Youth Football Development and the state of the game: An expert’s view

In continuation of our intermittent series looking at different aspects of youth football and youth development, we bring you the first part of an in-depth interview with Chris Green, award-winning multimedia journalist, BBC Radio 5 Live broadcaster and author of Every Boy’s Dream – England’s Football Future on the Line. Just Football spoke to Chris on a wide variety of topics including the pros and cons of the Academy system, the welfare of children used by clubs and dumped on the scrapheap, England’s golden generation and the new breed, the national football centre in Burton and the urgent changes needed to safeguard the future of English football at youth level.

JF: Chris Green thanks very much for agreeing to an interview with Just Football. You’re the author of Every Boy’s Dream – England’s Future on the Line. We’ve been looking at youth development on the site recently and with you being an expert in the field I wanted to ask you a number of questions. Firstly, tell us about your own background and interest in youth development in football. What inspired you to write a book, Every Boy’s Dream, on the subject?

Chris Green: Well as a reporter for Radio 5 Live in particular and also for magazines and various other things I was aware of the changes in youth development in the late 1990s from fairly early on really, although I had no idea how the system worked and how clubs really procured talent and developed players. Like any fan I just knew players came through the youth system and some clubs seemed to be better at it than others.

But I was amazed to find when the Academy system was introduced, and again – I didn’t know what academies were, didn’t know what a Centre of Excellence was etc, and to me the term Centre of Excellence implied that it was actually better than an academy although it turned out it was the other way round – when these rules were introduced in the late 1990s, fundamental changes were made and anybody who could take a broader view could see the fundamental changes that came about.

The biggest change was that clubs weren’t developing boys from the age of 14 anymore, who come in twice a week for training and a game at the weekend. This system was from the age of 9, which meant by nature you’ve got to look younger than that, so it would be a minimum of 8. It was also a system that required clubs to field teams in each age group from Under-9s up through to at the time Under-19s. So the clubs were going to have hundreds of boys on their books and need to develop facilities which at the time none of them really had, not even for first team players. It was a massive overhaul.

There was of course huge potential for it to have a massive impact on the lives of what would be tens of thousands of boys and indeed that’s been the case. Just looking at whether or not this would be the correct way to do things was always pretty high up on my agenda. The first time I really delved into it was one report I did for I think it was Radio 4 initially, just looking at the way in which non-league clubs were being pushed out of the picture completely and the way in which it was clearly going to skew the way smaller clubs could sell.

It’s given me no joy down the years to find that the system hasn’t worked and isn’t working from a variety of points of view. From my point of view the most serious of all is the impact on the lives and welfare and education of children.

JF: Of course. One of the principle concerns you express in Every Boy’s Dream is of the welfare of the children involved and the broken dreams of thousands of kids left by the wayside under the current system. Tell us a bit more about that.

CG: Yes the biggest concern to me has to be, a lot of us are football supporters and we want to see our clubs do well and we probably make some quite outlandish statements between the hours of 5pm and 6pm on a Saturday evening depending on how our football clubs have done. But we always have to fall back and look at the bigger picture. Footballers don’t want to lose, managers don’t want to lose games etc.

When it comes to youth development I’ve heard people say ‘I don’t mind how they get the best talent in as long as they get the best talent in.’ If we don’t aspire as football supporters to hope that the people who play for our clubs are developed in a right and ethical way then what does that say about who we are as people or what the game is and indeed our culture and society?

When we look at the way boys are developed in this country, I don’t think we do it particularly well in terms of a proper thought through structure that enables children to develop a lifelong interest in sport. I don’t think the system is geared to do anything like that. It’s geared to trying to produce players that will have the most value to the club, simply and ultimately about that.

So if 999 kids have their hearts broken so what, as long as the 1000^th one is Wayne Rooney and the football club can sell him for £25 million or whatever the case may be. Too much of it is driven towards that. Now a lot of the things in the academy system, when it was drafted by Howard Wilkinson in his role as technical head of the FA, a lot of the things Howard included in there were very sensible plans. But they’ve been just ignored.

We forget that for kids involved and for the parents there’s an awful lot of commitment here. There’s a lot of emotional commitment as well as physical and time commitment. I don’t think sometimes people involved in football understand how they crash into the lives of these kids and exactly what the impact is. Because most can’t make it. You’ve only got to look at the stats. So much of what goes on in football in English football at the moment particularly in the Premier League actually limits home-grown development, and we can all understand why clubs desire to have the best players in the world. Having the world’s top stars here is a wonderful thing. It’s great to go to your local club and see a plethora of household names, whereas when I was growing up you just got the best of British.

But there is a price to be paid. Unfortunately the price seems to be being paid in youth development and too much of it is paid by young kids who are given unrealistically overblown aspirations when the vast majority of them won’t make it. It’s very positive in that they get good coaching – but it’s almost at the exclusion of other aspects of their lives including playing school sport. So many things that to be honest with you from an education and welfare point of view, although there are rules there, there’s just so many things that are fundamentally wrong it’s pretty staggering that we’ve got to the process we have.

