James Gow on Enjoying Life in Abu Dhabi, Working with Young Talents, and Future Plans for Al Jazira Academy
Abu Dhabi: Sep. 21, 2021
We caught up with the new academy technical director James Gow, and here is everything he said about his new life in Abu Dhabi, his love for the job, his views on how to develop young talents, and how to improve Al Jazira academy to become even better and better than it already is.
New City, New Adventure
“Its brilliant, I enjoy living here because it’s a nice place to live in, the people are nice, the food is good, I love the job, it’s a massive job to do and I am motivated by that. To be honest, I spend most of the time here in the academy and in football, and because I enjoy the job so much the lifestyle and those things become so easy. I probably spend 10 hours here, six days a week, and there are so many things to do, and I enjoy it all very much”.
Enjoying Abu Dhabi
“I like how clean everything is, and how well structured everything else and I enjoy that. I have not done so much exploring yet, but I loved the nature here in Abu Dhabi, Al Ain, and Al Dhafra region, and I enjoyed going out to see the desert. Driving here has been a good challenge because it’s different than driving in England but am doing good. The weather is different of course but I like it. We have to be smart in how we train with the heat to achieve the intensity we require, but in the cooler months you will be able to train harder because the weather is perfect”.
About Al Jazira Club Academy
“We have an incredible facility and an incredible infrastructure, and we’ve got a lot of good players. When people see Al Jazira badge they talk more about the academy, and sometimes more than they do about the first team, so I can see the sense of pride about it amongst everybody, and this is giving an understanding of how big the academy is within the club structure and how important it is to the club. The size of Al Jazira club is massive, and everyone knows what it is. The expectations are high but not just for the first team but for the academy also, and I noticed that everyone is very proud of the tradition of bringing players from the academy to the first team, and I feel a sense of belonging and pride amongst people, and that is the biggest thing that shone for me so far”.
Role models in the First Team
“Playing for a huge club like Al Jazira and for the national team is an absolute honor, and having players who represent the UAE and Al Jazira in front of our academy youngsters is very motivating. We are always reminding our players of where they are now, and telling them the likes of Ali Mabkhout and the others were in their shoes before. Mabkhout started here and played in these pitches and now he is playing in huge stadiums in front of big crowds with the UAE and Al Jazira team, and this is a clear inspiration for our players and a clear target to reach. I tell my staff all the time to remind the players about why they are here, and we talk to them every day about what we are doing. Our job is to produce top-quality players on and off the football field, and everything we do is aligned with this idea because we want to help the first team in terms of football, and to do that we have to be incredible in everything we do. For the players, they can see they’ve got stars ahead of them and they were in my shoes, and at some point, I can be in their place, but it doesn’t come easy. It takes sacrifice, hard work, energy, enthusiasm, and desire”.
Pressure on the kids
“It is not right to compare yourself to another player and our young players should never do this because everyone has a totally different background and different personalities and it will be an impossible game to win. Mabkhout is an incredible football player but young forwards should never compare themselves to him, instead, they should look up to him and put him as inspiration. We tell every player once he enters the building that the comparison should be against himself and he should end the day in a better way than he started it and he should be better today than he was yesterday, and these rules are applying also to me and the staff, not only the players”.
Development vs. Winning
“That is the classic question, developing talent against winning titles. I want every single player that we’ve got to want to win every single game of football he plays and I want them to win every competition they participate in even if it’s a rock, paper, scissors tournament, but myself and my coaches and staff have to zoom away from that. Coaches and players have to and they have to show that winning mentality at all times, however, the challenge comes when you only want to win and you find yourself forced to sacrifice development. Let’s say for example that you have a talented striker who is seventeen years old, and another striker who is 21 years old, the second one might be a better player than the first currently, but the 17 years old has more potential and can be better in the future than the 21 years old. If we stick to the 21 years old striker then we may win more football games, but he will never reach that level the 17 years might reach, and we if play with the 17 years old in the U21 team we know there is a gap between him and between the rest of the team. In the short term, we are going to sacrifice winning games for the sake of developing that talent. The younger player will need time to reach the level we want him to reach, but we have to expose him at this early age to different challenges. This means we are not going to win as many matches as we want to win now, but after one year, the younger player may have closed that gap and perform better than the older. I ask my coaches to stretch their players beyond their safety zone and push them to the next level and outside their comfort zone. This might be playing him for the U19 while he is still 17 years old but we’ve got to push him because the only way to learn and improve is by being outside of your comfort zone. When you are learning something new your performance will drop down in the short term, and this could lead to losing matches, but we are sacrificing short-term goals for the greater good and for the long-term bigger goals, which is to produce a better football player for the future. Of course, we want to win titles and trophies, but what is more important than that is for them to develop according to our own style, and if this means we are going to concede more goals and accept more defeats at the youth team level then I can accept this”.
