Why France has so many good young players

I've been posting and tweeting a lot about Ligue 2 football recently. It is probably the best value market for smart clubs around.

The reason for this can be neatly summarised in comparing the two major junior cup competitions in England and France.

The FA Youth Cup and the Coupe Gambardella.

The Coupe Gambardella is like the FA Youth Cup for U19 players. It is played on the same say as the Coupe de France and attracts large audiences.

To demonstrate why I think Ligue 2 is the most exciting league for talent let's look at the finalists for the last 10 competitions in both England and France

England:
Chelsea x 8
Manchester City x 3
Arsenal x 2
Manchester United x 1
Fulham x 1
Norwich x 1
Aston Villa x 1
Sheffield United x 1
Blackburn x 1
Liverpool x 1

10 different finalists in 10 years

France
Montpellier x2
Nantes
Metz
Sochaux x 2
Monaco x2
St Etienne x2
Nice
Bordeaux
Sedan
Auxerre
Reims
Lyon
RC Lens
Marseille
Troyes
Tours

16 different finalists in 10 years

So the French tournament has more variety of finalists. But also a wider variety of economic wealth. The FA Youth cup has 15/20 finalists from the richest 5 clubs in the Premier League. The richest 5 French clubs are PSG, Lyon, Monaco, Marseille...then a gap then currently Lille. Only 4/20 finalists are from these clubs. Last years final was between two Ligue 2 clubs.

There are cultural, sporting and geographic reasons for this. In France, players are restricted to training within 50km of their home and there isn't a culture of recruitment of players much younger than that. The amateur club scene is valued with youth development prized, and the country is really big which means big clubs can't just scoop up everyone.

This isn't to say the development process is better than England. The English system is rewarded by excellent international youth teams. It looks to me like England operates in a very capitalistic way with the best youth products attracted to the best coaches and the best facilities. This leads to around 5-10 clubs being able to attract whoever they like from wherever they like. The French system is more socialist with the talents more evenly distributed. You don't get the same Chelsea style dream teams winning UEFA youth leagues and youth cups back to back to back to back but you do get Ligue 2 teams having top class prospects in their ranks instead.

Leaving aside the megastars like Mbappe who will come through whatever the system we've also seen people like Lenny Pintor (now at Lyon) shine in this tournament. Bryan Mbuemo who is now playing well for Troyes scored twice in the final last year. Marcus Thuram won with Sochaux in 2015
Indeed of the Lyon 2015 side that lost in the that final, all the players are still playing at a reasonably high level including Cornet.

France isn't necessarily producing better young players than England, but you have far more chance of getting them for a reasonable fee than you do with their English equivalents. Which makes it the best place to scout at the moment.






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Wyscout review and poking around the French third tier

Image
I signed up for Wyscout on Friday and was given full access for 48 hours. Inbetween the busy bits of family life over a weekend in the run up to Christmas I thought I'd do a quick review of it and reveal some of the players I liked the look of. For those who have never used Wyscout it actually looks a lot like Football Manager (or at least Football Manager about 10 years ago) The home page allows you to select a league to scout. The package I was trialing allowed me full access to 5 leagues (I chose the big 5) and partial access to all the others. To be honest I really couldn't see that much difference between full/partial access for player scouting purposes. I decided to use the trial time to see if I could use their stats and video clips to find some promising players in obscure leagues. So I looked in the French 3rd division, my thoughts being that France is producing so much talent that their third level must have some potential top quality players in it - with a t...
Read more

Scouting report Dan Ndoye - Lausanne Sport

Image
I've decided to try out a new approach to scouting. Instead of looking at how well the player is playing which almost always shows up positively in the data I am going to look at the attributes the player has. I'm going to look at a combination of data and video and record the results here.  The categories I've chosen for assessing the player aren't ones I've given a huge amount of thought to, it is an initial list of the things I think are important to predict the long term career progression of young players. Player - Dan Ndoye Club - Lausanne Sport Age - 18 Position - plays across the front 3, most often as an inverted winger. Technical Foot Good ball striking ability with either foot. Comfortable using either to shoot with and generates good power. Probably gets a slightly better shape on crosses from the left but has played wide on either side of the attack and tends to cut in and shoot more than cross. Touch Close control with either foot ...
Read more

Data Analytics conference - Daniel Krueger report

Image
Seattle Sounders Inaugural Analytics Conference (6/22 – 6/23 2019) Summary by: @DanielKrueger96 Organizers: @analysefooty @SSFCSpSci #SSFCAnalytics Day 1 Opening Remarks Garth Lagerway, President of Soccer – Seattle Sounders FC Building an analytics department from scratch Starting with current roster: sports science emphasis (RPE, sleep, athlete surveys, performance testing Player recruitment Inherently less data on players outside of your own club because other clubs don’t release sports sci data Building automation Finding objectivity to allow for data driven decisions Introduced Ravi Ramineni – Director of Analytics, Seattle Sounders FC General takeaways: There seems to be a common theme with sports front offices. Team presidents and GMs rarely have a data background. The role of an in-house analyst is fairly new, so this makes sense. Though front office management may not have an understanding of the technical side of the analyst’s day to do task, it is important...
Read more