You may be thinking that second-tier football is not really worth paying attention to, but you may actually be wrong. It’s thanks to investing in amateur football that the main leagues exist. And besides, calling Serie B or Ligue B amateur football is not really a just way to describe it. If anything, it’s a professional competition that is slightly below the pay-grade of the mainstream events out there.
There is no shame in that. In fact, any football betting site these days will have made a point of covering lower tiers football simply because the game is molded there just as much as it is shaped in the English Premier League, La Liga, and other worthwhile competitions that exist.
The reason behind this is simple – awareness, exposure, football heroes that are closer to their fans, and not least, a strong network of academies where young players are brought on to demonstrate some outstanding performance and shape themselves as the future legends of tomorrow.
In a way, getting access to Barcelona’s junior’s football school is great, but a talented player can achieve just as much even if they are coached in second division academies. Now, the question is to get there, but thanks to a well-developed network of second division football, this is quite possible. More so than getting in Manchester City or Liverpool’s academies, and this is a good thing, too.
Without Amateur Football There Is No Pro Football
Put this way, if you don’t invest in the grassroots, you won’t have professional football. In England and the United Kingdom as a whole, local teams are started on a whim, but some even make it past their amateur status and join seriously professional competitions, and that is a great thing.
Yet, a few make it, but what they do instead is to keep the fire going. Call such clubs torchbearers. They are just as important to football as are the great plays you see in the English Premier League.
Put another way, you are hardly going to watch quality football if there weren’t hundreds of little clubs trying to make football fun for the locals and inspire children from the youngest age to train hard and pursue a career in football.
Football may seem easy, but with so many people trying to play in the top clubs, you can rest assured that it takes rigorous training that comes on top of studying for any young talent out there.
While the challenges of shaping yourself into a football professional are many and often too hard for some to bear, the fact that there is so much football going around, with so many grassroots initiatives carrying on despite their slim chances of success, makes it easier to keep new talent coming into the main football clubs out there.
While a lot of eyes may be on the main competitions today, it’s good to remind ourselves every once in a while that pro football would be nowhere without the hopeful amateurs.
