Thanks for the explanation
@antohan, who would be the starting back 4 for you or the average football fan in Uruguay?
Who do you consider the guilty party (if there is any) when you mention the bench-warming talent problem? On one hand there's clubs like Chelsea buying 2 reserve squads full of talent and loaning them out/putting them on the bench, but on the other side of the argument there's the players themselves going from rather obscure/small teams instantly to the big guns ala Real, Juve, Milan etc. It seems to be a choice between money (big club) and playing time (smaller club) and while it may seem wisest for players to advance there carreer in decent size steps, would you be able to say no to the big money/clubs?
Sorry I didn't reply earlier, don't usually check alerts. The starters will be Maxi - Lugano - Godin - Caceres. I had hopes Gimenez would make it and he may be eased in over the tourno as Lugano gets suspennded for collecting multiple yellows when caught out.
The problem is the agents and investors part-owning the players. About 15 years ago there was a major financial crisis with clubs here and it's a league rule that you can't start the season with debts (or no foreseeable revenue to repay them, it's rather complex). Clubs had to raise cash in a hurry so agents and private investors advised by agents chipped in in exchange for owning the best youth prospects. Recoba for instance was part of a "bundle" of 5 players going for 1M USD.
Of coourse, the agents and investors got minted but the whole system got structurally undermined as with no fees from selling players they had to start selling their latest crop every year. Furthermore, as the club doesn't own the player they have no say on them staying or leaving, it's entirely up to the owners. This impacts sports results and associated revenues... It's fecked up, domestic football has turned into a short-termist shithole and you couldn't even argue players should stay until they develop because the standards are now abysmal.
I'm not sure but I think that trend started here, we were the test market. Argentina has fallen in the same trap, Brazil has a mixture of that and moneybags owners... It's a shame, South American football used to be pretty damn good but it bores me senseless now.
That's virtually the same squad they took to South Africa.
Indeed. There's criticism there hasn't been enough replacement of ageing players, but that was always going to be hard with the spine being the older players. In fairness, the oldest ones, bar Lugano, are not really starters any more but trusted backups.
The rationale for it is linked to the issue above. After 20 years of regularly missing on the World Cup, Tabárez was hired to "sort it out"and his -accurate- diagnostic was that the players didn't have a coherent style, much inactivity, played in random clubs, in random leagues, and it was impossible to build a team that could get results based on them meeting occasionally and trainign for a few days. He established the team had to have an identity, play one system and players should be drilled in that from an early age as even if they went abroad later they would have it hardwired in them and would make keeping that style and coherence sustainable. He also established various criteria in terms of discipline, ethics, team-orienntation, etc.
Every U-17, U-19 and U-20 side is coached on that basis. It means the pool of players is those who made it into those sides (rules out late developers for the most part), then some get injuries, others never reach their potential... and so the pool narrows down. Which is why you keep seeing the same names with very little renovation. Forlán and the rest of the Old Guard are the ones who were NT-worthy at the time. In faiirness, Suárez, Cavani and a few others are from the first wave of inductees and had only just broken through in 2010. There's a logic to it and as far as playign as a team is concerned, it works.
Frankly, with 3M people and the domestic league in the state it is in, I can't think of a better way to go about things.
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