The Hanspaul League has a new champion. G.I.C La Plate wins for the second season, now with the title

The newly crowned champion of the Hanspaul League met a year ago in a rejuvenated composition and decided to create a modern active sports team of small football in the Czech Republic. In the very first season in the second league, he won without a single loss and was promoted to the top league, which he not only managed well, but managed to reassert himself among the best and dominate the top competition and win.

The Hanseatic League now has 705 teams actively playing, with the G.I.C La Plate team being its new flagship team as of yesterday, and is also a successful supplier of young talent to the Super League and the National Team.

The project to support young talented and hardworking football players came about spontaneously, but in a deliberate and purposeful manner, when 121 ELITE Sports, in nurturing its wards, continually encountered the fatal and almost unbelievable problems of lack of concept and lack of care for junior football in our country.

Young talents aged 18+, even after completing quality youth and junior training in youth sports centres and extremely expensive academies, subsequently only end up in the poor functional organisation of Czech football and the efforts and considerable resources spent go to waste when young players fall into the lowest competitions of the FAČR.

The solution to the situation (still in the pilot phase under the name of 11th ACADEMY) of the endangered devastated talented footballers did not leave long to wait. It is a well-known fact that football talents are not even recognized in the FAČR environment and usually do not get the necessary developmental care for several serious reasons, combined with the ubiquitous corrupt practices and the “impassability of the best” such players soon resign.

The more courageous ones often find a refuge to realise their skills and desire to play quality football in the corruption-free environment of small-scale football, which is fortunately completely independent of the FAČR and has its own Association of Small-Scale Football (AMF). In addition, small football has many characteristics in common with football, and in combination with small football, due to the dynamism and high frequency of player participation on the ball and in the decision-making process, it acts as an important development initiative; on the contrary, the football skills of Czech league footballers, unlike those of small football players, clearly lag behind and are often significantly inferior.

121 ELITE Sports’ agreement with the management of G.I.C La Plate was, is and remains simple, i.e. to build and develop a team with young skilful hardworking and self-disciplined footballers and to create space and support for them, or to open up identical opportunities for each of these talents to prove themselves, develop and assert themselves through play and attitude with the support of both parties to the agreement.

The coach of the G.I.C La Plate sports team, Mr. Miroslav Vostatek, has always delivered beyond all expectations and has developed the team and its individuals beyond belief and pushed them higher. He does not interfere with the ills that Czech football suffers from, he, like his charges, has a free hand and an open space that together in the team they fill with successful results and a positive team atmosphere, hungry for goals and for a game with the ball that dominates the opponent.

It’s common knowledge that big soccer coaches don’t want and even forbid their players from any other sporting activity, especially forbidding them from small-sided soccer. In the world it is the other way around. On the one hand, Czech coaches are wreaking a reprehensible havoc on their players and needlessly stopping their qualitative development in all dimensions, but it is also all the more difficult for a coach of a small football team to put together a complete team for Monday night’s Championship match that is of high quality.

And that was an elementary prerequisite to realize, to be able to have the players available. However, thanks to the enthusiasm, the great work of coach Mirek Vostatek always worked and so we could, week after week, together with the team, not only think about the dream goals, about winning, about titles, about nominations to the Super League and the national team, but play for them, get closer to them and gradually fulfill them.

And we can and we want to say and thank that thanks to the continued excellent cooperation of the coach of G.I.C la Plate with the management of the Superleague Staropramen Praha, or rather with its head coach, Mr. Vaclav Socher, the team G.I.C La Plate managed to create such a small farm, so that talented hardworking players can be developed and advanced, i.e. successfully prepare them for higher demands and nominate them, build their self-confidence and quality.

Some of the best players have emerged, whose outstanding performances have earned them the right to play in the Superleague selection competition in the U20, U23 and men’s categories and these players, by the quality of their play, are now not only showing their worth to league football clubs who are looking in vain for young strong strikers and stoppers amongst the pot, but at the same time these boys, together with talents from other Prague teams, are pushing the Staropramen Prague Superleague competition up to the national finals that await us in the near future and, given the growing quality, are a huge added value for the development and international competitiveness of Czech small football, which, as we saw at the last European Championships, has been a little over its head by foreign opponents. The rejuvenation and improvement of the Czech national team has become inevitable.

