During the summer of 2017 the Veikkausliiga seemed to be on the precipice of a rarely seen wave of exciting young talent breaking through domestically, and therefore earning fairly priced moves abroad. Alfredo Morelos turned out to be a steal for Glasgow Rangers, and will probably earn them their money back multiple times over if they decide to move him on before his contract runs out. Mikael Soisalo had moved to Middlesbrough the previous January, Saku Ylätupa had gone to Ajax during the summer window and Timo Stavitski packed his bags for Caen the following January. All of the moves were greeted with great fanfare – finally, the Finnish league had become a talent feeder for the big leagues.
Ah, the heady days of summer! The sun rested high in the sky and the possibilities seemed endless. Now, on the other hand, it feels like it’s been raining for a decade and Mikael Soisalo has just had to change his address for the third time in four years as he heads for the Portuguese second division. Maybe that 2017 outlook was a little premature after all?
For someone who spends a lot of time thinking about domestic football, I have a tendency to harp on about players moving abroad. It doesn’t stem from disrespect for the Finnish league system as much as it does from a feeling that it is a necessity for the proper development of a young footballer to move abroad; spend a lot of time in Finland as a footballer, and you’re unfortunately not going to be exposed to the best development circumstances, the highest level of competition, the best wages. Going abroad, then, is the thing that all players playing in Finland should aspire to, and something clubs in Finland should actively encourage their players to do.
It is therefore difficult to argue that Soisalo, Stavitski or Ylätupa should have done anything differently. Read interviews with Finnish players who have moved to the Estonian league, the Irish league or the Norwegian third tier and you’ll invariably stumble upon the notion that playing abroad is something that every player dreams about, and only a rare few get to experience. Being snobbish about where you go, or even when you go, is a luxury players in Finland unfortunately can’t really afford – especially if the deal in question has the potential to significantly boost the selling club’s finances, like in the case of Stavitski and RoPS.
It might be difficult to argue, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be attempted, as it is a discussion worth having. Development is a tricky business, and any one player only has one career, so making the right maneuvers at the right time is of great importance. It isn’t quite as dramatic as only getting one chance to make the right move – Teemu Pukki is a case in point for how a talented player will keep getting chances until he figures it out, if he ever figures it out – but young players can help themselves quite a lot by removing the worst options from the equation.
There are, as far as I can tell, a couple of factors directly affecting player development in football: coaching quality, playing time, match quality, individual thresholds (physical, mental, technical). There is a discussion to be had whether there’s a technological aspect being forgotten in the above list, like access to equipment, analytics, the correct mindset – read The MVP Machine for a perspective on this – but I’m not sure if tech in football is mature enough to be worth a mention.
The problem with the the above trio of players – to me at least – is that they all jumped too many levels at one go before even really proving that they could dominate in the Veikkausliiga. Essentially putting more weight on coaching quality and match quality and less weight on playing time. For a young player, I think this is a massive mistake as I would consider playing time the most important factor for player development by far. Coaching is important, but whatever it is you learn on the training ground, you need to be able to put into practice, and you can’t do that if you aren’t playing. If you aren’t playing, the level at which you would be playing is merely anecdotal.
I don’t mean to say that Ylätupa, Stavitski or Soisalo weren’t good when they were playing in Finland – they definitely were, to varying degrees. It’s just that they weren’t dominant, and if you’re going to be making several level-jumps at one go, you should be able to show that you aren’t troubled by Veikkausliiga-level opponents.
Soisalo and Stavitski both showed good ball carrying ability, and had good creative numbers but had little in terms of goalmouth presence. Soisalo ended up scoring a bunch of goals in 2016, but he was Ilves’ designated penalty taker, so had some padded goal numbers. Stavitski has always had electric pace, which is a projectable tool, which is probably also the reason why he attracted the amount of interest he did.
Ylätupa, on the other hand, had some fairly pedestrian numbers, but showed some really nice flashes of ability during his brief spell at RoPS. He was, apparently, recommended to Ajax by Jari Litmanen, so it is unclear exactly how much they knew about him apart from the recommendation.
As an aside, the ability that the players have in common is dribbling, being able to carry the ball long stretches, which is straight out of the Pep Guardiola scouting handbook.
In all three cases, the numbers are good for the age and the level, but from a developmental perspective, I’m not sure that’s enough. Even in a new, better environment you need playing time to keep progressing, and in order to get playing time, you need to be productive on the pitch.
The added bonus of playing time is that it serves the purpose of establishing where in the football hierarchy you are currently situated. If you’re a good player in the Veikkausliiga then an Allsvenskan club can be fairly certain that you would do pretty well for them. If you continue to do well at Allsvenskan level, then a team further up in the food chain can be assured that you might be a good fit for them. A player on the books of a big club with no senior appearances ends up falling between the gaps a little bit, as youth football is fundamentally different from senior football. And sure, smart clubs like Brentford can exploit that fact by aggressively pursuing players who drop out of academies, without making a final breakthrough, but even so, you need to catch the eye of the smart teams for that to become a possibility, and even that isn’t a sure thing. In many of the cases of Finns moving abroad at a young age, it seems like they quite quickly disappear into the grey mass of the destination academy. A superstar prospect in Finland isn’t guaranteed to look anything but ordinary in a different setting with different expectations – Saku Ylätupa being a prime example of this.
