"Many times, we kill the players". AS Monaco coach Leonardo Jardim, who is interviewed by France Football magazine about his striker Pietro Pellegri, has come up in general with the very young footballers thrown into professional football, with little regard for the risks incurs them in the long run.
The record of Pietro Pellegri could include only a record, that of the youngest player launched in Serie A, the Italian championship, at the age of fifteen years and nine months. Transferred to Monaco two years ago, he played less than ten games, victim of repeated injuries.
By implicitly pointing to the responsibility of his training club, Genoa, the Monegasque coach raised the alarm on a blind spot of the celebration of "prodigies" (of precocity). The excitement they arouse rarely disturbs such concerns, as if the future promised to them could only be radiant.
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Skip classes
We can certainly oppose to this example the list of players having chained the matches before their majority without experiencing serious physical problems, from Pelé to Messi. But that of the missing is much longer. In France, Laurent Roussey and Laurent Paganelli, hopes of the 1980s broken by injuries, still serve as a textbook case.
The cemetery of the young prodigies is much more populated than the pantheon in which one saw them already sit. The inability to reach a sporting level or to support the requirements of the high level, the bad choices of career are the main factors of these failures. But some trajectories have been interrupted or compromised by physical problems.
Great footballers have made the cost of skipping classes. Ronaldo's brutal muscle gain after his arrival at PSV Eindhoven at the age of seventeen is most likely the cause of his serious knee problems.
Today, while football has reached a record level of athletic intensity, the danger is obvious. " Physiologically, it's an aberration to have young people play so early (…) while their organism is still developing »summarizes the doctor Fabrice Bryand, quoted by L'Équipe.
Hand down on hopes
"We think that a boy of fifteen or sixteen is already trained. This is not true. Maturity comes after eighteen, nineteen years in the bones, tendons, insisted Jardim. One can indeed worry that some early players are victims of chronic injuries, such as Benjamin Mendy, Ousmane Dembele or Kingsley Coman.
Leonardo Jardim is in an ambiguous position to get on this workhorse. He himself launched Kylian Mbappé at sixteen and eleven months, and his club has specialized in post-training – that is to say the express valorization of promising players, which must be exposed quickly.
The player market is pushing to convert promises into cash. The time is not when a training club could gradually integrate its beads and enjoy for a few seasons. We take the risk of exhausting young players prematurely to sell them better.
" The (clubs them) richer are handing over the most promising players "noted in 2016 the International Center for Sport Economics. According to the latter, the number of minors who left their country for teams from the five major European leagues more than tripled between 1995 and 2015.
Precautionary principle
Eighteen-year-old William Saliba has been bought by Arsenal for 30 million euros after sixteen Ligue 1 matches – but he has left an extra season for AS Saint-Etienne, of which he is a base player. Eduardo Camavinga, just seventeen years old, continues his tenure with Rennes.
These hopes are projected in a universe where the mental and physical load is even stronger than at the training center. To the extent that they also play their physical future, what precautions are taken to preserve it? When everything encourages – including the players themselves and their entourage – to treat them as seniors, the question is asked in a vacuum.
It is, of course, difficult to assess the consequences of premature professionalisation, to measure the particular wear that results from it in the midst of many other factors – physiological predispositions, injury to sequelae, and so on.
But precisely, in an environment where the means are not lacking, where we always mobilize more performance measurement tools, we regret that no major study allows to know more. If necessary, include in the regulations limitations of playing time depending on age. "Nuggets", it protects.