Adaptability
“We believe in adaptability, and in the last season our first team played with four different formations, and if we stick to only one style of play and one formation through all age groups our players will end up knowing only one style of play. We are trying to give them different experiences to play with and to get used to, and this makes them more adaptable. I don’t want to hear from a national team coach that our players are struggling to adapt to their ideas or play within their formations because I hope that we have prepared them to be adaptable and find ways to play in other formations and styles. We have a clear idea of how we want to play, and it is the majority of what we are doing, but at the same time if we developed them in the right way, they will be able to adapt to different styles and formations, and this what we are striving for now. I have continuous conversations with the coaches of the national teams, and I ask them about our players and how they are performing and the things they are doing with them, and I have the feedback I need about our players over there. This gives me more insights and information, and this is how we make the players balance between what they need to do for the national team and for us. National team camps are not that long, and the players will not return with a different mindset after only three days with the national team but hopefully, they will have even more inspiration having represented their country.
What's special about Al Jazira Academy
We have many good players, and for example, we have many good defensive midfielders and of course, we can’t put them all with the first team. It’s a matter of continuous conversation with the players, and it’s about showing them where they could be, and we have to keep this hunger alive by letting them know that if they performed well enough they could be with the first team at any time. At the same time, they need to know that not reaching the first team is not a failure, it’s a process of learning and improving. The first team manager needs players who can do specific things in training and matches, so if a player didn’t reach the first team at a specific time he will always know at what aspects of his game he will have to improve. All young footballers should be eager to join the first team, and they know very well if they are good enough the club will give them the chance. The sporting director and first-team coach are very supportive, I meet them on a regular basis each week and they know the players and they know my thoughts about everything”.
Communication with the First Team
“We already have a great connection with the first team and I have to be clear about this, we are connected with the CEO, the sporting director, and with Marcel and his staff and they are always visiting us in the academy, and the players and coaches here recognize that. It would be powerful to have players coming from the first team to engage with the young players, talk to them about what it means to play for the first team and what it takes to get there. Recently we organized a nice occasion for Saeed Al Abdouly who played his first-ever match with the first team against Ittihad Kalba a couple of weeks ago, and it was very inspiring for the kids to see one of them doing well enough and getting his chance to play in the first team with Ali Mabkhout and the others”.
What makes Al Jazira Academy different
“We have amazing management, and when we think there is something that will add value to the academy they will listen to us with very open minds, and we think about something that will help our players to become better, they will do it. We know the identity of the types of players that can play for Al Jazira and this is important, they need to have the core fundamentals to play for Al Jazira, they need to have a positive mentality and they need to be really strong with the ball, brave to ask always for the ball, technically good, and have the necessary skills. We also have an incredible facility, a brilliant strategy, which is to promote youth to the first team. I am constantly in conversation with my superiors all the time about what players we have here and who have the potential to go up, who needs to be stretched, who needs the opportunity, and we know the chances are going to come. We do not look outside when it comes to bringing in new players to the first team, we look inside the academy and we see who could potentially be good enough to play for the team because young players will add value and bring energy and enthusiasm to the first team. The strategy of the club is very strong and it comes from the very top down to everything we do on the pitch, it's all aligned”.
Future Plans
“We definitely take inspiration from other academies and organizations around the world, and we know there will always be ways to evolve. So whenever you do a good job you will have to find new ways to evolve even more. At the moment, we are working on hiring a performance consultant and performance analysts to give us greater insights, so we can know and decide what do we need to do more for each one of them. This includes the coaches also, they have to perform to their best, they have to plan more than they’ve done before, they have to review more than they’ve ever done before, and so on. We can still have an environment that is world-class, an environment that would be sufficient to develop high-performance individuals. One of our short-term goals is to bring more knowledge to the players, whether that be through education or through daily meetings and conversations. We want to add always to what we already have, this could be by increasing our support systems, performance analysis so that we can get more information about players from GPS monitors and sport science, and this will give us more insights on players like how much sleep they get, what type of food they eat. Players need to take care of themselves in everything they do if they really want to play for Al Jazira's first team and the UAE National Team. They might spend two hours with us on the training pitch every day, and we will do everything to help them grow up during these two hours, but we will also educate them on everything they need to do outside the pitch because it all contributes to you becoming the best version of yourself”.
U21 League
“There is continuous discussion in everywhere about the reserve / U21 competitions, and the system is different in each country, so there will always be something people can do to improve it and make it better. The structure of the U21 league in the UAE is good, of course, it can be better, but right now it's good. Having more than one competition for this group of age is always beneficial, so a cup tournament might be a big addition to these players. I like the current setup of the league because it's identical to the first team calendar and this is useful because it will make the U21 player prepare for matches in the same way as the first team player. The U21 players are playing in big stadiums and this is amazing because they get a taste of what it means to be a first-team player, and this is a good value to the current setup of this league”.
