Remember Hachim Mastour? No? Well, let’s refresh your memory
The Moroccan 19-year-old burst onto the scene as a youth player after a number of videos containing clips of him performing skill moves during youth games were posted online.
You know the kind. Techno music blaring, strange colours and effects which should come with a strobe light warning. There were lots of them.
The videos prompted the sages of the football world to declare Mastour the “next big thing”, but time has proven them wrong. Mastour is yet to break into the AC Milan first team all these years later, and remains best known as some sort of alternate reality YouTube star.
He has however experienced something of an Indian summer to his youthful career recently and Milan’s manager Gennaro Gattuso believes that it was threatening to knock his teeth out which truly set him on the straight and narrow.
Speaking at a press conference last week, the former Italy international – a man not known for his subtlety – admitted that he was impressed with Mastour’s recent improvement, and that he had previously warned the youngster to stop making videos for YouTube or else he may remove his teeth from his face.
“I even threatened him because he became more famous for making videos than playing, but he doesn’t do that anymore because I told him I’d knock his teeth out.
“In recent months he’s improved some things in training and we decided to let him play in the Primavera.
“The train has passed but he’s not 50 years old, he’s 20 years old [in June] and I think he has to take stock of his mistakes.
“He needs to play consistently, because we can see he’s lost some match sharpness. I’ve noticed a few improvements though.”
While there are likely more nuanced ways of encouraging young players to reach their true potential, it is heartening to see that the old footballing tradition of threatening physical violence to motivate underperforming players has not died out just yet.
