In Mexican football, youth development is a different beast. It’s consistent, organized, and designed with one objective in mind: to develop professional soccer players and aid in prodcution of talent for Mexico’s national teams.
For Torreon-based first division club Santos Laguna, youth development is a specialty. They have debuted more players in first division than any other team this tournament, and regularly have players getting calls to camp with Mexico’s youth national teams and first teams. It joins Pachuca, Chivas, and few others in heavy production of Mexican talent.
Four players in particular have excelled with the club thanks to its system of development, where apart from giving the players everything they need at the stadium and at their training facilities, they send groups of players to international tournaments every year to give them experience playing against international teams, stronger teams, in different environments.
These four players have been champions twice recently with Mexico’s U20 team in Bahrain and China. Both forwards, Ronaldo Cisneros and Eduardo Aguirre, have either been named leading goal scorer or MVP. At the U17 level with their club, they’ve led the league in goal scoring, and were recently named champions with Santos U20 in 2015.
Recently, Santos’ U20 has gone 10 games unbeaten with Cisneros scoring three times in the last two games. Both Cisneros and Aguirre netted in Santos’ 5-0 defeat of Atlas over the weekend.
A video the club released features these four players: Cisneros, Aguirre, and midfielders Kevin Lara and Uriel Antuna, discussing why the youth teams at their club are so effective and how it’s helped them achieve success and confidence with the national team. In the second half of the six-minute long feature, the players discuss why Mexico’s U20 team is destined for great things, with Antuna confidently saying the team has the potential to “change history and write their own story” with Mexico.