Going abroad also removes any advantage a player has for being local. If you grew up next door to the stadium, people are going to find intangible reasons for you to get another chance, but if you’re just another foreign import, you’re going to need to start showing signs of development from day one, or you’re out the door.
The other side of the coin is that once you’re out of the door, you’re falling from a much higher place than before. If you drop out of the Veikkausliiga, you’re going to face an uphill battle just to stay relevant. Mikael Soisalo, instead, fell from Middlesbrough to the Belgian league to the Portuguese second tier and Ylätupa fell from Ajax to AIK. If they had made those moves from Finland at the same juncture of their careers, they would possibly have been seen as great developmental moves for both players.
And there’s no reason to think that they can’t be! As mentioned previously, Teemu Pukki has done a lot of level-jumping in his career – both back and forth – and has now settled at the highest possible level as a very productive player – it doesn’t seem to have hurt him. Only, using the biggest Finnish talent of a generation as a template isn’t necessary optimal – not all prospects will have that inherent level of talent to carry them during their low points. And maybe Pukki would have settled quicker if his development path had been managed better. That he finally did break out the way he did is testament to his willpower and hard work, but could he have found his previously elusive work rate sooner if he had made better decisions?
It’s impossible to know for sure, every player is an individual which makes it difficult to make comparisons. The one thing I would take from Pukki’s development path, though, is that the key moments in his career have been decisions to take a step back in order to take two steps forward. The biggest moves for him were to take the dreaded maitojuna back to Finland to play for HJK and to go to Bröndby after having played for Schalke and Celtic. These were the kind of realistic, mature and pragmatic moves that gave him the platform to reach the heights he has, and although Soisalo, Stavitski and Ylätupa have all taken steps back after their initial moves, their steps maybe haven’t been far enough back (in fairness to Stavitski, he did return to RoPS on loan last season but injured himself before the season started).
This is something that some smarter clubs will do for you nowadays. At the very top level, teams now have specialized staff managing player loans to make sure that the players keep developing even though they are temporarily outside of the club’s control. Below that level, though, it becomes the responsibility of the player himself (or his representation) to demand this type of attention. Take Lassi Lappalainen as an example: instead of going to Bologna directly, he’ll have a season of MLS under his belt before facing that fight. He had established himself as a top senior player in Finland and made sure that he was going to get senior games at the next level. Joel Pohjanpalo is another good example, first a loan back to HJK, then a couple of seasons in the 2. Bundesliga before going to a patiently waiting Leverkusen.
It’ll be interesting to follow where Soisalo’s, Stavitski’s and Ylätupa’s careers take them, especially considering that there is a decent control group in Lassi Lappalainen and potentially Eetu Vertainen of players with roughly the same potential, playing roughly similar positions, with roughly similar youth paths who have made different decisions in formative stages of their careers.
So, if we recognize that this is a thorny issue with few objectively correct answers, what should a young player in Finland do if faced with this kind of dilemma?
The below chart shows some numbers for players who have moved abroad from Finland since 2013. On the y-axis we have ageseasons which is basically the age at which the player is playing during a particular season. On the x-axis we have the age of the player when they made the move abroad. The color of the tile shows the average of level adjusted minutes, with redder being more – the level adjustment is essentially a multiplier based on the level of competition.
What the chart suggests is that an early move is no guarantee for future success, in fact 18 seems to be the youngest recommended age to move, and waiting even longer seems like a decent idea. This matches up with the idea that breaking through in the Veikkausliiga should be the first thought on players’ minds before dreaming about a career abroad. Does this mean that a player should hang around in Finland until he turns 21? I wouldn’t say so, but I do think that you should always move to play, and to play senior football, wherever you go, and that if you make a jump of several levels, that you should require a more-or-less immediate loan, either back to the Veikkausliiga, or to an only slightly higher level. As I keep saying, the most important statistic for a young player is the amount of minutes you play.
The same tendency can be noticed from the current Huuhkajat-setup as well. How many of the current regulars left Finland before making a Veikkausliiga or Ykkönen appearance? I count Jesse Joronen (who had a loan stint at Lahti), Lukas Hradecky, Tim Sparv and Fredrik Jensen while Glen Kamara, Robert Taylor and Thomas Lam were naturalized, so started off abroad. The rest, at least to some extent, established a footing in the domestic leagues before pushing onward.
Although this can’t necessarily be considered proof of anything, it should still serve as a counterweight to the inevitable lure of glory that a big club’s academy represents for an impressionable young player.
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