FOOTBALL ACADEMIES and the relatively low numbers of youngsters that ‘make it’ in the game have been a source of conversation and consternation for a long time.
The consensus view paints a bleak picture of how tough it is to make a career at the elite level of the sport.
‘No Hunger in Paradise,’ a book by journalist and author Michael Calvin, was published to much acclaim in 2017 and provided some stark insights into the challenges facing aspiring footballers.
A 2021 BBC Sport article evoked similar sentiments and opened with the following passage: “On the same day in May 2019, Manchester United team-mates Marcus Rashford and Jesse Lingard posted the same cryptic message on Instagram.
“It simply read ‘0.012%’ and was a reference to findings that only 180 of the 1.5m boys playing organised youth football in England will ever play a single minute in the Premier League.
“That means there is slightly more chance of one of them making it into the top flight than being struck by lightning, but not by much.”
Yet Dr Chris Platts, senior lecturer at Sheffield, Hallam University, who works at the Academy of Sport and Physical Activity, finds the prevailing narrative on young players problematic.
He is someone with extensive experience in the area.
In the 2009-10 season, Platts began collecting data for a PhD.
It tracked 303 players aged 16 to 18 at 21 professional football clubs.
The project detailed their experiences of being in academies, and in particular, the education and welfare provisions.
Platts, along with some colleagues, has continued to collect data on the players in the intervening years.
The work, he believes, has allowed him to gain a clearer insight into how difficult it is to make it in football’s academy system.
Platts argues there is a degree of exaggeration in the findings unearthed by others.
He takes particular issue with the notion that the chances of playing in the Premier League are similar to those of being struck by lightning.
He says the fact the above results take into account all 1.5 million boys who play youth football in England contributes to the flawed logic.
“It’s like my son joining the local football team,” he tells The 42. “I’m not wanting him to join because I want him to be a professional footballer. He wants to enjoy it.
“That’s a little bit like saying: ‘These people at school are playing a guitar, but what are the chances of them making a career out of music?’ Well, that might not be why they are playing the guitar.
“So it’s a little bit misleading. And to me, it leans the statistics a little bit in favour of making it seem worse than it is.”
Another difficulty in measuring the data is that ‘making it’ as a footballer is hard to define.
What about the youngster who has a five-minute cameo appearance in the Premier League and spends the majority of his career in the National League?
Many footballers who never play in the top flight can earn excellent money in the Championship or lower.
And can a footballer who spends three seasons playing regularly in the Premier League before having to prematurely retire due to a career-ending injury be deemed to have made it? Or what about someone who plays in League One up until the age of 27 before being released?
“It becomes a very tricky thing to unpick and that’s what we’re trying to do with this work,” adds Platts. “Saying: ‘Let’s just move away from some really basic questions like how many make it and let’s try and show that it’s a bit more of a complex thing.’”
In this ongoing project, some of the conclusions Platts has come to are unsurprising. The life of a footballer is certainly a precarious one.
The majority of the players Platts interviewed had been on the move regularly when he checked back on his findings in late 2021.
Of the 303 players, 167 at least managed to get some form of contract at 18.
More often than not, they had moved down the football pyramid. By the age of 26, of the 167 players in question, only 5% had moved up, 5% were at the same level, 7% were abroad, 58% had moved down and 25% had left football.
Players were averaging 5.3 moves in their career from when they were 18, with 1.3 of those accounting for loans.
Football, therefore, is one of the few industries where generally speaking, between the ages of 18 and 25, individuals tend to get regularly demoted rather than promoted.
By the age of 26, 2% were representing the same club in which they were a scholar although 42% were still active in the game at some level.
“I think this runs against the popular narrative of: ‘Oh my God, you’ve got a contract at 18. That’s brilliant.’ And it’s built up as being a real pivotal point,” Platts says.
“But what the data that we’ve gathered shows is that your next five years are going to be as difficult if not potentially a bit more because what you signed up for is more uncertainty, more moves, loan moves, and you’re likely to be moving down, not up.”
And while youngsters sometimes strategically steer clear of representing the very best clubs in England owing to a perceived lack of first-team opportunities, there are some benefits to representing a top team.
“The higher up you start, the more chance you’ve got [statistically] of getting a contract,” says Platts.
“But you’ve got further to fall. And the data shows that more will fall and you’re likely to move. So there is a little bit of work around growing up in an environment like Manchester City or Manchester United or Arsenal.
“All of a sudden, by the age of 24, you’re playing at Barnet and thinking: ‘I was at Man United four years ago, what’s happened?’
“Whereas if you’re at Sheffield Wednesday, and you only dropped one league, you might be able to manage that.”
So Platt’s findings reiterate the idea that it is extraordinarily difficult to make it at the elite level while suggesting the situation is not quite as drastic as it has been previously portrayed.
Of the 125 players who were still in the game, 6% at 26 were still in the Premier League, 10% abroad, 11% in the Championship, 6% in League One, 7% in League Two, 14% in the National League and 46% lower.
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In 2011, around the same time as Platts was working on his PhD, the Elite Player Performance Plan, a youth development scheme initiated by the Premier League was introduced, to improve the quality and quantity of home-grown players produced by top English clubs.
