Dutch football 'needs to keep its top players in the country'

Dutch football faces the mammoth challenge of keeping homegrown talent within its clubs if it seeks to scale the heights of glory days of "total football" in the 1970s and 80s, according to a top official from the Dutch Football Association.

"We need our players to stay within our clubs in the Netherlands and our biggest challenge at the moment is to keep the agents away from taking our top players to play in other leagues in Europe," Corne Groenendijk, the technical expert from the Netherlands Royal Football Association told delegates on the final day of the 1st Dubai International Football Academies Forum Sunday.

Known either for their synonymous concept of "total football" or for delivering some of the flamboyant names in the sport like Johan Cryuff, Van Basten and Gullit, the coach believed that the bane of Dutch modern-day football has more to do with the "structural environment" than with talent today.

"Our World Cup team today is even better than the teams of 1974 or 1978," Groenendijk said in response to a question."We have been suffering due to some changes in the structural environment and not due to the paucity of players. We have players like Sneijder, Robben and Van Persie to match those names of the 1970s and 80s," he said.

"What we have instructed our coaches, is to keep away from this 10 per cent of talented players and allow them to develop. On the other hand, the staff has also be told to make the other 90 per cent work hard and try and match this 10 per cent," Groenendijk said.

"In this way, we are not missing too many things to have a successful run, as seen by our entry into the 2010 Fifa World Cup final. But what we see as a definite challenge is how to keep these players back at our clubs in the Netherlands," he asserted.

"The debate following our loss to Spain last year has been ‘Should we be known for good football and go home after the first round? Or should our football be more of a fight and less of play?'. My opinion is good football, and the current team has the stars to show this brand," Groenendijk reiterated.

"We have no Dutch secret on our success. We have a vision at the club level and we have stuck to this vision while working with a single-minded focus. The results will be seen in due course," he added.