We were ready, so the absolute highlight of the top-notch coaching work of the Vostatek – Socher – Bejda implementation team are the nominations for the national team, when young sniper and team captain G.I.C La Plate brought silver from the WMF World Championships in Kiev last year and this year he has already impressed the national coach of the A-team Mr. Stanislav Bejda when he was young and well prepared, jindřich Novotný, the unpredictable striker in the penalty area, was called up to join the national team as a “secret weapon” for the EMF EURO 2022 in Košice, where he made his debut for the A-team in the very first match against France with a beautiful and important goal.

We would wish many young footballers, even from the leading Czech football teams, at least a fraction of the kind of fulfillment of their dreams of winning titles and conquering the world internationally that the players of small-sided football can earn and fulfill, albeit not easily, but completely without the cumbersome and devastating hindrance of a rotten system.

The question of how to successfully complete the education of a Czech footballer aged 18-23 is asked daily and addressed without result, both among Czech football experts, coaches and parents, but above all by those most concerned, and these are the young players. Unfortunately, for the last thirty years, the situation has been without any answer and without an effective response from the FAČR, which would systematically and conceptually set up a process so that players trained from childhood could successfully and fully complete their sporting development, and then complement and improve the Czech league teams and our national team.

In addition, everything in Czech football is complicated by an overabundance of corruption cases and intrigues. Even after their police exposure, nothing has changed in the management set-up or in the inefficient system of Czech football. This is an increasingly serious matter, which we have started to actively address and we can immediately see the answer to how grateful young players are for the opportunity to play among the best.

And to make matters worse, after the coronavirus pandemic and during the huge current inflation, the so-called sociological scissors are opening up, i.e. whether and to what extent it will still be possible to “pay” for the completion of the education of young players in such a way that the result of inconsistent and irresponsible educational efforts is not just a young desperate individual in debt to the state, who languishes and toils in the Czech league, compared to other peers without proper earnings on at least the edge of existence, usually without education, without a job and also without much success.

Week after week, the players of small football show that they are determined to play football not for money, but above all for fun, for the common team, for each other, and obviously financial reward is not a condition of their top performance. The reward is the satisfaction of the game, the goals scored by the team, the team spirit and the approach to the occasion. However, because of the increasing foreign competition, even the AMF will have to find a motivational solution, initially at least for Super League players, to make it realistic to complement the national team and not lose the winning thread.

We wish that the best players of small-sided football could and should open the way to the league teams because they have shown something extra. Will, diligence, character and skill with proven results in strong competition.

Small football does a great service to the big one, by completing the education of young footballers, exposing them to very tough competition, including national pressure, and making these individuals resilient, capable on the ball, in tackles, in space, in speed, in accuracy, in responsibility and in goal success, all these very valuable competencies are a huge asset to Czech football. Hopefully the FAČR will one day recognise this added value, grasp it, use it and thus stop devastating the valuable Czech football jewels and potentials for thirty years with the same demotivating practices and unsuccessful methods.

And for those little footballers who fail to re-enter the football league and the magical world of big football, little football offers a joyful healthy and also magical environment for sport for life. It develops work with children and young people so that they are brought up in the 21st century in a dignified, crime-free and positive joyful environment, which little football has certainly been so far.

G.I.C La Plate now have a summer programme with some challenging objectives, with the semi-final and possibly final matches of the PSMF League Cup remaining to be completed from the regular season. From the position of the winning league team of the region (champion of the Hanspaul PSMF league), G.I.C La Plate advances to the Czech National Cup, which qualifies the best teams from the highest regional competitions and also the winner or finalist of the league cup of the individual regional associations for the past season.

The participants of the Czech National Cup are not only competing for laurels and medals, but also for places in the European Cups. The winner is assured of a start in the Champions League, while the next teams in the standings are waiting for the EMF Eurocup.