England have the best youth systems. It is Germany. In fact England has been advised to follow Germany’s example. Ignorant people like you should read this article
With regard to those players you mentioned. If you bothered to read my posts above I said a few Kenya players are lucky to have been involved in some semblance of youth development. For example Wanyama trained under a Belgian youth coach. It was the same youth coach who arranged for Wanyama to go and train with Beershot of the Belgian league back in 2008 when Wanyama was still in his teens. Olunga too was lucky to be trained by Ghost since he was in his mid teens. Most Kenya players only get qualified coaches when they reach their twenties.
You cannot win with a team that has only two quality players: Olunga and Wanyama. You need an entire squad of quality players.
Because we have so many ignorant people wale hawajui chochote. I feel compelled to post an article that explains how a country becomes a football power. This information ought to be obvious but I see that we have many football illiterates here.
[SIZE=6]How Germany went from bust to boom on the talent production line [/SIZE]
A decade or so after the DFB travelled the world in search of best practice,
German football is booming, reaping the rewards of the strategy drawn up after their dismal performances at Euro 2000, when Germany finished bottom of their group. Forced into an overhaul of youth football, the DFB, the Bundesliga and the clubs decided that the development of more technically proficient homegrown players would be in everyone’s best interests. This led to the creation of academies right across the top two divisions.
The fruits are there for all to see. Joachim Löw, Germany’s coach, is blessed with a generation of gifted young players – Julian Draxler (19), Andre Schürrle (22), Sven Bender (24), Thomas Müller (23), Holger Badstuber (24), Mats Hummels (24), Mesut Ozil (24), Ilkay Gundogan (22), Mario Götze (20), Marco Reus (23), Toni Kroos (23) … the list goes on – and Dutt says there are more coming through in the under-21 side who will travel to Israel for the European Championship next month.
As for Saturday’s Champions League final at Wembley, the DFB proudly points out that 26 of the players Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund named in their Uefa squads this season are homegrown and eligible to play for Germany. More than half of those players came through the DFB’s talent development programme, which was introduced in 2003 with the aim of identifying promising youngsters and providing them with technical skills and tactical knowledge at an early age. Covering 366 areas of Germany, this impressive initiative caters for children aged 8 to 14 and is served by 1,000 part-time DFB coaches, all of whom must hold the Uefa B licence and are expected to scout as well as train the players. “We have 80 million people in Germany and I think before 2000 nobody noticed a lot of talent,” Dutt says. “Now we notice everyone.”
Some youngsters attending the development programme are already affiliated with professional clubs but others may be only turning out for their local junior side, which means the weekly DFB sessions are also a chance for Bundesliga teams to spot players.
It is the opposite of what happens in England, where the FA relies on clubs to develop youngsters. Dutt smiles when it is suggested to him that the DFB are doing the clubs’ recruitment for them. “But if we help the clubs, we help us, because the players of our national teams – the youth teams and Joachim Löw’s team – come from the clubs,” he says.
The incredible depth of Germany’s coaching resources, as well as the DFB’s close relationship with Bundesliga clubs, helps to make the programme. According to Uefa, Germany has 28,400 (England 1,759) coaches with the B licence, 5,500 (895) with the A licence and 1,070 (115) with the Pro licence, the highest qualification. It is little wonder that Ashworth said last month that there will be no quick fix for English football. The country that invented the game has forgotten that we need people to teach it.
For Germany, post-Euro 2000 was about changing philosophies as well as employing more full-time coaches and upgrading facilities. The DFB wanted to move away from playing in straight lines and relying on “the German mentality” to win matches. Instead coaches focused on developing fluid formations that required the sort of nimble, dexterous players who would previously have been overlooked because of their lack of physical strength.
“In the past there were a lot of big players. But look at our players now,” Dutt says. “You realise that an important thing for a football player is technique and then the height of the player, ordinarily, will be small. [Diego] Maradona, [Andrés] Iniesta, Xavi – all little players. In the defence we think we need big players. Mats Hummels is big but he is very good with the ball. In 1982 Mats Hummels wouldn’t have played in defence, he would have played at No10. In the 1970s, [Franz] Beckenbauer was playing football and [Hans-Georg] Schwarzenbeck was running after the English players – if he got the ball he gave it to Beckenbauer and the job was done. But now Schwarzenbeck is Hummels, and Hummels plays like Beckenbauer and Schwarzenbeck.”
