‘FACTORIES’ is the word Richard Dunne used to describe today’s modern football academies.
The former Ireland international believes they restrict the creative development of young players, highlighting the benefits Robbie Keane and Damien Duff had playing in the rough and tumble of pick-up games growing up.
Dunne, who retired in 2015, said that while he is considering doing his coaching badges at the end of this year, he has been put off by the emphasis on modern academy structures, pointing out that his son completes yoga in the underage academy at AS Monaco despite being a child.
“It’s mad,” he tells The42. “I don’t see them coming through academies at all anymore. You’ve literally got from the age of five or six individuals doing the same training. They’re trying to find just one player; it’s like a factory.
I’ve gone around to a few academies and there’s no desire to build a team and let the kids enjoy themselves. It doesn’t look like it’s changing. They just keep going.
“There’s a club in England that my son went to when we were over there. They had a turnover of 36 kids on one team in six weeks. It was a case of ‘you might be good but you’ve not improved in three weeks’.”
“My son was six and they were kicking him out. Not that they weren’t good enough, it was because they hadn’t improved in the few weeks.”
Dunne moved to Everton when he was 15-years-old after playing schoolboy football at Home Farm, following players like Gary Kelly, Mark Kinsella and Alan Maybury in making the move across the water from the Whitehall club.
The 37-year-old played for the Merseysiders’ reserves before earning a five-year professional contract at the beginning of 1997. He says the burden targeting even younger hopefuls is even greater today with multiple sessions stretched across the week.
I was at a tournament last week, speaking to the academy directors at Everton. They were saying their kids train four days per week, including one-on-one sessions, yoga, strength, hand coordination sessions and the game on Saturday. That’s five days per week. This was an Under-9 tournament.
“(My son) plays for Monaco. It’s great and classed as this big club which must have a great academy but they’re not an academy. They just train on a Wednesday and play their match of a Saturday.
“For them, it’s a case of deciding whether to spend millions and millions on an academy, maybe get one player per generation from it, or let the kids enjoy it.
“For my son, he’s enjoying it and still wants to go out on the road every day to play with his friends. Whereas I could imagine if you’re son is training for two hours every day, four days per week, then there’s not much room for him to enjoy it.
As a parent would he recommend that regimented coaching if it means making it at a professional level?
“I wouldn’t do it or recommend it but it’s the way football is going and people might say if you’re not in, then you’re never going to make it”, he admits.
“I’ve heard Robbie (Keane) and Damien (Duff) speak before about being a street footballer. It’s what people want.
“That’s where you get the freedom to express yourself but also the hardness from playing against older kids of 15.
“You get battered and you’re falling, getting balls buried at you, but you just keep going. You lose and lose whereas in these academies it’s all winning.”
Dunne suggests that more focus should be put on allowing children to enjoy the game before setting in training structures when they are teenagers.
He says that copying the models of Spain and Germany has not worked in England, with their academies creating a homogenous set of players which lack identity and individual talents.
“If you look at the England team, they’re all pretty similar in terms of how they play. Raheem Sterling is different because he’s fast, but there’s no standout players or character about the side.
“It’s just another team, like a factory-produced side. They say: ‘this is how we do it, pass it two yards without having to move’ – you wouldn’t look at them and think who is going to roll their sleeves up and fight.
Should we just let the kids play?
“Well, yeah. Kids don’t have coordination or power in their legs to run. Some develop at different paces. It’s mad. You get as much from playing six hours in the field from six hours throughout the week trying to get fit.
“It’s because Germany did it and then Spain did it. Generations come around, the likes of Iniesta, all of those players were just a generation of footballers that were just incredible. It wasn’t solely down to the training.
“You can do the same training for the next 10 seasons but it doesn’t mean they are going to win the World Cup again.
“You get it every now and again. England were supposed to have their golden generation where they had great players at club level but at international level it didn’t work out for them.
“It’s the same with us and Ireland. Robbie and Damien came through at the same time and it’s unusual, but you’re still looking at it thinking is this because they had all this great training or is it because they played freely and just enjoyed themselves.
“They tick boxes, don’t they”, Dunne says on academies. “If players fail at least they can say they’ve done everything.”
Richard Dunne was in Dublin to announce that eir broadband customers can now cast the eir Sport app to their TV and that eir Sport will to show Ireland v Uruguay exclusively live.
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