Youth and Development
When the club arrived in Edensor Park, they organised the formation of a junior and youth football club for the children of United supporters who wanted to wear the club's colours. The club is a professional sporting organisation employing coaches, administrators and groundsmen. Apart from the first grade and under-20 team, the club has juniors (who have 26 teams playing in the Southern Districts Soccer Football Association. The youth league (under-13 to under-18) consists of five teams in NSW Soccer Premier Youth League competition.
Sydney United FC has produced a number of players who have played professionally overseas and represented Australia at the youth and international levels. During the 1990s, when they dominated the National Soccer League, the majority of first-grade players had come through the club's junior ranks. Many of these players compete in some of the best football leagues around the world and are an integral part of the Australian national squad. The club has produced 34 international representatives for Australia, a dozen Olympians and a number of Youth Internationals. The first Australian to captain an English Premier League club, Tony Popovic of Crystal Palace, is a Sydney United product. Another United product, Zeljko Kalac, is the first Australian to play for A.C. Milan.
Read more about this topic: Sydney United FC
Famous quotes containing the words youth and/or development:
“One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“For the child whose impulsiveness is indulged, who retains his primitive-discharge mechanisms, is not only an ill-behaved child but a child whose intellectual development is slowed down. No matter how well he is endowed intellectually, if direct action and immediate gratification are the guiding principles of his behavior, there will be less incentive to develop the higher mental processes, to reason, to employ the imagination creatively. . . .”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)