School’s in as Watford aim to teach valuable lesson in youth development

April 4, 2008

Matt Dickinson, Chief Sports Correspondent

Four unruly pupils at Harefield Academy received a shock recently when they were hauled out of their maths class for a lecture. It was not the head teacher doing the dressing-down but Adrian Boothroyd, the Watford manager. Boothroyd informed the boys that they were banned from football practice until their behaviour improved, which was no small thing for the children or the school that intends to turn these kids into professional footballers.

Sir Trevor Brooking, the FA’s director of football development, yesterday visited the school that is the home of the innovative partnership with Watford FC. Club academy directors from Tottenham Hotspur and Middlesbrough also toured the facilities, and there has been a scouting party from as far afield as Valencia.

Based on a Dutch system, boys at Watford’s academy are offered places at Harefield, a state-funded school just inside the M25. Gathering the children together allows the coaches far greater access and the ability to monitor each child’s all-round progress.

For these 33 boys (soon to rise to 50), football becomes an integral part of the curriculum. On four out of five weekdays, they will train for an hour and a half in the morning, with the football lesson squeezed in between, say, history and chemistry. They will then practise for another hour and a half after lessons, which amounts to more than three times the amount of coaching of 12 to 16-year-olds that is standard in most academies.

“It is just skimming the surface of what we’d like to be able to do,” Brooking said, “but you have to give Watford great credit. We’re all trying to increase the amount of time these kids can spend with the ball so that they are comfortable in possession. Technically we are just not good enough at the moment.

“We have nowhere near the depth for a 55 million population and that includes senior level. Italy have got 76 per cent of their own players playing in the top league, we have 36 per cent. We can talk all day about quotas, but it should be on quality.”

Watford’s scheme has been up and running since September and, while progress is hard to quantify in such a short time, the coaches claimed yesterday that the pupils at Harefield had made marked improvement. What is undeniable is the physical acceleration, in part from training with the gymnasts and swimmers who have also been attracted to a school trying to forge a reputation for sporting excellence. Plans have been approved for a boarding house that would give the coaches even more flexibility with the training regime.

It is a unique experiment, although other clubs have found ways of increasing their training time with under16s. At Arsenal, the very best boys are often taken out of school before GCSEs and educated by the club’s tutors to maximise the hours available to practise.

Watford’s project is not without its flaws. Most obviously, there is an acknowledgement that many of a footballer’s habits, good and bad, are formed long before a boy turns 12. Harefield applied to set up a primary school, but was turned down by Government ministers.

Both Watford and Brooking accept that it will be a long time before the scheme can bear fruit. “But we can see the power of football here,” Brooking said. “This was a failing school but look at these kids now. They’re shaking everyone by the hand and they’re being given a chance.”

Statistics show that 85 per cent of 16-year-olds connected to professional clubs are no longer involved at 21. “But if it works for Watford,” one club’s youth development officer said recently, “we’ll all be copying it.”