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What next for the new footballing generation?

This season, a new competition has hit the European football calendar in the shape of the NextGen Series.

The tournament will be run on a League basis with a knockout stage to follow and with U19s teams from 16 top European clubs including Barcelona, Ajax, and Sporting Lisbon taking part, it is sure to throw up some fascinating ties.  The concept has been hailed as a mini-Champions League in some quarters and is viewed by various pundits as a forerunner to a possible European League that could eventually supersede both the Champions League and numerous top domestic Leagues.

Here, ESEM managing director, Christian Machowski, gives some of his opinion on the new competition and how it can integrate into the calendar at club level.  

When you consider clubs like Barcelona, VfL Wolfsburg, Olympic Marseille and Inter Milan being embroiled in a competition that can see them face British clubs such as Manchester City, Aston Villa, Tottenham Hotspur, Liverpool and Celtic, you can’t help but get excited at the prospect.  The new NextGen Series has been introduced to give U19s sides from the participating clubs the opportunity to get a first taste of European football and as such it will give their young players some valuable experience.  However, from a fans’ perspective, it will also give people the chance to see the finest developing talent from some of Europe’s leading club sides a little earlier than they otherwise might.

There are some fantastic young players emerging right across the continent.  This summer’s U21s European Championships in Denmark saw the likes of  Juan Mata and Javi Martinez of Spain excel in a tournament-winning team but some lesser known players such as Xherdan Shakiri of Switzerland, Denmark’s Christian Eriksen, Ukraine’s Yevhen Konoplyanka and the Czech Republic’s Jan Moravek also emerged with great credit.  No doubt they will now be getting more attention as a result.  

The NextGen Series can only help the emergence of younger players at U19s level and allow them to begin to make a name for themselves across Europe rather than just within the youth or academy set-ups at their respective clubs.    It also means that as some of those taking part may not quite make the grade at their current clubs, they may well have taken the eye of any number of gathered scouts and could therefore stand more chance or continuing their careers elsewhere as a result thanks to their involvement in the competition.  

With the participating clubs initially being split into four groups of four, the knockout stages look set to be played further afield in the early part of 2012 and could even be held in Abu Dhabi.  There has already been much discussion about the prospect of the Premier League brand being taken to the UAE at some stage and maybe part of the thinking here is that any NextGen Series games played out there are used as test vehicles to see just how popular European football might be in a region where interest in the game among some very wealthy people is already widely acknowledged?  It will certainly be interesting to see how those games might be marketed.  

With other leading clubs such as Molde, Rosenborg and FC Basel also taking part, it will give people the chance to see emerging players from teams in countries where the public glare doesn’t always find a focus but again, with football having become such a worldwide phenomenon in recent years and with the ‘quality gap’ having tightened considerably when comparing British players with their Scandinavian and Eastern European counterparts, it will be intriguing to see how the players compare technically as much as anything else.  

There are plans to introduce the likes of Chelsea, Manchester United and Arsenal in future years and depending how the competition goes in this inaugural year, it may be worth posing the question; ‘what next for domestic reserve team football?’  Already, many Premier League reserve sides are effectively extensions of academy teams.  Not only is a reserve team seen as the natural progression for those young players that are performing consistently well and looking like they need to move on to an intermediary level before they get their first tastes of first team football but with fewer first team squad players appearing in reserve teams these days, other than when they might be feeling their way back after injuries, such teams are often made up of very young faces.   With that in mind, might a successful NextGen Series lead to the end of the Premier League Reserve League format as we know it, with middle to lower Premier League clubs who don’t take part being left to form new leagues with reserve sides from Championship clubs and so on?  

Already these questions and more are coming about as a result of the advent of this exciting new competition.  However, in the short term at least, it has to be viewed as something to look forward to and it should be embraced with enthusiasm for all the positives it will inevitably throw up.