Uruguay's teenage World Cup hero vindicates its youth soccer policy

The British press made much of the young players in Roy Hodgson’s England team, but the young man who stole the show was 19-year-old at the heart of the Uruguayan defense that defeated the English in São Paulo.

Not only was José María Giménez making his World Cup debut, the England match – in which he replaced Uruguay’s injured captain and team leader, Diego Lugano – represented only the 25^th senior game of his entire career, for club and country combined.

Giménez had the reassurance of lining up alongside his Atlético Madrid teammate Diego Godín, but in fact he has only ever played once for the Albirroja’s first team. He had earned a 1 million euro ($1.4m) transfer to the Spanish club a year ago, after 16 games for Danubio of Montevideo, where he had made his debut aged 17 years and seven months.

Giménez’s dramatic rise to World Cup football is testament to the strength of Uruguay’s youth football set-up, something on which national coach Óscar Tabáre has placed great emphasis. Giménez played in all seven games of Uruguay’s run to the final of the Under-20 World Cup in Turkey last year where La Celeste only lost out to France in the final on penalties, following a 0-0 draw.

Tabárez himself is a former Uruguay Under-20 coach, and when he was appointed in 2006 for his second spell in charge of the senior side he implemented an integrated approach to the national teams at all levels. It was based on recognizing that Uruguay, a country of barely 3.4 million, could not rely on the glories of the past to recapture success, and was inspired by the youth set-up implemented by José Pékerman in Argentina in the 1990s. In addition to running the senior squad, Tabárez supervises the work of the coaches of each of the age-group teams. And many of the senior players have graduated through that national youth system. Even veteran striker Diego Forlán played in Víctor Púa’s team that finished fourth at the Under-20 World Cup of 1999.

Tabárez works hard to inculcate a group feeling and style, telling The Blizzard recently: “When we took over, several players from the Under-17 team were playing abroad or had just been sold to European clubs. We didn’t like it. Footballers cannot grow up alone and we believe it’s important not to interrupt the learning process. The U-15, U-17 and U-20 teams are vital in order to maintain the process.”

Giménez was thus well-placed to make a seamless transition to the senior team. His debut came last September in a qualifier against Colombia, in which he shut out the combined striking talents of Radamel Falcao and James Rodríguez for a 2-0 victory.

When signing him, the Atlético president, Enrique Cerezo, said: "He represents everything good about Uruguayans: character, strength and discipline." Tabárez had no hesitation in turning to the teenager for the do-or-die England fixture, in which defeat would have meant almost certain elimination, indicating that he was preferred to the young Liverpool defender Sebastián Coates because of his superior pace.

All of this is in stark contrast to the difficulties England have had in creating a conveyor belt of talent from the youth system to the senior set-up. The former Under-21 coach, Stuart Pearce, repeatedly complained that eligible players were claimed by the senior squad when they could have gaining valuable tournament experience with the youth set-up. As a long punt up the middle bamboozled the English defense for Uruguay’s winner in São Paulo, it was tempting to think that he may have had a point.