The future David Beckhams?

Egged on by their parents, our child footballers crave Premiership success at any cost, but are England's future Rooneys chasing rainbows rather than riches?

(Muir Vidler)

Jonny Winter sharpens his skills

Matt Dickinson

From: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/football/article5074657.ece

While the rest of the world counts its pennies, football continues to roll around on a bed of £50 notes. Multi-million pound transfers, giant signing fees, six-figure wages (a week, that is). Credit crunch? Not in footballer-belt, where the tills continue to ring up sales of mansions and Bentleys.

Perhaps it is for the riches, perhaps it is out of pure love for the game that millions of small boys up and down the country strive to make the big time. At the Football Association (FA), officials are concerned that the vaulting ambitions of these youngsters – and their parents and coaches – are undermining the process of development.

So appalling is some of the behaviour on the touchlines that the FA, through its Respect campaign launched earlier this year, has felt it necessary to start erecting fences on park pitches to stop parents running on to assault officials – even the children. In a survey in Total Youth Football magazine, 83 per cent of respondents said that they had witnessed “unacceptable verbal abuse or interference from the parents or spectators of a youth football match”. More than 50 per cent had heard adults verbally abusing young players. At the academies, where the elite children learn, clubs have been forced either to exclude parents from training sessions or issue strict rules about watching in silence.

We could interpret this as a sign of how much we care, and no one is doubting our passion. We watch a lot of football, we shout about it a lot. It is so central to our culture that not only footballers but their partners, the ubiquitous WAGs, have become celebrities. Small boys aspire to be Wayne Rooney, girls to be Coleen.

At Crystal Palace, the hand-picked Under 13s train four times a week to try to climb the ladder to sporting stardom; kids like Jonny Winter, whose mother Janine ferries him from their home in Kent. The atmosphere is studious, the parents restrained, although the stereotype of the pushy parent is alive, well and shouting its head off elsewhere around the country.

At Palace’s training ground in suburban Beckenham, they have a role model from even closer to home in the form of John Bostock, an outstanding teen player who headed off to Tottenham Hotspur and the Premier League’s land of plenty this summer. Advised by an agent while he was still a schoolboy studying for his GCSEs last year, Bostock has had a boot deal with Nike since he was just 13. His current wages of £90 a week at Spurs, the standard apprentice’s income restricted by FA rules, will soar to around £3,000 a week as soon as he turns 17 in January.

His dad, Mick, went on a tour to France last year with the England Under 17s and could barely go to the bar without an agent or club scout rushing to buy him a drink. His home phone would ring incessantly. There were inducements along with the blandishments; six-figure sums that would have allowed him to give up his career as a cabbie.

For the families of English kids with notable talent, it is a frenzy for which there is no preparation. One minute Don Walcott was standing on the touchline like any proud dad watching his son, Theo; then suddenly he had hordes of scouts and agents on the phone. “You don’t mind being called once or twice, but it is the fact that some of them don’t take no for an answer,” Don said. “You can say it three, four, five times and they still come back. We didn’t get offered financial inducements, but one agent rang up and invited my wife and me on the next plane to the South of France.” They declined. Theo went on to join Arsenal from Southampton for £9.1 million and travelled with England to the last World Cup at the age of just 17.

No wonder Jonny Winter and the rest of the Under 13s long to follow the trail of Walcott, Bostock and Rooney. If only – and here is the nub – we could be more confident that there will be more English boys to match that talented trio.

As a nation, we are putting in the time and energy to become top-class footballers but something is going wrong, something is breaking down along the conveyor belt of talent. More than half the players in the Premiership are foreigners, a trend that shows so little sign of slowing that the football authorities are talking of quotas to ensure that home-grown teenagers are not totally squeezed out by their rivals from overseas.

Two of our leading clubs, Arsenal and Chelsea, have fielded teams without a single Englishman. Even Barnsley has a couple of Brazilians, not to mention a Jamaican, a Spaniard, a Peruvian, an Argentine and a German. Foreign footballers, like Polish builders, know that England is a country rich with opportunity.

