Article by Gabi Glăvan – Published Friday, November 21, 2025, 6:58 p.m. / Updated Friday, November 21, 2025, 6:58 p.m.
talent
We were used to talking about our talented people, who have not had opportunities to assert themselves lately because of the interests or, especially, of the foreigners who came to our championship. Somehow, through the streets and alleys of Romania, the unsupervised talent walks and, when he is about to take a step, someone blocks him in a national and, according to TikTok, global conspiracy.
Conspiracy answers are: “it is not wanted” or “there are interestsI don't know exactly what the interests would be, but they probably have to do with other peoples' fear of not rising to our true potential, which, according to folktales, was bestowed upon us as a divine gift.
The map that we see represents in red the countries qualified for the World Championship, and in orange those that are in the bracket. Now, without me saying anything, don't you see a pattern? Why is it that the further west you go, the redder the map gets? Even in Scandinavia, the westernmost country is the best. What about this vest and what does it have to do with it? Did the wind blow from east to west and move the talent that way? Yes and no.
Why is this happening?
To list the reasons, we'll start with the obvious: more developed countries have priority. Social and educational. Sure, we can include the financial side as well, but Portugal, who have had fantastic players and incredible generations lately, don't seem to know how to stop producing players, even though economically we are on a similar level.
Another thing we notice, if we look over the squads, is that most of them have players who are first or second generation in that country. The fact that these players are raised in Norway, Portugal, Spain or France is not only due to the historical factor, where these peoples made their colonies, but also the development opportunities that the families of these people received in that country.
Nuno Mendes, if he was born in Romania, was he the best left back in the world? His name was probably Nicu Mendes and he had an enviable line length. Is Nusa still playing in Leipzig? Dembele take the Ballon d'Or?
What is the problem, really?
Could our problem be just the fact that there are not enough Romanians in the championship? But those who are, why don't they reach the level of those listed above?
If it was a matter of numbers, India dominated world sports. If it was a gene problem, Curaçao would have qualified for the World Cup with players from the domestic championship. Instead, they are all born in the Netherlands.
Speaking of Holland, the brothers Timber and Lutsharel Geertruida also have origins in Curaçao. Do you realize how talented they are if they have players in two World Cup qualified nations with only 150,000 people? Maybe they are the talented people, not us! If Făt-Frumos was Curacaoan?! If it was a money problem, the Middle East had all the national teams qualified for the World Cup.
Well, what's the problem then?
We can go around the subject all we want, but the answer is obvious and has a common component: education and culture.
Sport as a form of education
Whether we want to understand it or not, sport is education. The discussion we had all the time in the country is that you have to choose between school and football. In reality, they go perfectly hand in hand, as long as you are given the opportunity to do both.
In the United States, you can't really play sports without school, in the sense that you can't get drafted or get into some form of professional organized sport unless you're affiliated with a particular school. The Americans put the restriction not on nationality, but on education.
In Europe, the Portuguese have, as optional subjects in their faculties, football. The opportunity to make contact with sports through education seems to be the winning card. Scandinavians have an excellent sports culture in the sense that socially people are encouraged to play a sport. Any!
Iceland, not to mention Norway, has players at the highest level, all born in Iceland, with no restriction on squad numbers.
Speaking of Norway, the great, literally and figuratively, Haaland played his junior year at a club called Bryne, and this club's 1999 squad produced 6 professional players and 35 players who went on to play football as adults.
Out of 40 children, no one left or, more precisely, no one left them. They didn't believe in selection, they believed in development. They had customized programs based on needs. The Bryne experiment is the basis of the development of football in Norway, at the moment and… it seems to be working.
Performance = Potential – Interference
In the reality of today's sport, talent is not singular, it is collective. There are talented individuals who need dedicated, educated people, healthy development environments that the collective creates.
The idea that there is, in a village, a child who is not seen is real, as long as people go to that village who see him, but also develop him. You develop in vain if you don't know where to look and you look in vain if you don't know how to develop.
Returning to the initial situation, we choose to look. Let's see each other, identify ourselves as Romanians and support each other collectively, but support in sports is not, as we see in the environments that perform, a patriotic condition, but an educational one.
Who gives us the guarantee that the one who “saw” the wrong foreigner will see the right Romanian? We can now see how many talented Romanians will end up playing professional football, but who counts the talented Romanians who don't make it?
Before we throw stones, I would say that it is not a problem of the state or a law, even the law, in essence, is good, but I would say that it is a social problem, which has an intrinsic solution.
Laws are good. It helps us understand respect in its legislative form. Respect is, however, first and foremost a social norm.
Education does not start from the state, it starts from home. Encouraging, supporting, fulfilling needs, guiding are forms of respect towards another individual. Respect is earned as long as it is given, and the normality that we keep referring to these days is just a social trend that we choose to wait for, instead of giving it. Sometimes, not even your own person.
The sum of respects!