JF: The FA’s Charter for Quality was published in 1997 and paved the way for the academy system we see in use today. How do you think the system has fared? What have been the merits, if any? And on balance, 13 years later can it be considered a success?

CG: Looking at the positive side of things it was great that proper rules and regulations were brought in. Myself, I thought the idea and the need to bring in proper qualified coaches for kids was absolutely spot on, as indeed with the senior game. I think the idea that boys should be developed locally is a good one, that there could be a maximum of one hour’s travelling time for under-12s up to 16 years olds and no more than an hour and a half travelling to academies was a good solid principle. There are a lot of good things in there. It’s just when you actually break it down, when you look at the devil in the detail this is where it’s gone wrong.

There are two fundamental things. Are we looking after the boys in the best possible way? And I say boys because there are no girls in the academies at the moment. Do we look after them well and has that worked? Are we developing more home-grown players who are getting opportunities to succeed at whatever level of the game they’re playing at? The answer is probably no.

And are we producing better quality players? Ok so we don’t have so many but do we have better quality players? Some might say the jury is still out on that. The proof of the pudding is in the eating and managers by and large choose not to play home-grown players so they obviously don’t feel that they’re better. When you look at the success of England teams over the last 13 years, has it got any better? A lot of people would say it’s probably got worse.

The cruel irony being I suppose, and I wouldn’t really include France ’98 in this, but I guess for strict timeline purposes, from the time the Charter for Quality came out in 1997 – if you look at England’s previous tournament to that we reached the semi-final of the European Championships. We haven’t been to a semi-final since and we haven’t even looked like it. In actual fact we’ve gone backwards. If you look at the last two tournaments we could have competed in, we didn’t make Euro 2008 and we performed pretty abysmally at the last World Cup. So in terms of those performance indicators it doesn’t appear that we are producing better players overall and it doesn’t appear that we’re looking after them any better.

Judging from those two things I think we have to say it isn’t working. And that’s just not me saying that – if you speak to any senior or more established academy directors around the country they’ll tell you the same.

JF: You mention the academy system and the 90 minute distance rules. Actually I wonder if you think that perhaps hinders the academies in that it makes them rely on foreign talent more, given that they can’t recruit within that catchment area. Do you think that encourages clubs to look to the foreign markets more? Or do you think it’s a positive rule that needed implementing for the benefit of children with regards travelling times etc?

CG: Well I don’t think with respect that the link to clubs signing boys to their academies makes them go looking for foreign talent.

Let’s take David Beckham. Let’s take 14-year-old David Beckham from Essex. Where would be the sense in him travelling to Manchester to be coached? What would be right about Manchester United being able to set up a huge academy in Essex? So it would mean that Southend and West Ham and Colchester and other clubs in that area would always naturally lose out? Where is the sense in that?

I can see the logic being that well how do you get the best players to the best clubs? Well I’d say the way it always used to be, you know? What was ever wrong with that? They’ll find their way eventually because the transfer system will work that way. And indeed one of the things you can quite clearly look at is the correlation between the lack of spending that the Premier League clubs and Championship clubs do on buying players from lower leagues. The market has virtually dried up. In fact it goes the other way – they get the best players from the academy and then sell downwards. So they do find their way eventually.

I mean I know boys in the Midlands who travel to the North West academies or from the Midlands down to London. In one kid’s case travelling on his own by train to a very well-known Premier League football club and somebody was picking him up from the train station.

I mean, this is a 14-year-old boy travelling back and forth from the Midlands. Now there are all kinds of implications in terms of safety and security around that but where’s the logic and common sense? How can this boy do homework? What time does he have to leave school to get there? What time is he getting back at night? There’s a whole bunch of reasons why those rules were brought in.

What about the no-hopers travelling all over the place, the kids who are never ever going to become professionals that the clubs are looking to procure?

What we lack in this country is a proper structure. In other countries they have a proper development structure that can take you from grassroots to their top clubs. At the moment we just have this kind of fairground attraction crane – a Premier League crane that comes down, sends itself into the collection of cuddly toys, picks one up and if it drops it, it drops it from the greatest height it can. And that’s what’s happening to young identified sporting talent in the country at the moment.

Football clubs come bashing in at the age of 4, 5 and 6, picks them up tells them ‘you’re wonderful, you’re going to be the next star’ and then a few weeks later decide they don’t need them. This is all activity that goes on outside of the formal academy structure. Clubs have what they call development centres which are supposedly centres where they prepare kids for the academies at the wise old age of nine. And they sift through hundreds and hundreds of these boys, and of course they all think they’re on the way, they’re part of the academy dressed up in the club’s gear and all the rest of it and they’re shattered when it’s finally explained to them that they’re released having only been picked up in some cases for a number of weeks or months.

Coming up in Part 2 Chris assesses the lack of leadership brought about by a power vacuum at the top, the 25-man squad rulings, the heartache of rejected children and much more. Subscribe to Just Football or follow us on Twitter to keep up-to-date.

England, Interviews, Youth Academies, Youth Football