Australia’s youth soccer teams have become used to failure

They were heady days when Australian youth soccer was the talk of the football world.

Craig Foster, left, Sami Al Jaber and Ned Zelic in Riyadh in 1997. Picture: AFP

They were heady days when Australian youth soccer was the talk of the football world.

It was a time when the production line churned out players such as Mark Viduka, Paul Okon, Ned Zelic, Harry Kewell, Mark Bosnich, Mark Schwarzer, Edi Krncevic and Frank Farina.

Time and again, the Young Socceroos (under 20s) and Joeys (under 17s) brought great joy, not just as perpetual qualifiers for World Youth Championships but actually performing well, topping their groups, making semi-finals and regularly beating superpowers such as Brazil and Germany. Who will ever forget when the Joeys stunned the world by qualifying for the final in 1999, only to suffer a heartbreaking penalty shootout loss to Brazil.

But as the sport moved from the 1990s into the 2000s there was a seismic shift. Moving from Oceania, where qualifying was almost a given, to Asia in 2006, where there is now stiff competition, has played a part but, where once Australian youth teams were ranked in the top six or seven in the world, now they have all but fallen off the radar. The Olyroos (under 23s) made the semi-finals in 1992 but haven’t qualified for the past two Olympics.

Failure to qualify for the WYC at 17s and 20s has now become the norm rather than the exception. And when they have qualified, they have generally failed to get out of the group stage, though the 17s bucked that trend in 2015 under Tony Vidmar. The most damning statistic is that the Young Socceroos have not won a game in the group stage since 2003.

It’s a situation that almost brings former youth coach Les Scheinflug, the man acknowledged as the father of Australian youth football, to tears. “Something needs to be done because this isn’t good enough,” Scheinflug told The Weekend Australian. “Our youth development has gone to the pack. Our 17s and 20s have gone from sixth and seventh in the world ... now you have to lift up the carpet to find where they are.”

He lays the blame squarely at the feet of the people running the game here. “We have had non-football people at the top ... rugby, rowers, AFL, cricket ... they knew nothing,” he said. “They got rid of the national youth league. We lost a generation of young players and we have struggled to recover.

“We lost the institutes. When I was coach I would go to institutes in NSW, Queensland, South Australia, Victoria etc, I’d see the players and do a session. By the time the national championships came around I knew most of them.”

Scheinflug was particularly scathing of “the love affair with Dutch football”.

“We brought in Dutchmen as technical directors. But what did these guys achieve?” he said. “We were told things would be better in 10 years. That hasn’t happened.

“As for (current TD) Eric Abrams (a Belgian), what has he done? Where is his plan? Does he put on sessions or does he just travel with the Socceroos?”

It irked Scheinflug that his attempts to try to meet with Abrams had been ignored. “I tried 12 months ago and I’m still waiting. Why are they ignoring me? Maybe they don't want to hear the truth? I have 50 years experience as a coach. All I want to do is help.”

Socceroos coach Ange Postecoglou was unfairly maligned during his tenure as national youth team boss because, apart from Scheinflug, he is the only other coach to top a group stage with the Young Socceroos.

Postecoglou is just as passionate about youth development and getting the representative teams back on track as he is about the seniors. “I have been very disappointed with the way things have been going,” he says. “I was particularly unhappy with what I saw from the 20s in Bahrain (at the last qualifiers). The result wasn’t there but the quality of football wasn’t what I wanted to see from us, either.

“The key thing about the time when we were very good at nat­ional youth team level is that we were resourcing it well. When we qualified via Oceania we would then make sure we did overseas tours to get the players experience before the finals. That’s not happening now. I also believe we need to get more young players into the system. We don’t have enough teams in the A-League.”

Postecoglou and Scheinflug also want to see development of players in the hands of the clubs via the clubs’ own youth academies.

“Our young players should be coached by our most experienced coaches, not by our most inexperienced and that has to be balanced with giving opportunities to young Australian coaches in the system.”