Full article : Liverpool have their new long-term No 1. On deadline day, they paid €33million (£28.3m; $38.3m) to bring 18-year-old Lucca Brughmans to Anfield — making him the most expensive teenage goalkeeper in history. In June 2025, Chelsea signed another Belgian prospect at the position, 19-year-old Mike Penders, for €20million. He made his debut in the Carabao Cup against Luton Town last month, and though he has ceded the gloves to World Cup-winning new arrival Emiliano Martinez, at 21, he is still the club’s goalkeeping king-in-waiting. The two have more in common than their nationality and talent: both graduated from the same club: Genk. Hemmed in by deep forest in eastern Belgium, near the Dutch border, the small town of Genk was in coal-mining country, its football club at its heart. These days, the industry of old has gone, but another rich and profitable seam has opened up. Seventeen years ago, a 19-year-old Thibaut Courtois was the first elite goalkeeper to emerge from Genk’s academy. He joined Chelsea for €9million in 2011 and, two Champions League trophies and six league titles in England and Spain later, he stands as arguably the finest goalkeeper of his generation. Genk also fielded the youngest goalkeeper in Champions League history in Maarten Vandevoordt, then aged 17 years and 287 days and now the 24-year-old first-choice at RB Leipzig in Germany. One man links them all: Guy Martens. His association with Genk can be traced back almost 35 years, during which time he has turned that small club in a quiet corner of Europe into the continent’s top goalkeeping factory. Last year, The Athletic was invited over to discover its secrets. Fifty years ago, another young prospect was emerging in the surrounding province of Limburg — specifically at Waterschei SV Thor, who would merge with FC Winterslag in the 1980s to form Koninklijke Racing Club Genk. Martens played for the then second-division club’s youth academy throughout his childhood. “As a player, I was not so talented,” Martens tells The Athletic. “I was aware of my mistakes, but there was nobody who could improve them. There was just the goalkeeper from the first team who would come and shoot some balls at me. So I decided to become a schoolteacher.” For the next decade, throughout his twenties, Martens worked in a local secondary school, teaching physical education, but he maintained his interest in the sport, coaching youth teams on the side. In 1990, he got to know Genk’s then goalkeeping coach, Poll Peters. “When (Peters left), he said, ‘I know a very good goalkeeper coach; he’s still young, but put him in with the first team.’ And so I started. In the beginning, I made a lot of mistakes, because I was only 35. I had no education in goalkeeper. I had to learn everything.” Martens, like Peters, was heavily influenced by Ajax, the European giants from across the border in the Netherlands, particularly the Amsterdam club’s goalkeeper coach Frans Hoek, who championed the promotion of a young Edwin van der Sar to their first team at the expense of the popular Stanley Menzo in the early 1990s. “Before Hoek, goalkeeper training was always three goalkeepers in a row, popping up shots in the corner of the pitch,” explains Martens. “But Hoek put everything together; he made exercises which included the other (outfield) players.” This is the core of Martens’ philosophy. As he speaks, he excitedly spreads a sheaf of papers over the table, outlining his central aim — to produce what he terms ‘3D goalkeepers’. In his view, a 2D goalkeeper simply performs the requisite action, such as a save or a punch. Martens wants 3D — to be able to rapidly read the play and produce the right action, in-game. “I must have a proactive goalkeeper,” he says forcefully. “The foundation is mental. Without that, you cannot be a goalkeeper. Then the second thing, the 2D, is the technique, stopping the shots. “But if you have only that, you’ll be a reactive goalkeeper. To be a proactive goalkeeper, you must have the ability to play football. To be 3D, you have to dominate, to always be the boss of every ball coming into the space. Always have good game reading, always have good decision-making. For me, a goalkeeper plays a fantastic game when he doesn’t make any save. It means his positioning must be fantastic.” Delivering that idea has led to some unusual policies. In the younger academy age-groups, Genk do not recruit goalkeepers. Until 12 years old, the club simply invite in the most promising players they can. Nobody then is a goalkeeper; but at the same time, everybody is a goalkeeper, rotating in training. Then, as they enter their teenage years, Martens will attempt to recruit the most talented members of the cohort as specialist goalkeepers. A young Thibaut Courtois practising his passing (Via Belgian FA / Genk) “Before Courtois was 12, he played outfield,” says Martens. “I’ve never had a good goalkeeper who played in goal since they were six years old. Maybe they’d be fantastic goalkeepers in 2D, but in 3D they need to know what it’s like to play high, to play up front, to be in midfield. “In my view, the goalkeeper is the most important player in football; they’re the first attacker and the last defender. And the best players are also the best goalkeepers. Their coordination, game reading… everything is so good. That (goalkeeping) technique is easy to learn. But the vision? You have it or you don’t.” Watching a Genk youth session, the goalkeepers stand out for the protective rugby-style scrumcaps they wear. Martens has made them compulsory, a policy which only Mechelen also enact in Belgium. It makes sense, given the coach’s focus on the cerebral side of the game. Once Martens has identified a promising player operating in an outfield role who appears to possess the explosiveness also demanded in goal, he can begin the process of specialisation. Using his own terminology, this stage is all about adding memories to the hard disk. “And when you put a lot of information into that — with training, talking, videos — you fill it up. The older you get, the more experienced, the quicker you can retrieve information from that hard disk,” he says. “You’re saying, ‘I’ve been in that situation.’ Then you can make the action.” For Martens, the best way to do this is by simulating aspects of gameplay, which can only be achieved by integrating goalkeeper training with the outfield positions. Should they rush out of their goal? Should they punch clear? Has that defender covered the near post properly? “The development of your brain is about making connections through tiny electrical threads,” he says. “If you repeat something a lot, the connection gets thicker. So as a goalkeeper coach, you have to put the most energy into this integration training, rather than training one-on-one. “If I’m just kicking the ball at them, because it’s only me shooting, they know what’s going to happen. They don’t have to make decisions.” Penders, unusually, arrived at Genk as a physically developed 13-year-old. Martens uses him as an example of the importance of this process. “Because he was big, his profile was fantastic, but his feet were a catastrophe,” Martens says. “When he was first training, he had a lot of difficulties. We needed to do a lot of coordination work, because his feet were like an elephant’s. “In 2D, his execution was very good, because he was big, quick, and had long arms. But in terms of everything happening in 3D in front of him, he had problems. We did a lot of work with his right foot and his left.” Many elite clubs perform physiological testing on players at a very young age and make decisions about their academy pathway, or lack of it, accordingly. Martens, however, is not a fan of measuring size and growth potential too early. “I had (long-time Australia No 1) Mat Ryan on loan (from Spain’s Valencia in 2017), who has specific talents in playing the ball with his feet. He was only 184cm (6ft), so normally he wouldn’t be considered big enough, but he made up for it. It’s the same with (leading Scottish club Rangers’ current first-choice goalkeeper) Ivor Pandur (6ft 2in; 187cm) — his positioning and his feet were fantastic. “Then I also had a goalkeeper who was 207cm (6ft 9in). You might have said, ‘OK, he can take every cross.’ But it’s not like that. His first step was not quick enough.” Courtois was another example. “When he was 13 or 14, some people wanted to release him,” Martens says. “He was not growing very quickly, and neither was his mind following his body. So he had problems; his coordination was s**t.” Courtois, now 34, was in the same academy age group at Genk as Koen Casteels. Currently playing for Al Qadsiah of Saudi Arabia after spells with Hoffenheim and Wolfsburg in Germany, Casteels has gone on to win 20 international caps, while primarily being a backup to Courtois, but the latter benefited from Martens working with the Belgian FA to place him in one of the country’s top sports schools. When an injury crisis paved the way for Courtois to make his first-team debut, just shy of his 17th birthday, it was evident that the difficulties of his youth career had helped him develop a preternaturally strong mentality. “He played a game at home against Gent, and I had the funny feeling he would be fantastic,” says Martens. “He took a lot of fantastic balls, and everybody was impressed. Some goalkeepers, when they’re playing in a game, shrink by 20 per cent. He was one who grew by 30 per cent.” Half a century on, Martens still remembers the feeling of making a mistake from his own career between the posts; the pain and the ostracisation. It is something he has resolved to change. “When I was goalkeeper, I made an error, and I came into the (club) canteen, I had the feeling that everybody was looking at me,” he says. “There was always a blame game. But now we say it’s OK to make mistakes. You can only learn that way. But the mental side is not as easy.” He points to the example of Vandervoordt, who, on the night in December 2019 when he became the youngest goalkeeper in Champions League history, was dispossessed as he attempted a Cruyff turn in a bid to escape under pressure away to Napoli. Genk lost that match 4-0. “We never blame them if they make mistakes,” he insists. “And Maarten knows that, because he had been there since he was 11. If they made a mistake when they were being proactive, fantastic. It is my fault, not theirs.” Martens’ attitude is to throw teenage players in early. Genk always aim to have four goalkeepers in the first-team squad, with two of them, at least, no older than 17. Training with the club’s best stoppers helps them improve rapidly. “Everybody in Genk, all our fans, also the board, knows that they’ll make mistakes,” Martens explains. “But they’re very good. And then, always, before they turn 21, they’ll go away for €10million, €20m, more. So then they say, ‘OK, Guy, who’s next?’” Even if the players he trains do not make it all the way to Genk’s first team, or beyond, they often still carve out a career in professional football. In the 2024-25 season, Martens counted seven goalkeepers in the Belgian Pro League who had developed under him. The latest is Brughmans, born to a Belgian mother and a Congolese father, who had made his debut with Jong Genk, the reserve team who play in the second division, just four months before The Athletic’s 2025 visit. Martens was visibly excited about his potential, while trying to manage his introduction to senior football. He rated Brughmans’ explosiveness and physicality as the best he had ever worked with, having begun coaching him permanently aged 14. After being signed by Liverpool on deadline day last week, the club’s record sale, he will return on loan for the remainder of the season. Martens, a lifelong Genk fan, is used to his charges going away. But it does not make the process easy. “It’s a frustration,” he admits. “I’ve never had a green apple become a red apple. They always become red on another team.”   submitted by   /u/Shroft [link]   [comments]