Since the turn of the year, there have been some particularly eventful months for the youth and talent work at FC Helsingør, where many new initiatives have been launched, new people have arrived, and work is constantly being done to build on and improve the existing work.
In January, new coaches started on the two top youth teams. Yacine Hamouchene is the new head coach of the U19 team, and brings great experience from similar positions at, among others, B93, Fremad Amager, IFK Malmö and Trelleborg. At U17, Daniel Pedersen is the new head coach, and he joins with several years of experience from FC Nordsjælland.
Work with U10-U12 under the newly established DBU Topcenter has also begun, and once a week the best players in the age groups from our parent clubs and partner clubs are gathered and trained by the best youth coaches in the FCH setup.
In February, the entire youth department, 111 players and 24 leaders, went on a joint training camp in Turkey for the first time in FCH's history, and both players and coaches greatly benefited from the opportunity to work in detail on things and fine-tune technique and tactics across the age groups. And our U17 team put the icing on the cake when they beat Silkeborg's U17 league team by a score of 4-1 in a training match down there.
In addition, FC Helsingør has applied for a B license for the youth work, which will mean that the youth teams can be matched at the high level the club is aiming for, to the benefit of the player development that should lead to more homegrown players for FC Helsingør's first team. The U17 team is already playing at B level, on a wildcard we were awarded in the autumn, and has shown a high level and excellent results, with a current fourth place out of the 14 teams in the league.
Talent chief Marc Thevis has recently returned from a trip to Brighton, where he, together with fitness coach Tobias Jørgensen and director Janus Kyhl, was on a club visit arranged by FCH's partners from the football consultancy firm Double Pass.
We had 3 days visiting their academy, where we gained insight into their talent development and talked with them about everything from training content, recruitment and playing style, to work related to education, video analysis, mental training, diet and nutrition, etc. We have had an incredibly great return from the work with Double Pass. We have used their analyses of our club and the subsequent training programme to take the next steps as a talent-developing club, and the fact that we have had the opportunity to visit Brighton in connection with this work has been fantastic and something we can certainly use in our future work.
Successful training camp
There has really been a lot going on since the turn of the year, and with the appointment of Yacine and Daniel it has been possible to relieve T+ coach René Lybek and myself of team responsibilities, so that we can focus on the administrative work and the guidelines, and put even more momentum behind the development of our youth setup. We went on training camp in Turkey and the whole idea of the trip was to focus on one of our core values: Community. It was a true pleasure to follow how the players interacted and got closer to one another, and how the coaches and leaders also really worked together, both internally in the teams and across the age groups. So we have, to a great extent, achieved the major social benefit from the trip that we hoped for. In addition, the sporting return has also been invaluable. It gives a huge boost to be able to work in detail on the training pitch also 2 times a day. When you have the players for a full week, you can also work in depth off the pitch with player meetings and video evaluation, and a huge praise must go to our coaches for having worked absolutely fantastically with the players on the trip.
B license and trials.
The talent chief also hopes that the club's application for a B license will be viewed positively
Over the past few years we have worked very purposefully in FCH Youth to build on our youth setup, and always strive for higher goals. It is no secret that talent development is highly prioritized in the club, and we work intensively to develop players for the Superliga team. In order to do that, it is crucial that our talents get the best possible sporting match. A B license would naturally provide that match, and it would make our talent setup even more attractive for young footballers in North Zealand. Our sporting results in U17 and U19 I think show that we are at a level where it would make sense to move us up another rung. We have also just had Nicolas Hald Willumsen for a very successful trial training session at Queens Park Rangers in the English Championship. Nico is one of a number of very exciting youth players of whom we expect great things, and I also see the trial training for Nico as a sign that attention from outside is being drawn to the youth work at FC Helsingør.
Looking back over the last 12 months, we have really been busy and have taken quantum leaps that can be measured against the rest of the club. We have both had great sporting success and significantly expanded our setup, so we are working with even greater quality and depth than ever before. We wanted to bring some really skilled talent developers into our system, and we believe that we have in fact succeeded in doing so. It is a true pleasure to see how every single day hard work and quality are being put into our youth teams, and now it is about setting even higher goals and then working towards them.
