Stars Cannot Be Made, They Burst into Flame
As we know, before World War II Soviet athletes in general and soccer players in particular did not participate in the international sport movement, ignoring world championships and Olympic Games. And when Comrade Stalin decided at last it was time Soviet athletes could come out on the international arena, the CPSU Central Committee passed a resolution in 1947 whereby the Party assigned them the task of winning world competitions and setting world records in the shortest possible time in all the “basic,” as the resolution put it, sports. Indeed, from then on, they never stinted on sports funding, and the living standards of a Soviet amateur sportsman were much higher than those of other builders of communism.
We should say there were certain results: for instance, Soviet soccer players became Olympic champions in 1956 and European champions in 1960, although both tournaments did not see all the best players of that time. Then the successes came to an end, and the acquisition of the Cup of Cups in 1975 by Kyiv Dynamo was treated as almost a world triumph. In the remaining time, our coaches conscientiously fulfilled programs, improved the training process, and worked on technique and tactics. However, the country with by far the most mass-oriented soccer in the world never managed to win anything. It became clear gradually that methods as such, coaching skill, and training conditions do not automatically bring forth stars. This is why the opinion of a respected colleague of mine (Den of January 12, 2001, not translated in this digest) about the causes of our inadequate number of soccer stars seems to me quite surprising. In reality, everything is simpler and simultaneously more complex.
A STAR IS BORN
Fan legends have it that there were two superstars in Soviet pre- television soccer: Muscovites Bobrov and Streltsov. But the former ended his career before the country made a debut in world championships, while the latter was first arrested for rape and then banned from traveling abroad. In the well-documented epoch, only Ukrainians Blokhin and Shevchenko can be seriously referred to as European stars. That’s all. What is more, their star performance did not depend on the fact that the former Kyivan was raised and played under one system and the latter under another. The point is that players like them could not help becoming stars. Their talent was a Godsend, and no training methods can produce a new Blokhin, although Lobanovsky has stubbornly selected the kind of players who could if need by replace a wayward star. The same applies to foreign soccer stars whose emergence at one end of the planet or another is subject to no algorithm. If everything depended on coaches, superstars would be coming from Germany, if on the climate and money, they would from Brazil and Italy respectively. But in reality, nobody anywhere has so far managed to set up a star factory. Leaving soccer aside for a moment, let us recall Ukrainian superstars Andriy Medvediev or Serhiy Bubka, who became such not at all because tennis and pole-vaulting are mass sports but thanks to their parents who contributed to the birth of a child with phenomenal abilities.
This has long been understood abroad, so specialists from the leading soccer and other sport clubs prowling over the remotest nooks and crannies of all continents to find phenomenal talents that cannot be produced in a most modern school with the most up- to-date curriculum. It is in this way that soccer found such outstanding players as Liberian Vea and Bulgarian Stoichkov, and much earlier a boy was brought from the savannas of Mozambique to Portugal, who later glorified the latter under the name of Eusebio. Players of this level do not need to be sought: in all teams they stand out like diamonds sparkling in a dunghill, while the tales of the coaches who allegedly raised and brought up, say, Zidane should be treated like a fish story. If you can do so, why not raise another dozen? You won’t: not because the coaches are lousy or useless. A coach is supposed either to raise a master or to spot a talent.
RAISING MASTERS
The massive nature of soccer plus the skill of coaches, sometimes complemented by a genetically suitable generation, makes it possible for a country or a locality to be a factory of players. Do you remember how many masters of soccer our Transcarpathia, Galicia, Kharkiv, Luhansk, Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, or Odesa oblasts once produced? It is next to impossible to explain why good players jump in droves from a certain locality at a certain time and then something stems this tide. There are too many circumstances of all kinds. It has become obvious recently that the drastic fall in soccer popularity and the almost defunct sports schools have not led to a qualitative reduction in the general level of our players. The nostalgic ranting of Soviet period stars should be taken as nothing but an old men’s grumbling about the greener grass, whiter snow, and sexier girls in the good old days. The diminishing number of soccer societies and groups has resulted in a far smaller number of bad players, while the number of good ones has almost remained the same, even under conditions such that our schoolboys are being shadowed by foreign scouts ready to take away almost preschool aged potential stars. The drop in the number of domestic competitions, with their characteristic agreements, contracts, and other machinations, has only revitalized soccer, stripping it of numerous crooks who have opted for some other line of business. If you further note that modern children can regularly see the world’s best soccer players, instead of knowing them by hearsay or from the press as their parents did, then there’s no need to wonder at their progress. All we have to do is recreate the conditions where the profession of being a soccer player could again become attractive on a mass scale, and then our clubs will find manpower.
However, no one can ever foretell where and when a new world class player will appear. This is exclusively a matter of chance, which we have just mentioned. Thus when discussing the training and raising of high class soccer players, we have to talk precisely about raising masters, not stars of Shevchenko’s caliber. Good examples of such education are the countries of the former Yugoslavia whose residents now play all over the world, from Australia to the America’s west coast. And there are so many Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes in Europe that they could make up a full-fledged league. And now will you name at least one true soccer superstar out of the Balkan Slavs? Boban and Mijatovic belong to the thirty-something generation, while no new stars on this level are so far in sight. We in turn have Shevchenko and Rebrov, i.e., as far as stars are concerned, we keep pace with the Serbs and Croats who have long made the export of soccer players run of the mill. And did Yugoslavia ever win the World, or at least the European, Cup?
ARE WE SQUANDERING TALENTS?
When somebody talks about a talented soccer player who had to eke out a second-string team existence through the fault of a coach, I immediately begin to feel the smell of cheap cigarettes from a stadium grandstand, where everybody is a “specialist” and an “expert.” This kind of reasoning is most typical of those who have never played and do not know that none of the coaches will confine to the substitution bench a player who can improve his team’s performance. If the position in which the talented novice plays is held by an experienced master in his prime, the novice has to choose whether to warm the bench or play in a different team. No doubt, Dynamo Kyiv has really been keeping in cold storage dozens of talented players who could become the gems of other teams, but this happens not so much out of coaches’ conservatism as out of these players’ desire to “serve” precisely in Kyiv. This service is now bound up with contractual obligations, and nobody forces the players to sign them. It is not the fault of Dynamo or Shakhtar coaches that some players feel it more comfortable to be bench warmers on these clubs than to be a locomotive for some weaker team, where they would also be paid less and irregularly. Even such a conservative as Lobanovsky, who has almost made a cult out of a stable team, always gives novices a chance and lets him play in the first string if he uses it well. It is not worth dwelling on the players who supposedly were lost in the crowd in Dynamo. The current open world has many other chances. Then why has not a single Ukrainian, who went abroad to seek glory, become a superstar or even a star? Either those who became “Russians” and those who have not changed their soccer nationality. Which of the dozens of Ukrainians playing in Russia or Europe can be taken by the national team in addition to those already playing on it?
The last thing to dwell on is the foreign rivalry which allegedly hampers Ukrainian talents from fulfilling their potential in Ukrainian clubs. This problem is also the fruit of fantasy, because those being and to be invited are not first or even second-rate players but promising young players or reliable average athletes who will never stand in the way of a new Blokhin or Buriak. Foreigners should be invited, for the coaches of highly aspiring teams cannot wait for this country to beget new stars any more than the large family of a traffic cop cannot wait until a driver commits an offense. Both the result and the people to reach it are required right now. Hence, the birth of stars, the making of masters, and the utilization of the players available will always be inseparably bound up in a process called big soccer. In this process, we are in quite an O.K. position, as far as this country is concerned.
