A craggy-faced old man gingerly makes his way along the grassy embankment next to the bumpy pitch. Walking stick in hand, baggy tracksuit hanging off his gaunt figure, a bone-chilling gust of wind sweeps in and tousles his grey hair as the sound of a 747 in the far off distance rumbles through Sydney’s morning sky.

We’re at Bossley Park, which, it should be said, will not feature on any postcards of Sydney. While plane loads of enthusiastic tourists flock to the Bridge, Opera House and Bondi Beach, and enjoy the hip bars and gorgeous beaches of the city’s Eastern Suburbs and North Shore, Bossley Park in Sydney’s western suburbs is like Ugly Betty. It’s got a heart of gold, but it’s working class central and drab as dishwater. And that’s exactly the way David Lee likes it.

“You can’t teach kids who live close to the beach – too many distractions,” says Lee in an accent as ocker as Paul Hogan as he rests his walking stick next to a wooden table and sits down for a chat.

FourFourTwo is watching the IQ Football Academy go through its paces at a deserted high school during school holidays. The program is Lee’s brainchild. Coaching kids is still his life, even though he’s in his 70s now. It’s Lee’s philosophy of coaching that IQ – intensity and quality – is built on.

On the pitch, effervescent staff coach Jeff Stanmore cajoles the youngsters. “One touch, one touch,” he instructs as the players, aged around 12 to 14, set up in a triangle, pass, dummy, lay off the ball and move into space in one free-flowing movement. “You don’t need two touches, if you do, get a girlfriend!” yells Stanmore as he intently follows each player’s movement on and off the ball.

Lee explains the academy’s philosophy, and the reasons he set up his own academy.

“IQ is about breeding smarter, faster players,” says Lee. “This is based on the three speeds in football: speed of movement, speed of ball and speed of thought. Speed of thought controls the other two. Here, we attempt to increase the speed of thought of players by developing their technical ability to a point where the player does not need to concentrate 100 percent on the control and distribution of the ball. Their first touch should be that good it becomes a learned behaviour and is second nature to them. The first nature has to be the decision.”

He adds that they are not “results driven” in a sense of winning matches. “The philosophy is to create a competitive environment as opposed to a competition environment, whereby the primary focus is on individual technical development.”

On a nearby tennis court, IQ staff are filming players sprinting to monitor technique and ascertain whether they have the requisite natural foot speed over five metres.

These ideas – mostly inspired by English coach Eric Worthington, a former director of coaching in this country, and Yugoslav guru Ivan Toplak – have guided Lee’s career as a coach. A career that was “in the development system” – that is, the Football NSW system – until he quit nine years ago disillusioned with the direction we were heading.

“The reason I quit in 1998 was because they introduced a program to help develop kids, but you had to pay for it,” says Lee. “That’s when I got out. The scholarships that Harry [Kewell] and Emo [Brett Emerton] went on were finished up. The federation is run for all the wrong reasons. It’s run to make a profit. Coerver coaching’s come in. You can become a Coerver coach with three hours of training. It’s bullshit.

“Here, I make the ball do the work; they make the player do the work. You don’t use tricks. Playing a ball first time and moving to get it back again is what it’s all about.”

Lee and Stanmore – who is also studying for his masters in sports science at university – are now seen as mavericks by the system.

“It doesn’t matter how many step-overs you do or if you can make the ball disappear up your arse, if you can’t pass the ball you can’t play the game,” says Stanmore. “All teams can do with maybe one of those players. At Coerver, you receive acclaim for a trick, in football the only acclaim you get is sticking the ball between the posts.”

The pair are concerned about the corporatisation of youth development which they say isn’t producing better, smarter players. They are also keen to point out that IQ charges a minimal amount (about $5 per hour of training). In fact, they say they’ve had preliminary talks with a well-known Socceroo’s representatives to run a school based on Lee’s principles that would be free of charge.

They are also deeply worried that some state federations are no longer focused on quality of individual. “The standard of the players coming through to the AIS is terrible,” says Lee, frustrated, “but no-one can say because they’re looking after their own jobs – I don’t blame them for that. The whole thing’s got holes in it. I don’t know where to start. If you’re not in this so-called development program, you can’t get in the state youth teams. And if you can’t get into the state teams, you can’t get into the institutes.

