Caught off side

It’s a Christmas to end all Christmases for Zico Marecaldi. Last week, the nine-year-old prodigy from Sweden BK Olympic signed a contract with Barcelona. 

In an interview with The Guardian last season, Jürgen Klopp, manager for Borussia Dortmund, raised concerns about some more dubious recruiting methods in football.  Teams with cash, like Munich Bayern, hire talent with the idea that such a player then will not be developed by a competing team. Many of those players then spend the season on the bench.

Mr. Klopp has lost key players himself, Shinji Kagawa to Arsenal, Mario Götze and, most likely, Robert Lewandowski, to Bayern.  For Dortmund these players represent the loss of an important investment for years to come. Like Peter Pan trying to secure his shadow, retaining recruits and developing successors is an elusive and consuming means to connect a team’s future development to past experience. 

For managers in professional sports, as in for example, organized crime, streaming human resources into highly specialized functions as early in life as possible has the added benefit of specializing recruits to a degree that it creates barriers to their entry into other fields. Although sports and crime are highly profitable, in the end nothing much is produced and these fields tend not to draw talent from other fields where careers might be more rewarding, if only by being less short and brutish. So it is central to the business model to find talent young and develop a specialized talent for what will necessarily be a short career. 

As a Barcelona spokesperson said back in 2011, after losing many of their own players in development, usually to Arsenal, a strategy which Barcelona has referred to as kidnapping, “There are two philosophies. Ours is to invest in our academy. The other is to fish all over Europe for kids. It’s legal but a little immoral.” 

Zico’s success this week will be hard to beat. His family plan to move to Spain as soon as possible according to the boy’s father, a coach at BK Olympic. It’s an interesting problem. Business is business. 


(The french version has been placed in a rehabilitative program by the relevant authorities. I did not know such a thing existed. Can I ever have it back? 
"On va voir!")