Montero, Yildiz and Huijsen: The Lesson of a Monday Footstep

There is nothing to read on the scoreboard on a Monday morning at Vinovo. No goals, no xG, not a single PPDA figure being updated. There is only the sound of a ball bouncing on wet grass and the footsteps of two young players walking onto the training pitch. Paolo Montero stands there, and as he later tells it, all anyone had to do was watch how they walked in.

I read that line in Tuttosport, then saw Goal.com quote it. A short statement, no data, no tactics, not a single line about contracts or transfer fees. And yet it made me pause longer than any transfer story I scrolled past all week. In the transfer window, people sell you numbers. The dressing room sells you something else.

Outsiders look at the scoreboard; I look at the pulse inside the tunnel. The pulse Montero describes has a very specific name: the discipline of Monday mornings.

Context: a man standing between two generations

Paolo Montero is not a pundit. He was a Juventus centre-back for nearly a decade, a man who lived through the hard, combative seasons of the Turin club, and later managed the first team for a brief spell. The more important detail for this story: Montero worked across both Juventus Next Gen and the first team. He stood exactly on the bridge between schoolboy football and professional football.

In Italy, Next Gen is not an ordinary youth side. It is a reserve team registered to play in Serie C, meaning young players get real professional football, real points, real relegation pressure, long away trips and matches where a defeat leaves a taste behind. The model is relatively rare in Italian football, and it turns Juventus into one of the few clubs able to run a production line from academy to first team without buying an intermediary.

Kenan Yildiz and Dean Huijsen are the two most prominent products to come through that route. Yildiz is a Turkish attacker, the ball-carrying, dribbling type who creates disruption in the space between midfield and the opposing back line. Huijsen is a Dutch centre-back of Spanish origin, the modern defender who can carry the ball, build from the back and step up to break a pressing line. Two different profiles, two different positions, one shared starting point.

And Montero, who once stood on the training pitch with both of them, recounts something the stat sheet never captures.

Core: when the dressing room writes the profile that data leaves out

Montero's story revolves around a very simple observation: all you had to do was watch them walk onto the training pitch on a Monday. He says he never saw them train at half pace. He calls them people who worked like animals, then adds the clause I consider most important: after that, they also had considerable quality.

Read the second clause closely. Montero does not say attitude replaces talent. He places the two side by side. Talent is a gift of nature, but work is the decisive factor that turns a promising player into a top-level profile. This is what scouts call an axiom: talent sets the ceiling, while attitude determines whether that ceiling is ever reached.

I have had a professional rule since 2026 in Busan. Every article must contain at least one quantitative figure as its central evidence. But that rule does not mean I dismiss what cannot be measured. It means I distinguish clearly between what can be verified and what can only be observed. Montero's story belongs to the second category, and I have no intention of turning it into the first.

Montero's method of judging players also deserves a pause. He says he watches their body language on the pitch, how they move with and without the ball. This is a soft, non-quantified scouting method, and it is directional only. But it is not worthless. In modern football, how a player moves off the ball is a leading indicator of adaptability to a system. An attacker who moves off the ball on the right rhythm survives in a possession system. A centre-back who adjusts his position before the ball reaches his feet survives in a pressing system.

I have watched Yildiz across many matches, and what catches my attention is not the dribbling. It is the moments he moves into space before a teammate receives the ball. That is the kind of detail television cameras usually cut away from. It does not create a highlight, but it creates goals for others.

With Huijsen, the notable point is composure under pressure. A young centre-back often panics under a high press. Huijsen, in the matches I watched, rarely hoofs the ball away aimlessly. He takes risks in the right zone, and that is the mark of a player forged in a genuinely professional environment, not merely in academy friendlies.

This is where the Next Gen model pays dividends. A young player competing in Serie C learns to endure a genuinely competitive match. When he steps up to the first team, pressure no longer feels unfamiliar, because he has already dropped points, been criticised, paid the price for a mistake. The gap between academy and first team at many clubs is a psychological chasm. At Juventus, that bridge has a name.

