The Danish FA changed youth football completely around about 5-6 years ago on the order of manager Morten Olsen. The talent pool, even for such a small nation, was rapidly declining.
Now they start playing 5 a side from u8-9 or something like that and only get onto full 11 man pitches when most of them are mid-teens.
I remember why I stopped playing amateur youth football for a while when I was 13-14, IIRC. I was quite simply such a tiny kid, having to deal with other youngsters twice my size on 11 man pitches. I stopped to play Tennis and later Volleyball. When I started playing again for fun in College/Uni, I was 182 cm's.
I was no talent. Worse thing was, that 2 of our best players were my size. They stopped too. Incidently the best of them, after establishing himself as a chef and caterer started playing again a few years ago. He's much better now as a grown up even that those early blooming, hoof-and-hoping "brutes", who kept on playing all those years. Even at 32 he's one of the best non-football league players at all in the region, despite not having played for 14-15 years.
This is a story, whic I assume at lot of you can recognise in some ways. Imagine, if we don't lose talents like him, just because under 12-16 coaches don't want to lose games and thus select 11 early developing Steffen Freunds each and every game.