“It’s all in Eric [Worthington]’s book. He sets out a plan. But they [the Federation] do it the other way around. They start them in a competitive game. When they can’t play they take them back to the beginning. Then they become de-motivated and drop out.

I think it’s something like 96 percent stop playing by the time they’re 16. It’s not psychology – psychology’s a big word – it’s just understanding,” he says exasperated.

The emphasis at IQ is on technique, using technique in a skilful manner, and maintaining a level of motivation. These kids actually look like they’re enjoying themselves. Which is not surprising given the pair have worked out some very basic ideas of player motivation.

“You’ve got to be motivated to improve, that’s the first thing you check,” says Lee. “Ten percent usually want to be there, 90 percent don’t; it’s the parents who want them to be there. And it’s very hard to tell. You’ve got to run tests. They’ve got to be intrinsically motivated, not extrinsically.”

Lee tells the story of one 16-year-old who recently spent five weeks at Bolton Wanderers. He impressed at the Reebok with his technique but the trial – in the bitter cold of an English winter – crushed his motivation.

“He comes from down near the ocean,” says Lee. “His family’s not short of a quid so if you’re thinking long term you wouldn’t take him. He’s gone overseas and found out he wasn’t too fussed about it. He’s a good kid and he’s quickly worked it out it’s not good for him.” That player is now helping coach the youngsters at IQ.

“When was the last time we produced an outstanding talent?” Lee asks. “We need to produce one outstanding player a year. That’s what’s alarming about the system.”

As we slowly walk along the perimeter of the pitch, youngsters in various Euro football shirts edge forward to shake Lee’s hands. Respect is clear, for he is also known as “David Lee: Harry Kewell’s junior coach”.A few kilometres from IQ is the HQ of Football NSW, whose head of high performance is Paul Bentvelzen. “Our mission statement in the high performance unit,” he says earnestly, “is to be the premier development program in the country.”

Bentvelzen says he judges the success of the NSW program “on the number of players that play for the country and how we go against the rest of the states.”

He adds with pride that “our U13s metro boys and girls haven’t lost a game yet. Our technical staff will then look at these results to see how far ahead we are of the other states. Our country teams haven’t been doing as well as our city teams, so we want to try and increase the standard of country football.”

Football NSW is arguably the most powerful federation in the country, cashed up thanks to massive player numbers and with land inherited from the late Charlie Valentine, enabling it to build impressive training facilities, HQ and accommodation near Blacktown, an hour’s drive from Sydney.

Football NSW uses Coerver coaching as part of its grassroots coaching program for seven to 10-year-olds.

“It’s been very successful across the whole state,” argues Bentvelzen. “It’s a technical based program that we can sell to mums and dads with confidence. After the seven to 10 age, we move into programs that focus on technical awareness and by 13, tactical awareness,” he adds, spreadsheets at the.

“We have goal-setting for young players as part of our home training program, where we get them to think about certain areas of their game, because it’s hard to assess young players. It’s got to come down to internal motivation.” Bentvelzen says that players do have to pay to play in state teams “but we do have a hardship fund, although that is difficult to apply to everyone.” Coerver sessions cost about $15 and Bentvelzen says anything from 40 to 100 sessions could be paid for. Overseas tours cost between $2000 and $5500.

One man with serious youth coaching credentials is Ange Postecoglou. He famously was involved in a slanging match with SBS’s football analyst Craig Foster last year concerning the state of the nation’s youth development. It was compelling viewing but also highlights the passion that this debate has stirred up over recent years.

Postecoglou was national U17 and U20 coach for seven years up until the beginning of this year when the FFA passed on renewing his contract. He’s not impressed with state federations hanging their hat on numbers rather than quality.

“Is it right?” he asks. “No it isn’t. So I’ll put it back onto them – your brief should be to produce better players each year rather than produce more numbers for the national team. I’d rather have one from NSW than 10 if it means the quality’s there.”

Postecoglou also notes the anomaly in the system that favours junior players who physically develop faster than others. “They get all the benefits of the best coaches and are separated from other kids, but once they get to 16 or 17 many are found out to be lacking in technical attributes. Perhaps some of the less physically big kids had more technical ability but were left behind.