The initiative has been a success based purely on the number of top English players that have since emerged.
But whether areas like player welfare and support for those who don’t sustain a career in the game have improved concurrently is debatable at best.
There are countless examples in recent years of former youth footballers who have turned to a life of drugs and crime after their careers in the sport have faded.
There are some sad and distressing cases, like Jeremy Wisten, a youth player who featured alongside future pros such as Cole Palmer and Liam Delap at Man City.
He had joined City’s academy at the age of 13 but saw his prospects dwindle after suffering a serious knee injury, prompting his eventual release by the club.
Wisten was deeply affected by this setback and died by suicide just weeks after his 18th birthday.
“I always come back to the point that I think my whole career will be trying to figure out whether welfare and elite sport can ever coexist or whether they are a bit like electricity and water. And I don’t just talk about football here,” says Platts.
“If you look at what’s happening in Canadian youth sport, for example, or what’s happening in gymnastics, or what happened in cycling, the list goes on.
“And I think when you get to an elite level, and it’s highly pressurised, and it’s about having to win at all costs, whatever anybody says, what ends up getting sacrificed are the people.”
Some measures have been implemented to try to improve the situation in recent times.
During the 2021-22 season, the Premier League introduced a mandatory three-year aftercare programme for all players released from the U17 to U21 age groups.
According to their official website: “This includes guidance on further and higher education opportunities, careers advice, alumni networks and the provision of mental and emotional wellbeing support.”
From last season onwards, it was also made a requirement “for all Academies to have a full-time member of staff responsible for player care. To enable EFL clubs to fulfil this requirement, the Premier League is providing £2 million per season to help fund the staff salaries.”
Platts still believes more can be done to improve the situation: “I’d get more female coaches in there, for example, because it’s a very highly-charged masculine testosterone-filled environment, which I don’t think is particularly healthy.”
One man trying to help alleviate the problem is Sayce Holmes-Lewis, the founder & CEO of Mentivity, a mentoring organisation.
According to his website, Holmes-Lewis for over two decades “has coached & mentored young people, from local grassroots talent to accomplished world-class athletes such as Jadon Sancho of Manchester United, Reiss Nelson of Arsenal, Ademola Lookman of Atalanta BC and Tammy Abraham of Roma FC”.
Holmes-Lewis himself is a former footballer. He played for Mullingar Town in the early 2000s around the time they were trying to establish themselves as a League of Ireland club.
He also had a short stint with FC Brasov in Romania that didn’t work out and spent the remainder of his career playing semi-professionally in England.
When asked about the footballers he has mentored, Holmes-Lewis tells The 42: “They’re all still pretty much in my lives, even those who haven’t gone on to get to where they want to.
“It’s important in terms of mentorship and supporting young people that you’re forming lifelong mentoring relationships.
“Because when things are going well it is great. You don’t really hear from them. But when things don’t go so well, that’s when you need that support, and they need people, trusted individuals like myself to be able to bounce ideas off.”
Holmes-Lewis says one of the most common problems for the young players he works with is their difficulty in dealing with the extreme pressure that football at the highest level entails.
The intense adulation they often tend to receive from people around them and conversely, the social media toxicity they experience particularly as these footballers become more well-known.
“I don’t think young people are being prepared to be able to navigate and deal with those situations,” he adds.
“Some of those players don’t think about a career outside of football, in terms of what they’re going to do once they retire, or if the worst case happens.”
Even young footballers who have not established themselves in the game often have big entourages and are prone to surrounding themselves with people who do not always have their best interests at heart.
“And that’s why a lot of the players that I have worked with do come back into my life and just seek advice or support or ask me to come to watch their games because they know I’m going to give them the truth,” says Holmes Lewis. “I haven’t got any ulterior motives.”
Holmes-Lewis cites Charlton (his son was on the books there for a period) and West Ham as two clubs with strong aftercare programmes but agrees with Platts’ sentiments that there is room for improvement overall.
“It’s important that we have more mentoring and support, more player liaison officers for football clubs, as well,” he says.
“I also think [the after-care programmes] need to be regulated, there needs to be some sort of curriculum and understanding of what is needed for different clubs because Liverpool can have different problems to a club like Arsenal just because of the geographic differences.
“So I think it has to be multicultural, it has to be diverse, it has to be led by cultural competency, and those that understand the different types of issues that young people can face based on different protected characteristics or different intersections.”
Education, support, safeguarding and financial literacy are also key, Holmes-Lewis believes, for ensuring today’s youth footballers avoid the unfortunate fate that befell some of their predecessors.
“I feel that a lot of young people that do get ejected from the game, because they’re defined as a football player, when that part of their identity is taken away, they try to find themselves and they want to find that adulation in other areas.
“And unfortunately, being on the streets, and crime and things like that can give you that fake adulation, obviously with major consequences.
“I also think around suicide and mental health, especially for young boys, it’s really important to raise awareness around that and create coping mechanisms for young people so that they can navigate these situations and understand what kind of support is around them because being uninformed is sometimes a major part of the problem.”
