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Luck? Poor Coaching? No, It’s Simple: England Just Don’t Have Great Players
Published: September 13, 2013
First everyone looked to Spain for the answer, the secret recipe. Now everyone appears to be looking toward Belgium.
A quick look at Belgium’s fantastic players makes it easy to understand why; Thibaut Courtois, Jan Vertonghen, Moussa Dembele, Christian Benteke, Marouane Fellaini and Eden Hazard have all emerged in recent seasons and have shown themselves to be extremely talented.
Observers have attempted to explain Belgium's rise in a number of different ways. Some have suggested that the lack of money in the Belgian leagues has meant that they have to develop youth players and quickly promote them into the first team. But that explanation does not make much sense—most of the players mentioned actually developed somewhere else, for example Vertonghen with Ajax or Hazard and Lille.
Another explanation is that the youth development in Belgium is just a bit more modernised and cutting edge than elsewhere. There has been talk about how the use of "brain training" and other innovative techniques have yielded positive results, focusing less on the physical and more on the mental side of the game.
Such a theory is fine, but it may just be we are trying to look for an underlying reason behind something that is just a naturally-occurring phenomenon.
Statistically, it is not impossible that a nation, even one of only 11 million people, will occasionally produce a bunch of great players of quality at the same time. We have seen such examples before from a variety of different countries—it has even happened to Belgium before, for those who can remember how good they were in the late 1980s with a similar collection of talented players.
As for Spain, you immediately look at it as being an additional b...
Article Source: Bleacher Report - International Football
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