“Taking risks, taking risks is the way it is”the speech of the technician Favio Sardano it is accompanied by applause that makes the palms explode. The game escapes along with the possibility of the championship for the 2004 category Fountain, a small football club for children in Remedios de Escalada, in Lanús. It does not matter.

The lineers won 3-2. But the ball and the protagonism have always been of the Lafuente boysEven after the expulsion of Matteo Sanabria. They are only 10, but you forgot their age when you saw them play. They played, showed themselves and searched, but luck was not on their side and the minutes passed without the boys being able to twist the story. Massimiliano Gonzalez is the captain. Defeat hurts him so much, as these things hurt when you are 10: with all his soul. There is nothing more important at that age. However, Maxi does not bow her head and he goes to the place where his family and friends are waiting for him with many hugs.

That same head held high now nearly a decade later. He is still captain, but now in the Argentina Under 20 National Team. Next to him and with the same shirt is Mateo, who this time was not sent off. Standing in the middle of the field, Maxi looks for his teammates and distributes the ball judiciously. It is still the same that was filled with football in Lafuente.

Sardano – who also played as a central midfielder – managed the boys together sebastiano solomon throughout his career in youth football. He highlights the Albiceleste captain as “a very concentrated boy both on and off the pitch who deserves everything he is experiencing with his friends”.

Salomón, former Lanús and Los Andes footballer and now coach of the Garnet youth teams after an experience in the Milrayitas First Division, cannot hide the emotion that comes from seeing his boys in the national jersey or in the First Division. “We have known them since we were 5 and we love them as if they were our children. They were placed in our care when their parents were late and we offered them hot chocolate at the club buffet. Seeing them like this today fills your soul. “

But Maxi and Mateo are not alone in the journey that took them from the small lane of Melo Street at 3900 to the AFA campus in Ezeiza, with a stopover in the lower ones of Lanús, and from Ezeiza airport to France. Brothers Franco and Valentin Carbonitoday in Inter and sons of the former Lanús captain Ezequiel Carboni, and the central Brian Aguilar They also left Lafuente and are part of the youth team headed by Javier Mascherano. And not only that: in the Sub 17 driven by Diego Placious there is Luciano Romerofrom category 2006.

What are the secrets of the new forge of (good) Argentine football? Eleven field jobs adapted to small spaces, short teams so that everyone feels important, respect for the ball and for the learning processes of each child, are the commandments that the coaches follow to try to explain this phenomenon of the southern GBA club, the new quarry of Argentine football which already has a dozen home players who today make up the professional teams of the First Division clubs. In the best style of the Club Parque in the 90s.

The key to the club’s educational success is work that is more focused on teaching than immediate success. “It is more interesting that they learn. The goal has always been to leave them the training tools. That they learn to decide, that they risk, that they make mistakes to add, seemed more important to us than going crazy to become champions with two headers ”, explains Salomón.

“For us, being champions was seeing the boys arrive in the First Division with the resources we gave them. We chose a path, knowing that it was a matter of losing many games, but understanding that our result was not to be seen in 40 minutes but in ten years ”, adds Sardano.

These are not easy times for those who pursue the dream of succeeding with the ball at their feet. Representatives, pressures and egos come sooner than expected. “We, first of all, are educators. We try to instill in them that they are first of all children, that they have everything to learn and that mistakes are part of learningSolomon observes.

It is complete: “That is why we need to work more with parents. We all believe our children are the best. This is why we ask that only for that short time we are the fathers and mothers of the boys. It is a necessary pact between parents, players and coaches ”.

Sardano understands baby football as a place where “seniors have a responsibility to decompress to get out of the vortex of instant success” and focus on a space to “teach with the ball”. In this sense, Salomón, champion with Lanús in 2007, affirms that baby soccer is an “extremely exquisite activity for education if carried out with conscience”. And he points out that it is a “unique environment in which children also form a sense of belonging with their friends and their neighborhood”.

“One of the most difficult tasks is that you have to teach them to share the ball, at an age where what they want is to always have it.. When to touch and when to dribble, at the same time tell them to be free to decide. So it is a slow training path but one that bears fruit ”, adds Sardano.

The success of the tour

The word pedagogy appears more than coach. And it is no small thing. Lafuente’s technicians move from the center of the scene, something peculiar in the world of children’s football where there are many technicians who tell first-hand championships of 6-year-olds.

For Salomón, being champion “is a great joy”, but the chosen path “has never been questioned”. Winning by beating him up and leaving the apprenticeship for Monday “was never an option“. “The finals were lost due to risk taking, because it is part of learning, because first of all we want them to know how to make decisions and we are proud of it,” she remarks.

Sardano concludes: “Many said: ‘You play a lot but you don’t come out as champions’. But today when you see 12 Lafuente players in the First Division you say: ‘Hey, we won something’ “” The boys have an age where if they lose a final and after two seconds you put a small field next to them they forget that they have lost , why are they still playing now? It is important that the grown-ups understand this, ”Salomón emphasizes.

The essence of the boy in the professional player

«The essentials have been in the First Division for five years. Of course things are built in, but those who dribble as a child do it as an adult, those who are selfless or intelligent as a child are as an adult. We try to improve what they have brought, just that. It is very strong (and very nice) to see you men today, doing things that we saw when they were with us ”, Sardano gets excited.

And he completes: «They will always have to work because learning is learned every day, but the idea was to prepare those who arrived at the club, whether they play or not, so that they always feel a little better. Childhood is a unique age. Bigger or smaller trophies don’t count if you don’t learn. “

“It happened to us from parents who told us they were wasting time because the kids weren’t winning and that their kids wanted to stay because they liked what they had learned. It was said that the fruits of what was taught would be seen in the long term, but in the meantime they continued to be children ”, concludes Salomón. It’s just that, as Mascherano’s Under 20 captain taught long ago, football is played in many ways, but it’s always better to keep your head held high and look beyond.