Training at the PSG Academy in Doha, Qatar.
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KARIM JAAFAR / AFP
Nahil Kanté, 13, is the very first player through the Academy to join the PSG training center.
This structure, created in 2015, allows young people aged 4 to 17, without level selection, to kick the ball with educators trained by PSG.
Do you know the story of PSG who, in 2013, missed a little Bondy kid named Kylian Mbappé, and who ended up signing him four years later against a check for 145 million euros?
You will admit that the price of the Paris-Monaco ticket is expensive.
But does a story like this still have a chance to happen again?
This is the question we asked ourselves when reading an article by our colleagues from Le Parisien on the young Nahil Kanté, 13, presented as "the little genius of the Academy recruited by the training center".
Arrived at Red Star at the age of 7 after having hit his first balls on the side of FCM Aubervilliers, he will regularly shuttle between the Etoile Rouge club and the Parisian Academy located at Urban Soccer in Aubervilliers.
Before finally joining the Rouge et Bleu and signing for six years.
Bad luck, after the publication of this paper, PSG double-closed all access to people who participated in the operation.
At the request of parents, who want to protect the son as long as possible from any unnecessary and potentially devastating pressure.
And obviously the deposit has traveled to the Red Star, since there too we were kindly made to understand that the subject was touchy.
No big deal.
In any case, it is not so much the player himself that interests us today as his atypical career and what he tells us - or not - of the evolution of the detection and recruitment policy of the player. PSG.
PSG meet its young supporters
Rather not, moreover, according to Nadia Benmockhtar, the former pro at Juvisy (current Paris FC) now in charge of the PSG Academy.
“Basically, this structure is not just a recruitment tool,” she asks at the outset, so that things are clear.
She explains: “The idea, as there are fans of the club all over the world, is to bring them little bits of PSG through our experience, our expertise in terms of training young people, with the help , on site, coaches and educators trained by the club.
"
Educator for 10 years at the FCM Aubervilliers football school, Ilyes Ramdani has seen “over the years more and more kids take part without us really knowing how to position ourselves in relation to it”.
"It is not necessarily competition for amateur clubs in the sense that the license price is higher at home [200 euros per year on average in a classic club vs. 300-400 euros at the Academy], he analyzes.
Afterwards, they offer a nice offer with educators trained by the club, not to mention the advantage of the five which allows you to play dry all year round.
We could clearly see that there was a form of attractiveness on the part of parents, and then there is the PSG label which is a major lever of attraction.
"
In fact, it is not the PSG itself which manages the some 102 Academy open in 14 countries around the world.
"We do not open them clean," confirms Nadia Benmockhtar.
We team up with a local partner, it goes through a license contract with a company [in France with Urban Soccer] which pays us to have access to this service [coach training and training programs delivered turnkey] and the brand image of the club.
"It is more the marketing strategy of the PSG which is at work there, not the sporting strategy, estimates Ramdani.
On the other hand, where it is interesting I find, it is that it made it possible to bring PSG closer to the popular districts.
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Pleasure more than performance at all costs
“The role of PSG Academy should not be overestimated.
It's almost a coincidence that he has been there, engages the educator of the 93. PSG simply recruited one of the best players of the Red Star and it turned out that he was also at the Urban d'Aubervilliers via the Academy.
But in fact there is a huge distance between PSG and that.
I am not convinced that this is a link with the training center.
There is also no selection of level at the entry, which proves that we are more on a notion of pleasure than of performance strictly speaking.
A finding that did not escape Ramdani: “In terms of performance, it has nothing to do with it.
The PSG Academy often asked us to organize small friendly matches since we are right next door, and very often it ended with a 10-15 goal gap for our kids.
"
“The idea is still to help children progress individually and collectively in the environment in which they are so that, tomorrow, they will be complete players.
But they do not belong to PSG and they will be free to sign in any training center afterwards if ever they have the level, ”specifies the person in charge of the structure.
At the club, we fully assume this lack of returns on investment, beyond the ticket they earn from these international partnerships.
"In Brazil, we have three players who are now regularly called up to the Seleçao youth team, we are super happy for them, even if we know that they will not necessarily sign for the club later," says Benmockhtar .
The same goes for the boys: "In the United States we had a kid who was super good but he was nine years old, so we couldn't offer him anything [Fifa regulations prohibit international transfers of minors], and two later he signed to the New York Red Bulls.
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"If you have a nugget, let us know"
But beware, PSG is no more stupid than another.
“Of course if we have the next Neymar in an Academy, we will still try to keep an eye on him and try to get him signed with us, smiles the former defender.
Besides, the people at the center tell us: "if you have a nugget, let us know".
And there, either the kid is almost 18 (or 16 if he's European) and we try to see if he wants to sign with us, or he is younger and we can not do anything.
“If this is not to rely on the quality of the work provided by the educators of the Academy to convince parents to continue the adventure with the PSG.
Which is not a cheap argument.
Here again, the Ile-de-France educator is cautious.
“I don't think that PSG needs the image of the Academy to convince the best young people to join them today.
They have an enormous financial capacity, they have a brand image, that is more than enough for them.
"If we can use the brand image conveyed by PSG through our structure, it's great, concludes Nadia Benmockhtar.
But without tongue in cheek, the goal is not really not to miss the next Mbappé.
"
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