The ‘corona lighting’ of Ajax and Feyenoord, who could have played the Classic now

Guus Baars was “in a flow”. He was seventeen years old and a talented defender in Feyenoord’s youth team. He played every week. “You weren’t thinking. You were just having fun playing football. You got better every time.” But suddenly, he says at Feyenoord’s Varkenoord sports complex, “there was a break.”

Baars, now 20, belongs to the ‘corona class’: youth players who were able to train less at an important stage of their career and hardly played official matches for over a year. This is as a result of the pandemic, which struck the Netherlands three years ago and brought the football world to a standstill.

NRC spoke to players and trainers about the under-18s of Ajax and Feyenoord from the 2020-2021 season. This group could now – in theory – be there this Sunday in the Classic, where the leading position in the Eredivisie is at stake. The youth teams, flagship of both courses, only played four (Ajax) and three (Feyenoord) competition matches in that season that was prematurely interrupted by corona.

Has the lack of duels affected physical and technical development? Have any players been lost due to the pandemic? What did the lockdowns do to the psyche of young players?

For now you have to stay home. Fine, Olivier Aertssen thinks when he reads the message from Ajax in mid-March 2020, he says, looking back at the De Toekomst training complex. There are not that many days off in football. And there is little choice, sports complexes have to close. He is fifteen and has moved with his parents from a village in Zeeland to Amsterdam a year earlier because he is going to play in the Ajax academy.

One day turns into six weeks. He stays in Zeeland, where his parents still have their house. The defender is given schedules for strength and fitness training and exercises with the ball. The polder is close by. “I could run as far as I wanted.” And the local club’s football field is a few minutes’ bike ride away.

Ajax’s physical trainers keep track of his work via the fitness and running app Polar Beat. He thinks the worst thing is that the Future Cup, an international youth tournament of Ajax in the Easter weekend, will not take place in 2020. He had been looking forward to that.

Feyenoord defender Baars initially sees the interruption as something positive. “Then I can practice my shot and my dribbling technique.” The fact that many fields are not accessible makes it difficult. When he wants to train for himself at an amateur club near Dordrecht – Feyenoord also draws up schedules – a man shouts that he has to leave. When he cycles home, the man chases him. “He rang my mother’s doorbell to say that I had broken into their property.”

Try to make as much contact as possible to “keep the boys connected”, the youth trainers are told in the first weeks, says Raymond van Meenen, head of operations from the Feyenoord Academy. At Ajax online meetings, players from the first team – such as Ryan Gravenberch – are put forward to tell the youth how they stay fit.

At Feyenoord, under-18 coach Melvin Boel organizes ‘challenges’, such as who can hold the ball up the most. “The winner received a credit for the PlayStation to purchase games.”

When young people up to the age of 18 are allowed to carefully return to the fields from the end of April, it will feel like a liberation for many. Training at their club is possible again. Although they do not yet know that the new season, 2020-2021, will also test their patience. Van Meenen: “That has been the most difficult season.”

Creating resistance

They were just able to take the team photo when the under-18s of Ajax and Feyenoord finally start playing matches again after the summer. But their competition will be stopped again at the beginning of October due to increased infections.

Training is still allowed. At Ajax they build tents where players can change clothes – visits to the main building are not allowed, showers must be done at home.

In order to experience resistance and play matches, practice matches are organized during the weekends between teams within the training. That is allowed. To make it look ‘match real’, they play in club uniforms. And, at Feyenoord, with music on the main field. Everyone says it’s fun in the beginning, but at a certain point the motivation decreases.

“You already know all the players, know how they play,” says Aertssen from Ajax.

“That tension from the opponent, from the audience, from the rankings, from winning or losing, that was missing,” says Saïd Ouaali, head of youth training at Ajax.

Some needed that to perform. “Stage players. ‘I want to entertain the audience, but I don’t see any people.’” Although Ouaali also saw players who flourished because the pressure of ‘having to’ was not there.

Feyenoord defender Baars calls the lack of real duels in a “crucial phase from the age of seventeen to the age of eighteen” “really bad” for his development. “You were no longer living towards something,” he says. “It was kind of a season as a reserve player.”

Ajax moves several players from the under-18s to Jong Ajax, which plays in the First Division, the competition of which continues. “We tried to keep the distance to the first one small,” says Ouaali. And with a large group, any dropouts due to corona can be accommodated. Feyenoord, without a Young Team in professional football, does not have that luxury.

In Ajax’s under-18s, the physical strain on the players is comparable to a normal season, according to research by the science department. Due to the limited number of matches, a larger part of that load came from running forms and less from football. This means that the players are more stressed in terms of endurance and therefore the heart and lung system and less in terms of muscle and tendon strain, which is a large part of football strain due to the many acceleration, twisting and turning.

‘Time to make my debut’

Van Meenen has a stack of papers on the table, all newsletters from the Feyenoord training for parents and players about corona measures and training schedules. A letter dated March 25, 2021 states that the KNVB is ending the competition because the final deadline for restart is no longer feasible. “Dramatic of course,” says Van Meenen.

“Football stood still, but you do get older,” says Baars. “I had hoped to make my debut at the age of eighteen. Now I’m already twenty. In the meantime, some talents have already broken through.” Although he emphasizes that he has not deteriorated in football, the past period has “gone very quickly”. “Now it is time to make my debut.”

In the weeks that he had to rely on himself, Aertssen has made a step forward in terms of discipline, he thinks. “If you run with a group at the club, you want to keep joining in, you want to join in. At home you walk alone. No one will pull the cart if you slow down a bit. You have to get it all out of yourself.” Just to indicate: as a team player, he learned to operate more as an individual athlete in terms of motivation during corona times.

Some players started thinking more explicitly about their future during the pandemic, Ouaali says. Do I actually want to keep playing football? “That awareness, that doubt, was visible.” There are players who stopped during that time, Ouaali says, “but we don’t know whether that was directly due to the pandemic.”

It is not yet possible to say whether there is a correlation between the corona period and the development of youth players, says Van Meenen. “Maybe only in five to ten years.” Aertssen, Kian Fitz-Jim and Youri Baas have now made their debut from Ajax’s 2020-2021 under-18 team. At Feyenoord this applies to Mimeirhel Benita.

Ischa Bouwman was signed by Ajax in September 2020 as a reserve goalkeeper for the under-18s, on a one-season contract. As an Ajax fan and a boy from Amsterdam, he liked that, but he only played two practice matches that season. After a year he had to leave again. “It was exactly the season that I was not able to show myself.”

That had an effect afterwards in his search for a new club. He had no footage of recent matches. “Most clubs I spoke to wanted me to do an internship first.” Internships at foreign clubs were difficult to organize due to the travel restrictions. Bouwman now plays for amateur club OFC from Oostzaan.

Talents have left both under-18 teams during the corona period, but the clubs state that the non-renewal of contracts is not directly related to the pandemic. They take into account the development over a longer period.

“With the training and practice matches you can of course say something about the development of a player,” says Van Meenen. “With the information you do have and the result on the training field, we simply made decisions that we would otherwise have made.”

Van Meenen remembers that every Saturday, after the mutual practice matches, they sat with the coaching staff and said: how nice it would be if they could have a normal Saturday again. “I know very well, the very first time we had such a normal competition Saturday, yes, that was great.”

Correction, March 18, 2023: it was previously stated that Ischa Bouwman plays at vv Noordwijk, but that will only be possible from next season.

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