If one club has led the way when it comes to producing young players in Germany it is Freiburg, who have won the German equivalent of the FA Youth Cup four times in the past seven years. Their 25-man first-team squad consists of 10 homegrown players, six of whom started in the 2-1 defeat against Schalke last Saturday, when Freiburg needed to win to pull off the unimaginable and qualify for the Champions League. Beckenbauer was among those who travelled to Freiburg’s Mage Solar Stadion hoping to see history made.
Freiburg’s coach Christian Streich. Photograph: Stefan Pangritz for the Guardian
Under the tutelage of their erudite and colourful manager Christian Streich, a qualified teacher who worked in the club’s youth setup for 16 years, Freiburg were one of the stories of the Bundesliga season. With an annual wage budget of only €18m (£15.4m), which covers the coaching staff as well as the first-team squad, Freiburg’s fifth-place finish was a remarkable achievement, even if Streich was unable to conceal his disappointment that they will be playing in the Europa League, rather than the Champions League, next season and that four of his best players have been snapped up.
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Last week the Guardian went behind the scenes at Freiburg, whose location, on the fringes of the Black Forest, is every bit as impressive as the work that goes on at the football school. The facility, which has four pitches including a small stadium, cost €10m in 2001, before the academy reforms were introduced and at a time when Freiburg were relegated from the Bundesliga, which gives an idea of how committed they are to producing players.
Freiburg has neither the financial wherewithal nor the desire to compete for overseas talent, so there is no chance of Streich, or any of his staff, being spotted with an agent in São Paulo brokering a deal for a teenage Brazilian. Of the 66 players in the under-16 to under-19 age groups in their academy, all but two are eligible to play for Germany. In keeping with the ethos of the club, where there is a wonderful sense of community, every senior academy player earns the same.
Across a sizeable area where they face little competition from other Bundesliga clubs, Freiburg work closely with five amateur feeder teams who receive a part-time coach to train children aged 8 to 11 twice a week. The most promising players are invited to attend the academy during school holidays and for occasional tournaments at weekends. “We believe it is not good for a nine-year-old to play [regularly] for a professional football club because it changes the reasons why he plays football,” says Sebastian Neuf, a member of the football school’s management.
Once a player reaches under-12 level things change. Those who live within 40km of Freiburg train at the football school up to four times a week and play in a league, where teams can win a title and be relegated, a major difference to the way academies are run in England. The earliest an academy player would take part in competitive football with a professional club in England – where the theory is that it “should be about performances, not results” – is at under-18 level.
Dutt offers an interesting response when asked about the rationale behind the league system. "It’s important for the mentality to have some games in the year you have to win, but it is not the main thing. The main thing is to do good training.
“For the Germans this system is very important. It’s like golf. If I play golf in England, no club wants to know my handicap. If I go to play in Germany you have to show your handicap. If you play with a guy you don’t know, the first question is: ‘How do you do?’ The second question is: ‘What is your handicap?’ Germans want to reach something, they want to go up.”
There is no shortage of silverware on show in Freiburg’s academy, yet the club are not obsessed with winning leagues and cups and acknowledge there is life outside football. Through a nationwide elite schools programme supported by the DFB, the 16 players who board on the top floor of Freiburg’s
While Freiburg have been investing in youth for years, not least because the club’s existence depends on it, Streich acknowledges that huge changes have taken place across all Bundesliga clubs, in particular when it comes to attitudes towards coaching, where a “jobs for the boys” mentality has largely disappeared. He believes England needs to rethink its own approach.
"They have to look to build coaches in England. They have a lot of money and they have bought players. But for me the most important thing is to educate the coaches in the youth academies.
“Before in Germany, if you played in the Bundesliga for a few years, clubs said: ‘We’ll take them to manage the under-17s.’ But they had no education to be a coach. Sometimes the same thing happens in England – I saw this. On the pitch these players played very well but that doesn’t mean they’re a coach, and now this changes in Germany. And then under-15, under-17 and under-19 coaches, they gave them a salary so they could do this work full time. Coaches came from university, who had studied sport, they mixed it up and then it got better.”
Streich smiles when asked what he thinks of some of the top English clubs, which spend millions on youth programmes despite there being no obvious pathways to the first team. “You can’t compare someone like Manchester City with SC Freiburg, it’s saturn and the moon,” he says. “We played against Manchester City’s youth team here, in the Black Forest, some years ago and also a few years later. They had one player from Sweden, one player from Finland, one player from Brazil, one player from here, one player from there. ‘What do you do next year?’ ‘Yeah, we buy eight or nine players.’ ‘What about scouting?’ ‘We have 20 people scouting at youth [level].’ We only have four for the professionals.”