“I’ve spent a lot of time in Clarefontaine [France’s national centre of excellence], and the first test of incoming players is juggling with both left and right. It’s an identification of a basic skill and if they don’t have that it’s not what they need from players.”

Australia youth development has some unique challenges. As a nation, we are geographically isolated from world football’s hotspots, have a relatively small population and football must compete with three other codes for raw talent, money, corporate sponsorship and media attention.

It’s a tough gig from the get-go for our football producers. Within this social-sporting context, the Australian football youth development system doesn’t operate collectively. In football terms, it’s like a team with players who each want to play for themselves. It doesn’t make for a productive national youth development system.

Football Federation Australia (FFA) runs the game at a national level but hasn’t yet put its imprint on a national approach to youth development.

Beneath this, the various state federations and elite state-based institutes run their own youth programs and set their own direction. For instance, NSW is the licensee of Coerver coaching for Australia and Oceania. The VIS already uses elements of Coerver but it doesn’t base its whole training on it.

Some states judge their success on numbers of players they get into state and national teams, while others judge it on the level of technical ability of the players they produce. And there is only a minimal level of information sharing between the states’ peak bodies.

Alongside state bodies are academies – such as the VIS, NSWIS and QAS. These elite organisations have varying degrees of partnerships with the state-run bodies.

Then there are the clubs. Most A-League clubs don’t have formal youth structures as we’d know in Europe [see boxout “Central Coast youth vision”, page 50], although the teams are mandated to include three U20 players in a 23-man squad.

At the base of the youth development system is what is powering the game: Australian kids love football. Boys and girls play the sport in record numbers; it’s the fastest growing participation sport for girls too. It also means football at junior level is big business.

At the top end of the youth development chain is the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) whose head coach is former Socceroo Steve O’Connor. He tells FourFourTwo that the technical level of the players arriving at the AIS “is well behind all major football countries. What’s more, we only have nine months each year to get them ready for qualifiers in Asia in October.”

Which brings us to the black hole of Australian football. Australia hasn’t had a national youth league for three years. While the architects of the new A-League have done a fine job of revitalising the senior competition, the kids have been left outside the house – and they’ve been homeless for way too long.

If there is one thing all those who FourFourTwo spoke to agreed on, it was the destructive effect this is having.

“It is a black hole… a huge black hole,” says Ian Greener, who runs the football program at the Victorian Institute of Sport.

Postecoglou describes it as “disastrous”. “In 2004/05, we didn’t even have an NSL. We came back from the 2003 World Youth Championships having beaten Brazil, and many of the squad came back to play state league football – having just beaten Brazil!”

According to insiders, a national youth league is on the FFA’s radar, but when exactly, no-one is quite sure. One insider tells us, “It’s all about money, [but we] don’t know when it’s going to happen though.”

As a work-around, the AIS football team was admitted to the Victorian Foxtel Cup. Frustratingly, the AIS – based in Canberra – has not been able to play in the nearer NSW Premier League. Why this is so remains a mystery to most, including O’Connor.

In fact, he’s scathing of NSW’s long-standing refusal to bring the AIS into its Premier League, while the extra cost of playing in Victoria comes out of his own AIS budget. This funding issue is putting in doubt continued participation in the Foxtel Cup venture. “It’s been beneficial, no doubt, to have the guys play against seniors and regularly,” says O’Connor ruefully.

Step back to 2003/04 and, ironically, the old National Soccer League assisted the development of a number of our most talented younger players. By that final season, many NSL clubs were so broke that teenagers were thrown into the first team. It didn’t hurt their progress.

Victory stars Daniel Piorkowski and Adrian Leijer (now at Fulham) anchored the Melbourne Knights defence, Alex Brosque broke in at Marconi as did Adam Kwasnik at Spirit, while South Melbourne’s Kristian Sarkies was given his chance, as was Jet Tarek Elrich at Olympic.

In 2007, A-League U20s will find it much tougher to play regular football in the seniors. But unlike the old NSL, there is no regular summer youth league to play in.

It’s no wonder so many youngsters chance their arm overseas.When the FFA – and Rob Baan in particular – approach the task of drawing Australia’s disparate development forces together, the Victorian model of youth development may be of interest.

