You are eleven years old. You love football. This game is yours. Then a piece of paper somewhere, a meeting you were never in, and a word gets attached to your name. Or doesn't.
That word is talent. We have used it for decades like a flashlight, searching young bodies for something hidden inside them, something we could find if we looked hard enough, early enough. Find it, take it, water it. Leave the rest in the dark.
This episode asks what happens under the ground while we are busy looking at the tree. The roots talk to each other down there. Fungus runs between them like nerve and vein, feeding the weak, warning the strong, holding the whole forest together as one breathing thing. Cut that down to save your one good trunk, and the trunk dies too. It was never standing alone.
So we put forward a different word. Potentiality. Something that grows between a child and everyone who ever passed a ball to them, drove them to training, taught them a trick on a summer evening and forgot they ever did it. This one runs close to the bone of what Progressão has always tried to say — that a player is not a tree standing alone in a field, but a forest, and we're counting trees when we should be tending the soil.
The Progressão book is being translated into English. More on that soon.
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