No Hunger In Paradise Page 18

  His concern is authentic, vivid. It requires courage to express it in such terms, because the majority of those in youth development prefer to provide private confirmation of the troubling trickle-down effect of the cynicism and brutality of first-team football, rather than raise their heads above the parapet. Careers can be undermined by candour. Power is a potential pollutant at whatever level it is administered.

  ‘You know the football world, the culture of the dressing room. If the first-team manager comes in and decides he’s not having a certain player, everyone blanks that player. They turn their back on him. It’s not, come in, sit down, you need to know something. You’re not going to be part of our plans. We’ve got three players in the position already, and we believe they are ahead of you. Your contract is costing us too much money. It’s, I’m going to turn my back on you and just make you miserable.

  ‘I’ve seen that happen at senior level. Now it’s happening at youth level. The academy manager, head of coaching and the head of recruitment decide, for whatever reason, they don’t want a particular kid, or don’t think he’s got a chance. He’s got eleven months left on his contract, so they start blanking him.

  ‘But he plays on the Sunday and tears it up. Inside, I’m like, yes! Go on, son, prove them wrong. Yet he gets back to the dressing room and no one tells him how well he has done. Everyone thinks they have to stick to the original opinion. There are a lot of good coaches around, but some of them would tear their granny’s eyeballs out to get a full-time job in football. The way to do that is to agree with the boss.

  ‘Honestly, the stuff I’ve seen in academies. Coaches can be vile with the kids, because they think they’ve got to kiss someone’s arse. I’ve sat in personal development meetings with them, when they discuss the development of the five Cs in a player – confidence, commitment, control, concentration, communication.

  ‘They’ve got their head down like the school swot, writing furiously in their notebook. They walk down the stairs, and nobody’s around now. They see a player and they’re like, “Oi, what are you doing? That’s rubbish.” I said to this one guy, “You should read what you just wrote down in the CPD meeting. The way you are talking to that child is horrendous.”’

  His voice breaks, in a mixture of incredulity, sadness and contempt. McCool is at pains to stress his respect for the vast majority of his peers yet, emotionally, the dam has burst. Bad experiences manifest themselves, like muggers emerging from a shadowy alleyway. Another episode, on a tour to Belgium, looms large.

  ‘It made me think, what the fuck am I doing? I don’t want to be part of this. It was heartbreaking. There was a lad, coming up to sixteen, a left back. It had been deemed that he wasn’t going to be signed as a scholar, but I go into these things thinking that every day is a new day and that he might do something that will change their minds.

  ‘We’d spent weeks and weeks and weeks with the club philosophy of playing out from the back. This lad receives the ball from the goalkeeper about five minutes into the game, chops inside, and looks to play a diagonal pass into centre midfield. We’re playing a Dutch team, who close down, press. They work hard and they’re psychologically powerful, physically strong.

  ‘They can read the game. They’ve shown him inside, shut the line off because they’re very clever off the ball. Our lad is doing what he’s been told to do. He’s played the ball inside, but they’ve doubled up on it, knowing where the pass is going. They’ve robbed it, got a counter-attack, and nearly score. The lad is berated from the sideline. Not that the kid hasn’t heard swearing before at school, but pitchside, from the dugout, really?

  ‘Then, out of temper, a coach screams, “Get off the pitch. Get off the pitch! Get off my pitch!” I feel emotional now because the face of that child is right in the forefront of my mind. He has been demolished. There was no acknowledgement, no handshake. You could see that he wanted to cry and he didn’t want to show it.

  ‘He made a mistake, but he did what we taught him, so actually we’re at fault, not the kid. He walked off down to the corner flag and I couldn’t leave him. He couldn’t speak to me. He had tears rolling down his face, and I just thought, what the fuck have we become? To be treating so-called elite talent, a maturing young man, in that way …’

  England, our England. The pretence of the Premier League’s youth development strategy, in which players are defined by so-called performance clocks and coaches are turned into clerks by an obsessional desire to harvest self-justifying data, cannot hide the ignorance and intolerance it is supposed to have eradicated. Here is McCool’s experience of another European tournament:

  ‘We played Feyenoord, who were coached by Roy Makaay, the great Dutch forward. I think about what he achieved in Spain, and with Bayern Munich, and I am in awe of him. I’m privileged to be standing in the next dugout to him. The biggest thing for me was his behaviour. I never heard one angry word out of him. Not one word.

  ‘Our dugout is carrying on like a typical English pub football team. Quite frankly, we’re playing like one. This guy occasionally goes to the edge of the technical area, calls a kid over, and speaks quietly to him along the lines of, “When you get the ball in that situation, maybe have a look there, or there. Do you think you could maybe move there?” All very controlled.

  ‘Our dugout is pumped up, like a drunken crowd at a greyhound track when the dogs come round the final bend. We’re in an elite football environment, shouting and screaming. Do we value knowledge? I see people I want to learn from, people who have pearls of information, let go by clubs because they are seen as a threat to someone who wants all his mates around him. Why do we do that?’

  There are good people, striving in unheralded circumstances, trying to find answers to such questions. It is an instructive, affirming experience to visit smaller clubs, less exalted Category Three academies, where first-year professionals are paid £125 a week and coaches like Tony Mee excel in defiance of a system suffocating on stardust and sycophancy.

