NPFL U-15 Tourney: Curbing age cheating, ensuring sustainability

• MTN/NPFL/La Liga Partner To Improve Game Successful football playing nations have a culture that ensures that they produce quality players from unfettered children, who, in their innocence, just want to play the game in the first place. These youths, when taught the basics and structure of the game that early in life, grow to become international stars.

In advanced countries, where football is seen as more than a sport, clubs, governments and schools create avenues to make the best use of children’s talent through a culture that deliberately build these kids in all aspects of the game.

This culture, anchored on development programmes fashioned, in most cases, by football associations for clubs, creates a conveyor belt of talented and educated footballers, who move seamlessly from through the age grades until they become big stars.

When Germany failed to cross the group stage of Euro 2004 hosted by Portugal, the leaders of the country’s football knew it was time to do something drastic to return the then three-time world champions to the top of the global game.

They set out to do so with their youth development programme, which ensured that every club in all tiers of the Bundesliga, adopted a youth development project that created a steady supply of talents from the grassroots.

With this project, Germany became world champions at senior level 10 years later in 2014, semifinalists at EURO 2016, U-21 champions in 2009, U-19 title winners in 2014, and made four final appearances at U-17 EURO level, including one win, in the last eight years.

In a recent interview granted bundesliga.com, immediate past Germany manager, Joachim Low, who led the team to World Cup glory in 2014, said after the failure in Portugal, “we said, ‘we have