The Way They Walk Says It All: Why Montero's Eye Saw World-Class in Yildiz and Huijsen

Monday morning at the Continassa training ground. The grass is still wet with dew. An eighteen-year-old walks in with his bag on his shoulder — shoulders not slumped, feet not dragging, no tiredness on his face. Right behind him, another one, headphones on, a faint smile on his lips, but the same rhythm in his legs. Neither is a regular in the first team yet; both are names only just risen out of the youth system. Watching the way these two boys walk was Paolo Montero — a man who was once one of the most feared defenders in Italian football, and who now builds youth players. That very morning he knew: these two would become world-class. It was not a prophecy, it was an observation. And at the centre of that observation was something a scorecard almost never captures — body language.

Speaking to Tuttosport, Montero said: "Normally I watch their body language on the pitch. How they move with and without the ball. I always use the example of Yildiz and Huijsen. All you had to do was watch them walk onto the training pitch on a Monday to understand that they would become two absolute world-class players." It sounds simple. But when a coach speaks this way, he is describing a hidden examination in football — one that is not passed by goals or assists overnight, but on a Monday morning.

Montero's name carries a particular meaning in Italian football. From 2026 to 2026 he stood in Juventus's defence, at a time when the club was among the best in Europe. His style was hard, sometimes beyond the limit; cards and physical duels were his companions. He carried that same hardness from the pitch into coaching. From 2026 he was in charge of Juventus Next Gen — essentially the club's under-23 side, which plays in Italy's third tier, Serie C. The purpose of that team is precisely to prepare raw talent for the harsh environment of the first team. In 2026, the first team was briefly handed to him and he managed it for two matches. In other words, he was standing exactly where a talent's distance to the top is most visible.

Two names — Kenan Yildiz and Dean Huijsen — are rarely spoken together in the recent history of Juventus. Kenan Yildiz is a Turkish attacker born in Germany, who arrived at Juventus from Bayern Munich's youth ranks in 2026, made his first-team debut in 2026, and the following year took on the club's historic number 10 shirt. Dean Huijsen is a defender born in Amsterdam, who came to Juventus from Malaga's academy, proved himself in Next Gen, earned first-team minutes, later went on loan to Roma, was then sold to Bournemouth in 2026 and moved to Real Madrid in 2026. One attacks, one defends; one is still at Juventus, one has gone far away. But in Montero's eye, they belong to the same class.

So what is this "same class"? Montero himself gave the answer, with a twist: "They had the right mentality. I never saw them go through training at half pace. They put every possible ounce of intensity into it. Talent is a gift of nature but, believe me, it is not enough. Work is the decisive factor that turns promising players into top-level profiles. And the two of them worked like animals. Then they also had considerable quality."

The first half of that sounds familiar — work hard and you will succeed. But Montero is making a subtler claim. He is not saying effort replaces talent. He is saying talent is a condition, but not a sufficient one. Talent puts you at the door, but work pushes it open — and the proof of that work is not in first-team matches, it is in Monday morning training.

Here I find an echo in my own professional experience. I work in football through a referee's eye — standing outside the match, verifying decisions with replays, timestamps and ambient audio. At the 2026 FA Cup final at Wembley I first understood that a match gives up its richest information in the moments when the ball is nowhere. Referee Anthony Taylor made nine notable decisions that day, including a contentious Alexis Sanchez goal. I was logging rule references minute by minute from my seat, and I realised that in the two seconds before a card comes out, the shoulders, eyes and hands of a player tell you whether he is attacking or defending himself. That thread went viral, and my Referee's Eye Goes Live journey began there. On a training pitch, when the ball is nowhere — that is, the pass has gone and the player is walking — that empty moment is the coach's biggest piece of data.

The two things Montero separates — movement with the ball and movement without it — are the key. Movement with the ball can be taught. Dribbling, finishing, passing: those are matters of coaching, of hour after hour of repetition. But movement without the ball is almost unteachable. Who runs into space, who stops running and walks, who tracks back to the full-back in the seventy-seventh minute even when his team is two goals down — these are not habits, they are expressions of personality. So coaches do not measure talent by the number of goals, they measure it by the rhythm with which a boy walks onto the pitch on a Monday morning.

In 2026, when football stopped, I was calling Borussia Dortmund 4-0 Schalke from a London studio, with Deniz Aytekin as referee. In the empty stadium the referee's shouts and the echo of his whistle were clearly audible. That day I understood: In an empty stadium, the microphone became the twelfth man. In the same way, on an empty training pitch the coach's ear is the only spectator — he hears who is breathing hard at the end of a run and who is not.