Two men who’ve been pivotal in unifying the state and setting a cutting edge direction are Ian Greener and Ernie Merrick. The pair set up the football program at the Victorian Institute of Sport (VIS) in 1991, working together for the four years.

“Ernie was one of the first players to kick me in this country,” laughs Greener, who came to Melbourne in the 1970s from the UK to play state league football.

The VIS has had great success in bringing on excellent young talent, with Leijer the latest player to move to Europe after signing with Fulham after starring for Merrick’s Melbourne Victory. Earlier, Josh Kennedy, Scott McDonald, Jason Culina, Mark Bresciano, Vince Grella, Ljubo Milicevic and Matt Spiranovic all went through the VIS program. When Melbourne Victory won the Grand Final last February, six VIS graduates were on the pitch at the final whistle.

However, Greener points out what Postecoglou notes: it’s not about how many players you can get into various state and national teams or how many national youth championships you win.

“If you look at the funding,” says Greener, pausing before carefully choosing his words diplomatically, “and how you are going to be measured, it’s the number of players who are going on to bigger and better things. And these have to be measured in some shape or form.

“We [the VIS] are currently playing in an U21 competition for points. And I guess people will look at us and say, ‘How are you tracking?’ and some people will focus on your win/loss ratio but it’s really a matter of how many boys do we help and assist to go to the next level?

“When I was at the FFV, I guess we were judged by how many times we won national championships and national titles. And I’ve got to say in the 10 years I was at the federation I believe we probably only won it twice.

“I never judged our success on winning national championships. It was about how many players came through our system who then went on to perform at the highest level. And if you look at the World Cup in 2006, the midfield of Culina, Bresciano and Grella all came through our system.”

Greener makes a powerful point. That said, seven current VIS scholarship holders have been named in the current Australian U17s squad. Bailey Wright, Kamal Ibrahim, Teddy Yabio, Petar Franjic, Fabio DiLizia, Anthony Bran and James Jeggo (on standby) are all, if history is anything to go by, a good chance to be part of the Socceroos for the 2014 World Cup qualifiers.

“It goes through cycles, so it’s good for us that we have such a good group of players coming through. It doesn’t matter how good your development programs are, if you don’t have that initial quality…” Greener adds. “We just have a very good cluster of players right now who have benefited not only from the program but who have come into it with very good basic skills.”

The fact that Victoria is producing better quality raw materials is no accident. Across the state, Greener has helped to standardise and improve grass roots coaching ideas since he returned in 2003 to the VIS. This in turn has helped raise the level of players coming through to the elite training programs and state teams.

“We are trying to pass the information back to our local coaches. As I said to them recently, our next intake of VIS students is now currently with your junior club. The onus is on you. We can get you doing the right things for them at a young age so when they come into the VIS, players know what is expected and it’s not a culture shock.

Greener put forward a plan some years ago to put newly qualified, top level badge senior coaches on a “P” plate system where for the first year they must contribute a block of time each week to coaching juniors.

“This would benefit our system because you can still coach at senior level but our junior kids can benefit from the good messages coming from these coaches running quality sessions.

“Setting up the academy program was about developing a state-wide program but also really highlighting to the coaches what the philosophy was because you really have got to get quality coaches working in the system and that was a challenge and probably always will be a challenge.

“The better coaches seem to have this view that for them to be recognised, they have to make their way into senior football. But as any world system’s aware, the best coaches need to be working at the youth and junior level because it’s the message they [young players] get from an early age.

“So we’ve tried to set up a career pathway here in Victoria targeting some of the best coaches and really brought them back down from a senior level,” says Greener. “But then you’ve got to keep them happy with financial packages which is always going to be a problem. The best coaches need to be working at the junior level.”

Greener, a former pro with Middlesbrough – he actually lived in the same digs as Aussie Craig Johnston in the mid-’70s – moved on from the VIS to FFV in 1995. Merrick stayed at the VIS and in fact was employed full-time to oversee its football program from that point on, while Greener returned to the VIS three years ago.

