Masters of Modern Soccer by Grant Wahl

Author:Grant Wahl
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2018-05-01T04:00:00+00:00

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The best advice that Kompany ever received was also the worst advice. When he was a youth player in Belgium, he says, one of his coaches told him, “You’re a big defender. Stick to what you’re good at.” In essence, that coach—Kompany says he was one of the exceptions at his club, Anderlecht—didn’t expect him to become technically gifted on the ball. “And that just did it for me,” says Kompany, snapping his fingers. “[I wanted] people to be surprised to see my skills, that I could do things that a striker does. I was obsessed by it, and I kept working until they said, ‘Vince is really good when he plays from the back!’ They used the words elegant and flair. I was never as good as some of the most gifted players, but I was better than anyone in my position for a long time.”

The youth system at Anderlecht was modeled on the famed Ajax academy in the Netherlands. The emphasis was on producing ball-playing defenders, and Kompany’s obsession with passing and technical skills paid off. The ball stayed on the ground. Kompany’s youth teams almost never played in the air. “We weren’t allowed to kick the ball all the way upfield, so you kind of evolved into the player you needed to be. You took a lot of risk, but that’s what they asked for,” he says. “I was always a defender and defensive midfielder. The way we grew up at Anderlecht, it was interchangeable in the sense that the defender was asked to break the lines with the ball. And in that case, the defensive midfielder would become the defender. Everything was based around being a ball-playing defender.” When you watch video with Kompany and he wins a ball in the defensive half before launching into a 60-yard run downfield with it, the temptation is to compare him to Franz Beckenbauer, the legendary German defender. But Kompany often smiles and calls it “going Anderlecht.”

Kompany grew up modeling his game on other graceful defenders and defensive midfielders with good ball skills. “I used to be a big fan of Marcel Desailly,” Kompany says. “He played as a defensive midfielder at Milan and Marseille, and then he moved back to central defender. At Chelsea and his national team he was always between two positions, so there are a lot of similarities. I was also a great admirer of Patrick Vieira. But I never really identified myself to another player because I was cheeky in my head, thinking I needed to be better. But I liked the all-around presence that they had on the pitch.”

In some ways, Anderlecht’s insistence on its youth teams keeping the ball on the ground is similar—in effect, if not in intention—to the rules adopted by U.S. Soccer in 2015 that eliminate heading the ball by children age 10 and younger and limit the amount of heading in practice from the ages of 11 to 13. Although U.S. Soccer cited a desire to prevent head injuries in young players, a number of former U.

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