RICHARD DUNNE SPENT nine years at Manchester City.
He was the club’s Player of the Year for four consecutive seasons. He was the captain. The leader.
But the place is unrecognisable to him these days.
He paid a visit to the sprawling £200m Etihad Campus a couple of weeks ago when his 10-year-old son, Tayo, was training at the academy.
It was a dizzying experience.
“It’s completely different. It’s insane. It’s just a big football factory”, he told The42.
When we went, the Saudi Arabian women’s team was playing on one pitch. It was just like ‘What is this place?’ There are 17 pitches in it. There are different entrances for different people – one for the academy and one for the first team. One dressing-room on one side and ten on the other. They don’t come across each other at all. But I think the new manager is trying to introduce some of the academy players getting picked to train with the first team for experience. That will help.”
There’s a disconnect, Dunne feels. There’s no sense of togetherness between the young, supposedly hungry prospects and the experienced elite.
“We used to know everyone”, he says.
“Carrington used to be small, sort of. Everyone was on top of each other and everyone knew each other. There (the Etihad Campus), I’d imagine you wouldn’t know half the people in the building because it’s so big. If someone got injured during training it would be ‘Right, you come over here’ and you’d mix with them (the youth players) and start playing games with them. It will lose its soul a bit but that’s just the way football is.
Everything is an academy. Everything is about ‘Well, it worked for Barcelona so it has to work for the rest of us’. You can see the kids training there and they’re just individuals. Everyone is an individual and then, presumably, once they get older, they’ll build a team but it’s all about the individual – can they move right, can they kick the ball, juggle the ball. It’s a factory. You’re trying to find one. And you might find one every four or five years if you’re lucky. The amount of money that must’ve gone into it is crazy.”
Dunne talks passionately about the underage structures within clubs and feels children are being over-coached.
He thinks that instead of figuring things out for themselves in their own time and creating their own experiences, youngsters are being whisked away to academies before they’re even mentally or physically mature enough.
“It’s alright having loads of academies but you need kids to have freedom”, Dunne says.
“When they’re 13/14, then an academy is useful because their bodies have developed. But when you’re six or seven, kids don’t even know how to run properly. Just let them have the freedom to go and play. And when their brains have developed, they (coaches) can teach them what they want. You’ve got kids in academies four days a week for two hours. They’ll come out on a Friday and someone will say ‘Show us something new’ and they’ll all do the same trick because that’s what they’ve learned that week. It’s just a lot of robots.
When I was 10/11, you’d be playing against 16-year-olds out on the street. Everyone wanted to play so it toughens you up straightaway. You’d know that you couldn’t get past one fella because he was much bigger and stronger and faster so you’d have to think of a new way to beat him. That’s how you solved your problem.”
Would Dunne be concerned if Tayo wants to pursue football as a career?
“I have no desire to push him into it”, he says.
“When I played for Aston Villa, I’d take him with me but he’d just sit in the creche. He was about five and didn’t want to watch the match – he wanted to draw pictures. Then, one day, he watched it and wanted to play it and now it’s every single day. It’s a good activity to get into. And I know how hard it is to make a career out of it. But you have to let children dream and enjoy it. If it works out – great. If it doesn’t, that’s great too.”
Richard Dunne was speaking at the launch of SSE Airtricity’s #PowerOfGreen research findings which highlight the achievements the nation is proudest of. More more information, you can visit www.sseairtricity.com.
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