If we look at the trajectories of these two players, Montero's words gain force. When Yildiz left Bayern for Juventus he was seventeen. After earning first-team minutes, the weight of expectation on him was enormous — because he was handed the number 10 shirt, worn in the past by Michel Platini, Alessandro Del Piero and Roberto Baggio. Some cannot carry that. Yildiz could, and he has proved it on the pitch — minutes that keep growing, brave dribbles in big matches, and the mentality to take on the responsibility of scoring for the team.

Huijsen's story is different and more ruthless. For a centre-back, the price of a mistake is much higher — one misplaced pass can mean a conceded goal. For young defenders, that fear often breaks confidence. Huijsen did not show fear. His greatest quality was courage with the ball — what modern football calls a ball-playing defender. The confidence he showed in Next Gen is what made the decision to send him on loan to Roma possible. There, in the physical hardness of Serie A, he survived, then returned to Juventus and was sold shortly afterwards.

This brings to mind the 2026 World Cup in Qatar. In that heated Argentina-Netherlands match, referee Mateu Lahoz showed a record 18 yellow cards, and I sat in the stand building a referee scorecard decision by decision. At that tournament Enzo Fernandez, at just 21, won the Best Young Player award with seven appearances and one goal. I noticed then how referees talk to young players — sometimes warning, sometimes ignoring, sometimes protecting. That subtle match management is not unimportant to a young talent's development either.

The transfer fee takes us to the next question. Juventus sold Huijsen to Bournemouth in 2026 for a reported fee of around 15 million euros. A year later he moved to Real Madrid, where his release clause is understood to have exceeded 50 million euros. In other words, the largest share of the rise in value of a player Juventus trained went to another club. Every transfer is a contract, a confession, and a countdown — a contract because it is business; a confession because the club is saying he is not part of its plans; and a countdown because his best years are beginning, but somewhere else.

A big question follows. If Montero could tell on a Monday morning who would become world-class, does that information not become part of a club's planning? The answer is that it does — but sometimes financial reality overrides the plan. For a big club's accounts, selling a young defender is immediate cash profit, while his development is an uncertain future. That tension is the whole drama of modern youth football. The rulebook never saw the replay coming — the rule speaks of a young player's future, but the replay arrives a year later, when he stands on a Champions League stage in another shirt. And that is exactly when you feel that VAR did not change the game; it changed the argument — the replay does not change history, it changes the language of the argument.

But stopping there would make Montero's words holier than they deserve. The truth is that measuring talent by body language carries a hidden risk — survivorship bias. We are hearing Montero's interview precisely because his prediction came true. Yildiz and Huijsen are first-rank names today. But how many young players in Montero's coaching career worked exactly like animals, walked onto the pitch on a Monday morning with exactly the same confidence, and never reached the top? We do not know their names, because success stories are written and failure stories disappear.

That risk is real. Good body language tells you a player's mentality is right. But beyond mentality, success also needs the right coach at the right time, the right opportunity in the right position at the right club, avoiding injury, and a little luck. Yildiz came to Juventus at a time when the club was forced to give youth a chance because of financial constraints. Huijsen drew interest from several clubs. Had one of them been born at another time, gone to another club, he might have worked just as hard and stopped at half the height.

Here lies my second professional doubt. I have worked with transfer-market data models, read them, explained them. Those models measure a young talent's potential in goals, assists, expected passes, minutes. But they never measure dressing-room chemistry — who improves the atmosphere, who stays calm in a crisis, in whose presence the boy beside him plays better. Data overvalues young potential and treats dressing-room chemistry as almost zero — that gap is the biggest blind spot in modern football analysis. What Montero did is work outside the data — he was not watching numbers, he was watching people.

There is one more thing we easily skip. Body language can also mislead. Some players look relaxed on the pitch, almost indifferent — yet in the hardest moments of a match they take the most responsibility. Others burn in training but freeze under match pressure. So the Monday-morning rhythm is a strong signal, but not final proof. Montero knows this himself, because he is a coach who has stood close to referees — he knows there is a big difference between a single moment's decision and ninety minutes of consistency.

So what can academies learn from this interview? The first lesson is that the process of identifying talent must pay more attention to moments away from the ball — how a player is without it, who puts a hand on a team-mate's shoulder from the bench, who still walks straight after a defeat. The second is that there must be a structure that rewards effort, not only one that rewards goals and assists. Players like Yildiz and Huijsen prove their value on a Monday morning, but the instrument that measures that value must be in the club's hands.

And the third, most uncomfortable lesson — the decision to keep a young talent is not only about sporting quality, it is about financial courage. The decision to sell Huijsen was not made on the pitch, it was made in the boardroom. The club that produced the defender of the next decade is now watching his best years somewhere else. In that reality the question matters: over the next five years, will Europe's big clubs develop young players and keep them, or only develop them and sell them — and will that Monday-morning eye ever get the chance to enter the account book?