By holding such crucial positions – and working together – it has allowed the pair to take a leading role in policy and development of Victoria’s youth systems. “We really needed to create a structure within Victoria, so I guess for around 10 years the idea was to create the development programs and feeder systems into the VIS by setting up programs in both country Victoria and metro Melbourne.”

Unlike the NSW federation, Coerver is not used by Greener in a formal sense. Asked why, he says there is no need to license an entire program off the Dutch company, “as the academy program I wrote for the VIS already has a few Coerver-style activities but isn’t based [entirely] on it.” And like any youth program, the ball and how it’s used is the basis of all training. “We do all of our work with the ball. Our fitness work is done with the ball and the ball is the centre of all our training. We work from day one in every session on valuing the ball. We work on possession and being able to move it around but we have to have direction with possession.

“So, every session we would actually do some form of possession work. It’s possession with direction because we want to hurt the opposition and score goals – because it’s not about keeping the ball for the sake of keeping it. There has to be that balance between keeping the ball but also moving it towards the opponent’s goal. I tend to split up my sessions into six phases; phase two or three is possession training.”

One of the other obvious benefits of the Greener-Merrick Victorian revolution is that youth development in the state has a direct line to the very top.

“With Ernie moving on to Melbourne Victory we’ve got a unique model that I know FFA is looking at,” boasts Greener. “We’ve got VIS, FFV and Melbourne Victory. We are so in line that our boys play with Victory in their pre-season matches and play against Victory in high intensity practice matches. To mark an Archie Thompson or to compete in the middle of the park with a Kevin Muscat is invaluable for their development.

“And the likes of Kevin, Archie and Ljubo take time out to give advice to these youngsters too. And you can’t get that from any coaching manual.”

Ultimately though, players in our youth development system have to want to make it. Postecoglou says, “A lot of these boys, they’ve made it purely through their own guts and determination.”

“It’s easy to pick the players who will make it,” adds Lee, of his former star pupils Kewell, Emerton and Wilkshire. “They wanted to be a good player and were willing to do what they had to do to become a good player.

“Harry trained three times a week, sometimes four, while in school. You’ve got to have supportive parents, which he did. Wilkshire would come up with his parents from Wollongong.

“Plus you’ve got to have the endeavour to get better. Harry got about five bucks a week back then,” Lee says with a giggle at the irony of his former charge’s current financial situation. “He was never worried about the money. Someone said to him, “What if you don’t make it, have you got a plan B?” and he said, ‘I’ll make it.’”

The FFA’s review into youth development is due out this month (September 2007). FFA CEO Ben Buckley tells FourFourTwo that they aren’t going to “operate with a big stick” and tell states what do.

“We should take a step back and realise there really hasn’t been, over the last however many years, a national development plan,” he explains. “We are in the process of meeting with all the state and territory federations to get their input into the creation of a broad, national approach which includes structural reforms at the grass roots level and also some reforms at the elite player pathway level. We need a national vision for the way the game is developed.”

Buckley admits that since the FFA took control of the beleaguered sport in this country three years ago, “governance reform, the A-League and entry into the Asian Football Confederation” has been the primary focus, not youth development.

“We’re not going to take a big stick,” he says when quizzed on how enforceable any review will be. “That’s why we’re consulting the states. Rob Baan, our new national technical director will have a significant input into the content of the programs and from there we’ll seek to work with the state and territory federations to get a national direction. We’ll ultimately have to have a view – but we want their insights.”

Rhetoric aside, Buckley admits it will “probably take a number of years” for the FFA-driven agenda to work its way through the national system. As for existing contracts with third-party parties such as Coerver, Buckley simply says, “you have to work through those individual examples of existing arrangements...”

Buckley adds that a national youth league “has absolute recognition” of its importance to the overall vision of youth development at the elite level. He notes, “There is a big cost attached to it, but we’d be hopeful that we could something [set] up for not this A-League season but the next one.

“It’s not a sprint, it’s a transition phase,” concludes Buckley of the overall challenge. “You can’t change it overnight.”

As David Lee puts the keys into the ignition of his humble mustard-coloured Mazda at end of another day’s training, he winds down his window and tells us, “You know, we have a saying: A 12-year-old superstar can easily become a 16-year-old dropout.”

Let’s hope Lee is not still saying that in another five years.