Robbie Slater’s assessment of the Olyroos’ failure at the 2024 U-23 Asian Cup as being due to a lack of playing talent is wrong. It’s due to Australian football’s poor coaching.
Three games. Two draws. One loss. Zero goals scored. One goal conceded. That’s the story of Australia’s U-23 Asian Cup campaign. For Tony Vidmar and his playing group, it’s nothing short of an abject failure.
In a group with Qatar, Indonesia and Jordan, Australia should have progressed through to the knockout stages. At the very least, Australia should’ve scored a single goal. Just a single goal. But they didn’t.
In the match’s aftermath, former Socceroo and Fox Sports football pundit Robbie Slater expressed his belief that the Olyroos tournament failure was down to a lack of footballing talent as opposed to a failure of coaching.
As far as statements go, it airs on the side of the absurd. Throughout sporting history, coaching has acted as a great leveller. Great coaches elevate mediocre teams. It would have been easy for Leicester City to dismiss their 2015-16 Premier League campaign before a ball had even been kicked.
Why should they dream of a Premier League title? They don’t have the talent. Until they did. And a large reason why Leicester City achieved what they achieved was because of their coach, Claudio Ranieri’s, brilliance.
The same can be said for Japan at the 2022 World Cup. On paper, both Spain and Germany’s squads were far superior then the Japanese. And yet, they progressed to the knockout stages ahead of the Germans. Again, Japan were well-coached.
The Olyroos, as evidenced by the recent Asian Cup, are not. Slater raised some good points, many of which the Australian footballing population would agree with. Yes, certain Asian nations, like Japan and South Korea, are advancing further than Australia. Yes, A-League clubs should focus on developing their talent, as the Central Coast Mariners and Adelaide United do. And yes, there needs to be a serious review of our national team’s set-up and structure.
But no, the Olyroos’ failure at the 2024 U-23 Asian Cup was not because our players weren’t as talented as the Indonesians and the Jordanians. It’s because they weren’t coached well enough to be given a chance.
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Australian football needs a review of its youth national teams
At Euro 2000, reigning champions Germany, with a squad featuring Oliver Kahn, Lothar Matthaus and Michael Ballack, went winless, scored just once and finished bottom of their group. What followed was a widespread revolution of Germany’s national youth team setups, placing the player development impetus not on individual clubs within Germany, but with the FA itself.
Implemented in 2003, a year after Germany lost the World Cup final to Brazil, the German FA’s talent development programme was responsible for nurturing some of the nation’s finest footballing talent, many of whom would go on to lift the nation’s fourth World Cup trophy in 2014.
Robin Dutt, former sporting director at the German FA, explained the rationale behind the program to The Guardian in 2013.
“If we help the clubs, we help us, because the players of our national teams – the youth teams and [former Germany head coach] Joachim Löw’s team – come from the clubs,” Dutt said. A core component of the program was coaches across all levels of the national team educating their sides in the same tactical set-up.
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For decades, German football was synonymous with industry and hard work. Under the German FA’s post-Euro 2000 overhaul, players were coached with a single goal in mind: developing fluidity and technical proficiency increasingly prominent in modern football and providing a platform for nimble, skilful footballers to thrive in.
In a similar vein, after decades of underperformance, a review of England’s national youth development systems resulted in current England manager Gareth Southgate’s appointment as England’s head of elite development in 2009.
Since then, Southgate has been a central figure in England implementing a consistent, possession-based playstyle that not only benefits player development, but also results in greater coaching. This period has also seen England make a World Cup semi-final and finish runners-up at Euro 2020. Not since 1966 has England’s national side been in the hunt for international trophies as they are now.
Australian football has the talent. In the eyes of many, the rising group of young footballers the nation has produced is among the best in a generation. Nestory Irankunda will soon be a Bayern Munich man. Jordan Bos is consistently one of the Socceroos’ best. Garang Kuol has potential, even if European life has been far from fortunate thus far.
Outside these three top-line talents, Ryan Teague and Nicolas Milanovic were having fine A-League seasons prior to their involvement at the Asian Cup. So too were Lachlan Brook, Jacob Farrell and Jake Girdwood-Reich. The brilliant Marco Tilio was injured for the U-23 Asian Cup, while Thomas Waddingham is on Tottenham’s radar.
Also missing from Tony Vidmar’s selection pool for the tournament due to their clubs not releasing them were Patrick Yazbek, a full-fledged Australian international, Alessandro Circati, Calem Nieuwenhof and Nectarios Triantis, among others. Joe Gauci would likely not have been released by Aston Villa if he was called upon, while Alex Robertson has been injured for the back half of this season but would fall into this category too.
To suggest the talent isn’t there is laughable. There is a lot wrong with Australian football, but talent is not one of them. A glaring issue is the archaic systems implemented throughout our national teams. Australia lacks a modern, possession-first style of football that takes good coaches to implement.
For all his flaws, Graham Arnold is correct. Australia needs a top-down review of how it develops its footballers at a national youth team level but dropping out of the U-23 Asian Cup at the group stage and blaming the players is a cop-out to cover for poor coaching. Even a second-string Australian side, missing the aforementioned unavailable players, should progress from that group.
For all that’s wrong in Australia, our current crop of youth isn’t one of them. What is wrong is the direction they’re being sent down. If we can learn anything from Germany and England, it’s that youth development is not just simply about identifying talent and getting them into the system. It’s about making sure that the system is right. And the right system, it seems, stems from proper coach development targeted at implementing a single, modernised and possession-based footballing philosophy over one rewarding physicality over technicality.
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The Olyroos’ failure at the 2024 U-23 Asian Cup should be a canary in the coalmine. Though not one signalling Australia’s footballing talent is on the decline, but rather one signalling its coaching system needs an overhaul.
