Scouting in Europe is insane as soon as a player is seen and heard about scouts come from all over.

Interesting stuff, Krones.

How about starting a thread reporting your football experiences in Spain?

Arthur did one a year or two ago about a French football trip. I think a number of us found it pretty interesting.




Edited by Decentric: 21/2/2014 11:14:26 AM

Krones I run tours to Spain regularly usually to Barcelona and Madrid and although Im not a coach I am really impressed with the game in Spain especially at grassroots level. The whole feel of the game is different and its not hard to see why they are the World Champions I absolutely love being there and for the boys we take over to experience this too its a great learning curve for them.
Are you based in Spain?

Please keep us updated.

yes in Valencia.

In Australia there is a pathway and we are told players will only be looked if they are in that pathway (something i am personally against) here no matter where you are or what division you are in you will be seen.
1 thing every club in Australia should implement tomorrow is netting behind the goal and sit back and watch you strike rate and goal rate rise.
astro turf pitches are great, cop a real battering here and still look great.
at 10:00pm every night men take over the pitches and play till past 11:00pm in some sort of senior comp, how do they get up for work.
With so much unemployment here why are we not tapping into the resources of under valued under paid coaches and players to raise our own comps?

Totally agree that the pathway system in Australia is to narrow and the current system in a way puts all of its eggs in one basket.

Please elaborate about the netting behind the goal, I think I know what your talking about, but some clarification would be great.

Behind every goal their is 5 m high netting to prevent the ball from travelling too far if the goal is missed . all the fields are a single full size but small astro turf field. The fields are surrounded by a fence and there are pivoting goals on the side for small sided games .There is a kiosk and club house separate. All the clubs i have seen so far are of the same construction. I'll take a photo and post it.

I was at villarreals training centre not much we can learn there it is too big and far too advanced for us.

Comparing us to Spain and in Europe in general are oceans apart, In Spain they are 3 or 4 divisions of football clubs to where talented players can play, okay bigger population base plus a strong football methodology which means why they are a World Powerhouse.

Compare to us where we only have 9 professional clubs, plus the NPL which is a great step forward for the long term, its silly to compare to Europe where there football systems are well established a long long time ago.

Its good to compare to what they doing, but we are still developing our football system here, so we should focusing on that instead.

Just my opinion.

So what's the correlation between the ball netting and higher shooting rates. Is installing the nets something the clubs have consciously done.

The netting encourages shooting and makes players shoot more often and the game is restarted quickly.I think it is a mater of having too rather than consciously done.

Ok thanks