Self-taught through video in Busan, I now read a match the way I read a palm. And in reading matches, I learned that a young player needs two things to survive at the highest level: a skill sharp enough to make a difference, and a mentality durable enough to endure the days when that difference does not come. Montero is talking about the second. But he is also saying the first is already there.

Contrarian: the trap called world-class

Here I have to say something many people will not want to hear.

Montero calls Yildiz and Huijsen two absolute world-class players. That is a very heavy label. And in the transfer window, labels like that serve a specific function: they raise a young player's perceived value at the negotiating table.

They called me crazy. The match did not. I am not saying Montero had a market motive when he said it. He is a man speaking about players he once coached, and his tone is one of sincere admiration. But I am the one reading the report, and I have to separate two things: the speaker's intent and the effect of his words.

The effect is clear. A famous former Juventus player, who worked across both Next Gen and the first team, publicly calls two young players world-class. That is a form of free marketing. It is not in a contract, not in a financial statement, but it exists in the minds of the negotiators on both sides of the table.

And here is the biggest blind spot in the story. Modern football has a cycle I call hype-then-smash. When you label a young player world-class before his career is even shaped, you set a bar he must clear in every single match. When form dips, as it inevitably does in any career, the reaction will not match reality. The decline will be read as a failure, not as part of a development process.

I have seen this many times. Once pushed to the margins, I understand the value of the corner seat. That seat showed me young players pushed up too early, used too much, placed into adult rhythm before their bodies had matured. And when they break, people call it the player's failure, not the system's.

Montero's story has a dark side few mention. It is a beautiful story about attitude, and beautiful stories make people forget the other variables: luck, system fit, physical development, timing. Two young players came through the Next Gen route and succeeded. But how many came through the same route and did not? That number never appears in an inspirational piece.

I do not deny work ethic. I deny making it the only story. Data is the referee, but data does not tell everything. And a compliment, however sincere, is not data.

What this story really says about Juventus

Set aside the two names; the notable thing is the structure.

A club able to run a reserve team in a professional league is a club with considerable infrastructure. Not every club can sustain such a bridge. Operating costs, facility requirements, federation rules on reserve-team eligibility, all of it adds up to a barrier only big enough clubs can clear.

When Montero says he uses Yildiz and Huijsen as an example, he is speaking to another group of young players. He is turning the two of them into models in his coaching message. That is a cultural signal. A club that treats internal development as its main axis will produce stories like this, and stories like this in turn keep feeding that culture.

In the transfer window, this is the kind of signal people overlook because it is not loud. No transfer fee is announced, no release clause leaks. There is only a former centre-back talking about two young players. But for a club trying to position itself as a place where young players can grow, words like that work as a recruitment tool. They tell families and agents: the path here is real, not a marketing stunt.

Data tells what has passed. The dressing room tells what is coming. And what the Juventus dressing room is telling is a pipeline that has been proven, at least at the level of reputation.

I once sat in a press room in Busan and put forward a figure about the defensive shape, and the coaching staff changed their setup because of that figure. I believe in data. But I also believe some things happen before data has time to form. A Monday morning at Vinovo is one of them. It does not appear in any stat sheet, but it appears in a coach's decision about whether to put a young player on the pitch.

Takeaway: the signal to track

Montero's story will be retold. If Yildiz and Huijsen keep rising, it becomes a cited piece of evidence, a called-it moment people use to reinforce the credibility of the speaker and the development model. If one of them declines, it becomes an example of premature hype.

What I track is not the two names. I track rhythm. Their minutes next season, their starts, how they respond after a defeat. Those things tell me whether the label holds.

Because in the end, a young player is not defined by one Monday morning. He is defined by the Monday mornings that follow, season after season, when no one is standing outside the training pitch to praise him anymore.