Sergiy Tyshchenko's column. How many players for the first team should Dynamo Academy train?

Guillermo Samso, the former Argentine coach of Dynamo Kyiv's youth teams, has taken over the Peruvian team Persas from the League of the Kings of the Americas. This league features teams that include showbiz stars and football legends.

I know Gilya well. He is an acquaintance of mine. He is a man with a big heart and good personal qualities. When the Argentine Francisco Alvarenga Samso arrived at Olimpik Kyiv, he was looking for opportunities to contact his countryman and expressed a desire to help him adapt. On 24 February 2022, he supported Ukraine on social media. Although he did not stay here for long.

Being a good guy is not a profession. Guillermo will now train showbiz stars and football legends. After Dynamo, he worked for the Libyan Football Federation. He worked somewhere at the grassroots in Spain. Before moving, I worked in Japan. There were offers from Turkey, but I chose Ukraine with my friend Ramon Catala. The general level of these Methodists is not high. Their only real advantage is that they are foreigners.

Argentine football and Ukrainian football don't have much in common to be able to work effectively on a methodology. Another Argentine, the more status-based Jorge "Koke" Raffo (who was the director of Barcelona's school in Argentina), also gave nothing to Shakhtar's school. Anthropometry was the first priority in the selection process. At the youth level, it can help you win, and then... Shakhtar have no players born in 2003, 2004, 2005 for the first team. Raffo hasn't seen Danylo Krevsun, who is now scoring and playing at Borussia Dortmund. Where are his giants? Because the contract included prize money for winning youth competitions....

Now everyone is demanding a bunch of young players for the first team. Where are your own pupils? Nowadays, the coach of Dynamo's youth team, Ihor Kostiuk, is being criticised for various things. Some people don't like the game, some don't like the results. Someone counts the number of passes or the percentage of possession. But no one takes into account the material Ihor Volodymyrovych works with. In fact, Dynamo does not have a 2004.

Samso was trying to pronounce Igor Horbach's name in a very funny way and predicted a great future for him. Today, Horbach plays only for Zorya. Anton Tsarenko has been in the first team since 2004. And he is still only a rotational player. No one knows whether he will be able to play at the first team level. There were some interesting players there, although not many of them. I don't remember all of them. But the same Yevhen Pastukh scored 3 goals and made an assist for Rukh in the UPL. His style of play is as textured and powerful as Artem Dovbyk's. This Zhytomyr resident did not stay at Dynamo for long.

The year 2005 is not good either. You can't expect to see many players with a view to the first team there. We don't take into account Taras Mikhavak and Roman Salenko, who joined the team through selection at a relatively mature age. Oleksiy Gusev still has a chance. Perhaps, Dmitry Kremchanin and Andrey Matkevich.

It's very simple: the higher the quality of the coaches, the more players will be in the first team. Ihor Kostiuk and Oleksandr Shovkovskyi have already become hostages to what the Academy is bringing up. They can change something, but they cannot turn a player around. There are obvious talents like Ilya Zabarnyi or Viktor Tsygankov, who should have moved on to adult football on their own. The rest of them need to be worked on. You have to work very hard. Sometimes you have to squeeze out more than the player has.

Before Samso and Catala, there was a Methodist, Romeo Wendler. He was a Croatian-German specialist. He is a Croat, but worked for many years in German football. The then coach of the team, Oleksandr Hatskevych, wanted to have an Academy with a German flavour. What good did Wendler do? His methodology didn't work at all. Then he was sent to work with the attacking players so as not to be expelled and breach his contract. Another answer to the question of where the youngsters are in the first team. Wendler is now without a club according to Transfermarkt.

The Argentine and German-Croatian methodology did not produce the desired result for the Dynamo Academy, there was no breakthrough or novelty effect. I think that the club's structure worked on about the same results without inviting foreign specialists to the Academy of the capital's team.

Not long ago, coach Mykola Ishchenko left the Dynamo Academy. First to Yuriy Maksymov at Zvyagel, and then to Dnipro-1. Just think about the fact that the coach of the Dynamo Academy went to work in the Second League as an assistant. Probably, there were no conditions, or he wanted more money, or ambition At the same time, the talents of coach Ishchenko are not fully understood.

The other day, another Dynamo Academy coach, Yevhen Lozinsky, took over Obolon's youth team. Earlier, Artem Yashkin moved to Rukh. In 2017, Volodymyr Samborskyi and Oleksandra Sytnyk left Shakhtar. I'm not ready to discuss what kind of coaches Ishchenko, Yashkin, Lozynsky or Sytnyk are, but Samborsky is a very serious specialist in youth football at the level of Ukraine.

When people demand big transfers from Dynamo, I just want to laugh in their faces. We should not demand investments in players, because they can only give short-term results, but in the Academy's coaches. They are the ones who grow and shape the future of Dynamo Kyiv. How successful it will be depends on their work.

Now the demand for coaches of youth teams will only increase. LNZ plans to create an Academy. Polissia has big plans. "Rukh has big ambitions. "Shakhtar is used to trying to be the first. Foreign schools like Benfica will appear. Competition for quality specialists will only increase. Accordingly, the price for the services of such specialists will only increase.

But there's no need to overstate the case. Not everything is so bad. Today, the Dynamo Academy has brought up the best young player in the country - Matvey Ponomarenko. He is from Myronivka, Kyiv region. No one stole him from anywhere or brought him here. He was simply brought up. "Shakhtar, Rukh, Dnipro-1 cannot boast of a player of this level of talent.

The work at the Dynamo Academy is ongoing. The year 2003 brought Volodymyr Brazhko, Nazar Voloshin, and Ilya Zabarnyi. But it won't be like that every year. Now we can count on one, or at most two, players from each generation. These are today's realities. And some of them get their chance with advances. Is this enough for the first team to perform well? This is the main question. To make the Academy's work more effective, we need to improve many aspects of the Academy's work - some coaching, international selection experience, international tournaments - rather than change them.

Serhii Tyshchenko