Belgium: How fine details and painful defeats transformed Red Devils into world-beaters

“I remember the final very well,” says Werner Helsen. “We lost it because of small details, just little things.”

Helsen is recalling Belgium’s only previous appearance in a European Championship final, in Italy in 1980, when Guy Thys’ side lost 2-1 to West Germany, conceding a goal two minutes from time at the Stadio Olimpico.

It’s no coincidence that he chooses to dwell on the small details given that Helsen, along with Michel Sablon, Belgium’s then technical director, was responsible for turning Belgium from global non-entities into the world’s number one ranked side.

He’s also the man who utterly transformed the way that the country viewed youth development, putting together a system that has since brought through some of the most gifted and exciting footballers on the planet.

Detail. It’s all in the detail.

The catalyst for change was Belgium’s home soil humiliation at Euro 2000, a competition where the hosts exited at the group stage and didn’t so much capture a nation’s imagination as plunge it into mourning.

Belgian football had rarely, if ever, been at such a low ebb.

“No-one went into that tournament thinking we could win it,” says Helsen, a professor in Sports Science at the University of Leuven, who also works extensively with Uefa. “But no-one thought it would go quite as badly as it did.

“Even five years ago, we probably didn’t have a team that compares to the Belgium team that we have now.

“I don’t think we ever had a year in mind when we started our work – we never identified a specific tournament that we thought we could be challenging for.

“But the work we did, particularly with Michel Sablon, who was technical director at the time, was completely geared to creating a system that would produce footballers capable of playing in major tournaments and also winning them.”

The revolution that Helsen and his colleagues introduced was based around the work of a US psychologist Anders Ericsson, at the University of Florida. Ericsson’s work focused on the number of hours top musicians devoted to their craft.

His findings from the orchestra halls of Berlin were then taken to the football field and a select number of schools around Belgium, all of which would be instrumental in ensuring that youngster like Kevin De Bruyne and Romelu Lukaku would receive the requisite hours they needed to become elite performers on the world stage. The concept of 10,000 hours was at the heart of a plan that would turn Belgium from a laughing stock to the envy of every country in Europe.

“The science behind sport is becoming more and more important – you can see that in tennis, in cycling and also professional football,” says Helsen.

“First of all, you need to have a philosophy and a vision. Then you change coach education. Belgian is still considered to be very strong in this area. Then we set up a cooperation with the schools, which is also very, very important because most of the players playing in the national team and in the team below have all come from the Top Sport Schools, which allow players to practice 12 hours a week extra in addition to what they do with their club in the area of technical development.

“This was a major breakthrough because to get to that magic 10,000 hour figure you need all the extra hours you can get.”

In the Top Sports Schools system, the likes of Lukaku would train three hours every morning, with the exception of Wednesday. That training would be integrated into the normal school day so that the education of the players involved remained undisrupted.

Elsewhere, small sided games were encouraged in order to give young footballers as many touches of the ball as possible. Until the age of 11 or 12, games would be four v four, before switching to eight v eight when those youngsters became teenagers.

The higher the level you played at, the more there was an emphasis on playing 4-3-3, particularly within Belgian age-group sides and those sides funnelling crop after crop of extraordinarily talented young players towards the full national team.

At the start of this process, Belgium would just be happy to qualify to a major tournament – something they failed to do in the European Championships for 16 years after hosting in 2000.

The legacy of the work done by the likes of Sablon and Werner now means that qualification is taken as a given. The next step in winning one.

“The main challenge when you’ve had such an extraordinary generation of talent is to ensure that another can follow it,” says Roberto Martinez, the Belgium manager.

“That’s something that everyone at the Belgian FA is passionate about – and we’re confident that there will be. And not just this generation but the generations that follow it.”

That should be enough to bring countries around the world out in a cold sweat.

The team of 1980 is still feted - it would be no surprise, though, if Martinez’s side eclipses them.