Far too small – became the largest

When will the clubs and coaches learn?
The size of a football player is not crucial.
Many players at all levels will be deselected because they are ‘not big enough’.
That’s how it happened when 12-13-year-old Antoine from the city of Macon north of the city of Lyon tried to get a foot inside the French clubs.
Antoine traveled around for trial training after trial training but was just ‘not big enough’ and was given the reasons for rejection from both Sochaux, Metz, Saint-Etienne, Montpellier and Auxerre, as well as the one that hurt the football mad boy the most: He was dropped by the favorite club Olympique Lyon, where he trained in a talent team for collaborating clubs every Sunday, shouting and screaming as a Lyon fan in the home games – but still he was rejected due to his size.
What a mistake!
For Antoine with the surname Griezmann ended up having to leave France and go to Spain to be allowed to play in a club’s talent squad when he got a youth contract with Real Sociedad.
In Lyon and in French football they first discovered Antoine Griezmann’s extreme abilities when he scored a sensational overhead kick goal for Sociedad that sent his childhood favorite club out of the Champions League. At the stadium where he himself stood and cheered as a boy – and where they said, ‘No, you are too small.’
(Watch the goal here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxHQaeELYLg)
Griezmann later moved to Atletico Madrid and is now the superstar in one of Europe’s best clubs.
And for France he was named best player at the European Championships two years ago – and to Man of the Match in the World Cup final in 2018 against Croatia, becoming world champion with Les Bleus. Very well done by one who was too small to get a contract …
‘The answer was always the same: What I hated to hear – that I was too small,’ Griezmann told in an interview with the English football magazine FourFourTwo.
If you have received the same message from a coach who looked at the size instead of the skills, remember Griezmann’s success – and remember his next words in that interview:
‘There were times when I thought it was difficult, but I never gave up. I continued to fight, and now I’m living my own dream. I do not think I would be where I am today and be as strong as I am, without the adversity of childhood.’

23 June, 2023

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