At Palace, the outstanding Under 13 player is Gus Sow, a bow-legged midfield player with a biting tackle. “He’s the best in his age group by a mile, including the kids at Chelsea,” one dad says. “If he doesn’t make it, we should all pack it in.” It is hard to ignore the possibility that Gus’s talent comes from the fact he moved to England at the age of 7, an asylum seeker from Liberia.

So what is going wrong? Why are there not enough Rooneys or Walcotts? Why are there precious few Bostocks? Life as a footballer has never been more appealing. The wages are obscenely high, the hours enviably short, and it is a golden age for English clubs, with Manchester United and Chelsea contesting the Champions League final at the climax of last season. “The trouble is that a lot of kids aspire to the fast cars and the lifestyle without always thinking about the hard work that has to go into it first,” Gary Issott, Palace Academy’s Under 18s manager, remarks.

That is just one of the issues raised by Sir Trevor Brooking, the Football Association’s director of football development, who is given to doom-laden comments about the state of English youth football – despite being in charge of improving it. “We have nowhere near the depth of talent in the different age groups that we should have with a population of 55 million,” he says. Sadly, he is less certain about how to bring about an improvement.

England is not producing nearly enough technically adept footballers despite the instruction the Palace lads receive on crisp Saturday mornings. A book could be written on the causes – everything from the quality of our coaches to the English climate.

“The wind ruins everything,” says Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger. “It forces you to work on speed or continuous movement. It’s very rare you get the chance to sit calmly and work on technique or tactics. You have to keep the players moving, otherwise they get cold. And this is something that begins way back when they are children.”

There is not much anyone can do about the weather, but the FA did announce earlier this year that it was putting £200 million into grass-roots football, targeting 5 to 11-year-olds. Yet we still lack a coherent national coaching programme, with the FA and the professional clubs endlessly at odds as to who should be in charge of bringing through our youthful elite.

Professional clubs have a big incentive to produce home-grown players, but some people believe classic English failings – such as treating the ball like a hot potato rather than a possession to be cherished – develop before the best kids are selected by academies.

The clubs take children from the age of 9, but there are many, including Wenger, who believe that they should begin much younger. The Arsenal manager, a champion of finely honed technique (which is why he rarely signs English players), believes that the skills of a Maradona or a Pelé are formed from the age of 5. By the age of 9, English kids have come through a school system where sport is an afterthought. They have already picked up the bad habits.

“The biggest problem we have in youth football is that we need the best coaches but we don’t pay the best salaries,” Issott says. “We all say how important it is to start producing world-class youngsters, but we don’t put in the resources. Then we ask, ‘Where are all our top players?’”

Issott also cites the lack of time that the coaches get to spend with the children as a factor. At Watford, one of the most innovative clubs in England, they require kids who join the academy to move to a specific secondary school which gives the coaches three times more access to the boys than at rival clubs. “It is based on something they’ve done in Holland,” Issott says. “Everyone will copy it if it takes off.” But the results may not be known for years.

Of course, being asked to move school could put an even bigger burden on families who are already making heavy commitments. A dinner lady during the day, Janine Winter has the time to ferry Jonny to training every Tuesday and Thursday – a three-hour round trip which means that her son is often not in bed before 11pm on a school night. There is an even greater toll at weekends, with games as far away as Norwich. “It is a big strain on the parents and you hear of it causing marital difficulties,” Issott says. And there are no guarantees that any of the kids will even get close to the professional leagues.

“It is a sacrifice,” Janine Winter acknowledges, “but Jonny loves it. They get good coaching at Palace, much more organised and disciplined than if he was just playing in the park. That’ll serve him in good stead even if he just ends up playing football at weekends for the fun of it.”

That is the fate of most of our budding teenagers – more so now than ever as clubs look to superior, and cheaper, foreign players. By the FA’s own admission, Fabio Capello, the England manager, has put the team on course for the 2010 World Cup finals in spite of the system. “Insufficient numbers of high-quality English players, coaches and tutors mean that it is time to reverse recent trends,” begins an FA document released in October. “We’ve got to have a reality check,” says Brooking, “having not won anything for 42 years.” Forty-two years and counting.