THINK the world's best footballers are born rather than made? Matthew Syed, three-time Commonwealth table-tennis champion and author of an acclaimed book on talent, Bounce, begs to differ.

You only have to compare a Sunday league game with a Champions League tussle at the Nou Camp or Old Trafford to see the importance of natural ability in football. At the local park, you see players trying awfully hard, chasing around the pitch and even nailing the occasional long pass, but you see little of thrilling quality.

In the top European leagues – particularly among the best clubs – you see something quite different: touch, feel, finesse, vision, the ability to hit an inch-perfect pass across the field into the path of an team-mate. These are the things that elevate football, to those of us who love the sport, into something approaching an art form, like chess played at speed.

Talent is the word we use to rationalise this schism between the best and the rest: the idea that sporting stars are born with greatness encoded in their DNA. How else to explain how Lionel Messi can perform with such creativity? How else to explain the sublime consistency of Paul Scholes? How else to understand the sheer accuracy of David Beckham’s free-kicks?

It boils down to the idea that sporting excellence is reserved for a select group of individuals – winners in a genetic lottery that passed the rest of us by.

But what if this seductive idea is all wrong? What if our deepest assumptions about success in football – indeed, in life itself – are entirely misconceived? What if talent itself is not just a meaningless concept, but a corrosive one, robbing ourselves and our children of the incentive to work hard and excel?

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