Don’t forget the fun

18 Aug Don’t forget the fun

The search for the next best sporting talent is always on.

Channel 4’s new series Football Dreams – The Academy, which started last week,  is the latest line and focuses on Crystal Palace’s academy.

Sure, the demand of editors is always to ‘sell the sizzle’ but even so the opening credits featured some hackneyed old vernacular:

Coach: “This is a results business” and “You can’t stay in the team unless you perform – there’s no hiding place.”

Players: “I just want to be famous” and “I’d love to earn six figures a year.”

The kids we’re talking about are as young as eight years old. Eight. Years. Old. OMG.

That’s the expected audience reaction, right?

Missing in action was an important ingredient mentioned by colleagues who contacted me the following morning to ask if I had seen the programme – fun. Why? Because there wasn’t any. My more concerning problem? The premature professionality of it all.

You can’t criticise the people charged with trying to make the elite football youth development ‘system’ (for that is what it is) work – or the legalistic lingo adapted by coaches, players (boys, really) or their parents towards the recruitment and retention of players.

Blame the game’s owners who constantly sow the spellbinding seed of ‘the dream’ in business terms rather than the thrill of the ride it should be.

It is Alice in Wonderland stuff to expect pre-teens or more ‘mature’ 10, 11 and 12 year-olds to think and act like grizzled professionals as clubs try to inject the magic bean of consistency into young kids.

The Looking Glass sees them constantly shadow box around the legalese of their futures – a seeming need to require ‘representation’ to negotiate a new ‘contract’ when really it is just a take-it-or-leave-it registration form their mum, dad or guardian can sign.

Then there’s the constant issue – which I am sure we’ll see more of as Football Dreams progresses – of kids being whipped out of school to play more football.

Small wonder one young lad wrapped in the ‘will-he, won’t he’ drama of being released said: “I don’t what else I will be.”

Me neither, son. You see, adults routinely decide to take away one-third of a child’s schooling without wondering if they’ll slip behind with their education. Oh, and they seem to want a medal for it.

If it wasn’t so serious – many of the boys who fail to make it are so fragile after being released (as the vast majority are) they endure a living nightmare of rejection and wear a yoke of failure – it would be funny.

Only it isn’t. Addictions, depression, even suicide, feature readily among the all-too-familiar mental health problems of those chewed up and spat out by the football business as teenagers.

By then, of course, the football business has lost any interest in them – children who were expected to ‘put away childish things’ while still being children.

Avaricious football clubs have no right to take childhood away in the miniscule hope they might ‘make it’ as professional footballer and strut their stuff at their behest. The power of dreams is more acute the less you have, of course. Cue endless shots in Football Dreams of South London tower blocks and council estates (as an editor why wouldn’t you?) where Crystal Palace and others go, bugles out, a-hunting for the next big thing.

What they’re actually looking for seems somewhat less clear. As mentioned, consistency usually seems high up the list – reliable performers who can hit the required mark, game after game. But why be so besotted with consistency from children or teenagers?

Fun is an essential ingredient of growing up – a time to enjoy the challenge of discovery, test your limits, learn from mistakes (failure is the best learner you can get). All that kind of thing. Inconsistency comes with the package.

Developing talent should surely be about firing imaginations, instilling belief, inspiring people to take their talent beyond the boundaries of most mere mortals. Adding some fun to the hard yards, for heaven’s sake.

At its best, youth development is a beautiful thing – in all sports.

Just look at the fresh smiling faces on podiums at the recent Commonwealth Games and current European Championships.

Or take Manchester United, a club currently in turmoil but with a heritage underscored by its relationship with youth, from developing England’s first true talent scouting programme – the Manchester United Junior Athletic Club (MUJACs) – in the 1930s to the Busby Babes of the 1950s and Sir Alex Ferguson’s Class of ’92. Long periods spent trying to buy success in between, and arguably now, have generally failed.

What you can’t expect as you give youth a chance is consistency. “You’ll win nothing with kids”, right? Not now, maybe, later possibly.

That means being in it for the long haul – which requires patience and nurture. And there’s the rub.

Check out Dominic Ball’s recent book, From Winning Teams to Broken Dreams. Ball, a former Watford and Tottenham Hotspur trainee now aged 26 and playing for Ipswich Town, admits to rarely enjoying a game between the age of 10 to 21, due to the constant pressure of scrutiny.

One day, his older brother Matt, also a former academy player, called to advise Dominic to be less tense, to enjoy the game he was being (well) paid to play. To savour it. He did and still does – and there’s a lesson in that for all of us.

Work hard but enjoy the ride. Leave the dreams to others.

Chris Green is the author of Every Boy’s Dream – England’s Football Future on the Line and a regular spokesman on football youth development matters.     

© Chris Green