Del Piero loses his cool: "Killed creativity, we only teach kids one thing"

Alessandro Del Piero at Sky’s microphones made an examination of the problems of Italian soccer, starting with youth soccer, which no longer churns out talent as it once did. According to the former Juventus captain, there is a problem at the base, during the training and selection of talent: “We in Italy want big, big and fast players, because soccer now requires this and in France and England they have players with these characteristics. But this is not the case.”

“We in Italy have always been better at seeing something different, having our eye on talent, technique and different qualities that Spain has ‘stolen’ from us today. I don’t have the solutions to everything, but you have to start from a clear assumption, today with Italy U15, U16 or U17 we do extraordinary things, but in the U21 we don’t reach the top, while in my time we won with the U21 for two editions in a row of the European Championship. This is something that needs to be analyzed: why at 15 or 16 are we as strong as and, perhaps, more than the others, and then we are not anymore?”

“We tell the boys too much what to do and this kills their creativity,” Del Piero pointed out. “If we give too strict directions then the young players know how to perform only that, they become good in that system, but as soon as they come out of it they make mistakes and are branded as poor. Not so, they are not poor: the problem is that they have been taught only one thing. They have not been taught to solve a problem on their own.”

“In other countries these problems are not there, there is no ‘prohibition of doing’ like we have. We are in a context where kids have to express their qualities and test themselves. My greatest joy you know what it was? Challenging my friends. And thus challenging myself as well. There was a time when even video games were paid for, you paid a hundred lira to play, so you cared. Today video games are free….”.