On December 1st, Christos Mouzakitis will be awarded by the Italian newspaper TuttoSport as “the best young footballer in Europe” for the outgoing year. He is the winner of one of the two awards established by the Italian newspaper, the Golden Boy Web. The second award will be received alongside him by Paris Saint-Germain superstar Djire Due – this is the Golden Boy 2025 award. The difference between the two awards is that Mouzakitis’s award resulted from a public vote, while the French player’s award is decided by a committee. If one looks at the list of winners from previous years, one will understand why this success of the young Olympiacos star is huge: that list includes names like Bellingham, Adeyemi, Fati, etc.
Mouzakitis left behind two Turkish stars: Yildiz of Juventus and Yilmaz of Real Madrid.
The award is the icing on the cake of an excellent year for the youngster. During this year, Mouzakitis established himself at Olympiacos, reached the national team, where at only 19 years old he is considered one of the main players in the starting lineup, and he also decided a derby with a goal of his own.
Last February, with one of his goals, Olympiacos eliminated Panathinaikos from the Greek Cup, and just a few days earlier the youngster had scored his first league goal against Levadiakos.
The coach’s role
Mouzakitis is extremely hardworking and belongs to the category of players who have built their success on their own. Of course, he was fortunate that both coaches he has worked with believed in him deeply. Sotiris Silaidopoulos appointed him captain of Olympiacos’s Youth team, which won “the Youth Champions League,” the famous Youth League, two years ago. But there is no doubt that José Luis Mendilibar also did exemplary work with him. To develop a young footballer and make him a starter in a team that is competing for titles, it is not enough simply to recognize his talent and hand him a starting spot: when we are talking about players like Mouzakitis, those things are rather easy. The difficult parts are elsewhere.
The first is to send him to the first team at the right moment, and that is not always simple. If you send him too early, you may “burn” him out of haste — we have seen this happen in Greece.
If you keep him on the bench longer than you should, you may lose him because he will become discouraged. The player’s promotion must first and foremost have the approval of the fitness coaches: if they tell you that musculoskeletally he is ready, there is no need to be afraid. However, that alone is not enough. Many other things are needed.
First of all, the team must be ready to play with the “youngster” — to ensure, in other words, the best adaptation possible.
The kid must enjoy his promotion without burdens, but he must also know that in the team there is always someone ready to play in his position: when Mendilibar decided to use Mouzakitis, Olympiacos also had the veteran García and Ese. The Basque coach set the bar of competition very high because he trusted him.
Mendilibar immediately understood that the future belonged to the youngster, and he told him during the summer preparation that he must always be ready to start if asked. The coach believed that the team could integrate a gifted teenager — meaning it had players who would run for him, cover him, help him, teach him to cooperate and to listen.
However, he did not use the youngster as someone who would have plenty of time to show what he could offer, but as someone who had to make use of every opportunity. And the youngster understood that.
The usual mistake
For a talented young player to integrate and perform in a team, the coach must first build around him a mechanism that allows him to show his talent, and this mechanism is not always simple.
Barcelona, the best team in the world at developing talented youngsters, once did this exemplarily with Messi, and is doing so now with Yamal, but it has not succeeded in many other cases. The usual mistake teams make is expecting youngsters to make the difference because of their talent — to immediately take on leadership roles, to demand the ball constantly, etc.
Whereas initially, they must be integrated — meaning supported by the team with the right teammates. Behind Mouzakitis’s success stand Ese and García, as well as Retsos, Tzikinio, Rodinei, all ready to advise him. All of these, along with the excellent family of the youngster, will be even prouder on the evening of December 1st…