Frank Arnesen, who is full of admiration for Streich’s work at Freiburg, has been on both sides of the fence and is well qualified to compare the merits of youth football in Germany and England. The Dane, who has just left his position as sporting director at Hamburg after working for Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur in the same capacity, believes England has the best facilities for young players but feels the spending power of Premier League clubs denies academy graduates the chance that exists in the Bundesliga.
“The money is a big part of the problem in England because clubs go out and buy finished players instead of waiting,” Arnesen says. “Young players need to make mistakes to get better, but managers think they can’t afford [for] that to happen. You see the squads, even in the smaller clubs, they get players from all over instead of bringing young players through.”
Arnesen believes that the introduction of the “50% plus one” rule in 2001, which requires Bundesliga clubs to be owned by their members, has helped to promote homegrown talent. In the absence of foreign benefactors it makes financial sense, and also appeals to the supporters in control, to give young German players an opportunity.
Youngsters play table football at Freiburg’s academy. Photograph: Stefan Pangritz
The landscape could not be more different in the Premier League, where the majority of clubs are in foreign hands and English players in the minority. It is hard, almost impossible, to imagine Germany accepting that situation, not least because the success of the national team is at the forefront of everyone’s mind.
“I think one thing is very important, coaches who are coaching for the national team of Germany, from upstairs to down, they are very respected and it’s a good job to have. In England I am not so sure about that,” Arnesen says. “I think there is a feeling that to work for a club is much higher than the FA but that’s not the case in Germany.”
It was one of the reasons why so many people were surprised when Ashworth, who was attracting interest from leading clubs because of the exceptional job he did as sporting director at West Bromwich Albion, opted to take up a high-profile but extremely challenging position with the FA at its new national football centre at St George’s Park, where it remains to be seen whether he will get the support he needs from the Premier League and its clubs. Arnesen, who recently met Ashworth at Hamburg, believes relationships need to change in England.
“The FA [must] create a situation where it is an honour to be there and you need help from clubs,” he says. “Hamburg have one of the biggest defensive talents in Germany, Jonathan Tah [the national Under-17 captain]. Sometimes he is training from Wednesday to Friday [with the DFB] and he cannot play Saturday in his own game for Hamburg. We did not think that was correct so we sat down and talked, and that is what the Germans do.”
Dutt agrees. “I spoke three hours with Dan about this,” he says. “It will be better for England if the clubs and the association talked together. If you see the English clubs, there are a lot of foreign players and not many from England. Chelsea win the Champions League and then the Europa League, so they have success. But the English national team, I don’t think they are successful at this time.”
The Elite Player Performance Plan, which the Premier League introduced a little more than two years ago, feels like the last throw of the dice for youth development in English football. Millions of pounds are being pumped into academies, with clubs free to cast their net far and wide for players who will have more contact time with coaches than ever before, albeit with no promise of greater opportunities to break through. Time will tell whether it works.
Elba my brother. I stand by my point that indiscipline has wrecked most of kenya’s promising players. Yes academies do help a lot, but England is a good example of why academies are useless without good talent. Recently I was drinking somewhere on thika rd with ghost mullei, zedekia otieno and some other coaches involved in Kenyan soccer and they all blame alcohol na wanawake for wrecking Kenyan players lives. Yes, Wilshere or Ashley Cole might drink BUT they turn up for training next day, and on time. In kenya we have heard cases where players were even too drunk to train for or play an international match. You remember Muiruri, arguably kenya’s best dribbler in the mid 2000s? him and so many other including Oliech were notorious for that. You cant succeed in soccer without self discipline, whether academies or not self discipline is key. If you are keen enough you will notice Divock Origi, Wanyamas and other stable Kenyan foreign based players have one thing in common; very firm parents who hold them by their hands all through their careers…and most of their parents also happened to have been players. Musa Otieno has been hailed by the South African media as a model soccer player cos of his discipline and work ethic. We have had so many Kenyan players coming out of “soccer academies” like Kisii high, Thur gem, Langata, Dago or kakamega high etc go to Europe, middle East or even South Africa only to be chased away cos of indiscipline and poor work ethic even after passing their trials very well. Reason they fail is One, they don’t take training regimes seriously, two, they overindulge in alcohol, clubbing and women.
@mikel
I read your paragraph. But I am not sure what your point is.
- Are you saying Kenya does not need structured youth development?
- Are you saying indiscipline is the main reason that Kenya is mediocre at football?
Please answer and explain what your point is.
We all agree that indiscipline is a problem in Kenya football. I however disagree if you claim it is the main reason we are mediocre.