  He moved to Doncaster Rovers in September 2016 for family reasons, after being head of coaching at Rotherham United, academy manager at York City and lead development phase coach at Scunthorpe United. At his level, annual academy budgets are £315,000, a third of which is found by the club. Category One academies swallow anything between £3.5 million and £7 million a year; in return they devour those lower down the football food chain.

  Some smaller academies refuse to play more exalted opposition because of their fear of poaching; even if they do fulfil fixtures, many hide their best players, who are given cameo roles as substitutes for the day. Mee, whose softness of tone might not have always manifested itself during twenty-three years as a physical training instructor in the British Army, is more sanguine about such certainties:

  ‘I try and look at it quite pragmatically. If I flip the situation to the grassroots game we try and spirit their best kids away to make our academy stronger. We’re telling their coaches they should be proud, with such limited facilities, of developing a kid good enough to go into a pro club. Can we afford, then, to be that sniffy when the Cat One clubs come in and take our players?

  ‘In terms of coaching quality there shouldn’t be that significant a difference, because we are pretty much all at the same level in terms of qualifications. But if a Man United comes in and says, “Our facilities are ten times better than yours, our coaches are better than yours and we are Man United,” what can you do about it?’

  He reads voraciously, studies internationally, and picks the brains of former pros on coach education courses to better understand what drives a successful player. He counsels young coaches ‘with no grass on their boots’, to use his evocative phrase. They are invariably engrossed by the tale of one of his pupils at Thomas Rotherham College, where he cut his coaching teeth for six years. The boy was 16, and had been rejected by Sheffield Wednesday.

  ‘He was not the best student in the world, a little bit wayward, but a really good footballer. I could see why he
had been released, having been in the system, and heard what people thought about size and attitude and everything else that goes with it. I don’t suppose he is bothered what I think now, but I will be honest with you. I never saw him as an England player of the future.

  ‘It was the right decision to release him at the time. There was nobody else sniffing around him. He was quick and knew where the back of the net was, but I had a better player than him the year before, a lad called Lee Squires. He was a brilliant kid who got a trial at Rotherham, but broke his wrist at the worst possible time and couldn’t play. He didn’t make it and is now head coach at a college in the States.’

  The football world knows the flight path of Jamie Vardy, Mee’s lost boy, from Stocksbridge Steels to Leicester City and the Premier League title. It is unaware of the backstory of Dominic Hart, former captain of Rotherham’s under-18s, who is majoring in accountancy and playing for the Northwood University Timberwolves in Michigan. His name is etched on Mee’s soul:

  ‘Having to tell Dominic he wasn’t getting a pro contract, I actually cried. My assistant manager had to take over because I couldn’t do it. I knew how much that contract meant to him. I knew how hard he had tried. He was a superb lad, a great scholar who had come through the club from the under-9s, but ultimately it was probably the right decision.

  ‘People underestimate the humanity of coaching, how arbitrary things can be. It doesn’t matter how much analysis we do, how many reports we put into the system, a first-team manager has so little opportunity to look at the under-18s. If our best player happens to have a stinker when he is around that boy has blown his chance.

  ‘I had a lad, Mitchell Austin. His dad was an Australian rugby league player. He’d done a full morning’s training and was told at lunchtime he was playing for the reserves against Middlesbrough that afternoon. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t have his best game. His future was pretty much decided on that game. He was lost to our system, but made himself a career.’

  Austin, a forward, played part-time for Stalybridge Celtic, made nine first-team appearances over two seasons for Cambridge United, and went on loan to Lincoln City, Brackley Town and Southport before he joined Central Coast Mariners in the A League. At 25, he had just been named man of the match for Melbourne Victory in a high-profile friendly against Juventus.

  Mee’s skill, as part of football’s middle management, is to match the pair of part-time coaches who oversee each age group. They tend to be young, technologically literate, and supported by unpaid interns. They spend six hours a week with their players and at least another eight hours, without payment, feeding the Premier League’s Performance Management Application.

  The PMA is a computerised system designed to evaluate training sessions, and provides a template for six- and twelve-weekly reviews. To employ the jargon, it records outcomes against learning objectives, in the context of a four-corner development model. A player’s performance clock archives individual and collective technical development, matches played, sports science support, medical interventions, psychological and social observations and educational progression.

  Confused? You will be. The PMA services the EPPP, which demands APP reviews and IAA monitoring. Education is dictated by the QTS, which shapes NVQs and BTECs. The FA promotes DNA and the PGB oversees the professional game. The EPL is becoming increasingly subservient to the PL. Clubs have TBs and AMTs to work in PDP, YDP and FP. Excuse the French, but WTF?

  The Elite Player Performance Plan, to pay it the courtesy of its full title, is as self-perpetuating as any civil service chimera. It is supposed to be qualitative, but it demands quantity. The PMA is not standardised, so cannot yield consistent outcomes, yet it is held up to the light as a symbol of collective progress. Be my guest, and savour the subjectivity, simplicity and above all the logic of Mee’s approach:

  ‘There’s millions of me, coaches who want to make a difference, but career progression is limited. It is the same as being a player. You need a break. It doesn’t matter what people on my courses think about my work, or what the kids I have coached think about me. There’s no profile. I might have been five foot five inches and eight stone soaking wet when I joined the army at sixteen, but experience of another career has stood me in good stead.

  ‘I am not of that boot camp mentality, but I appreciate elements of military life, like having to take responsibility. I don’t think kids in our academies necessarily appreciate what it takes to get to the next level. There is softness there, a fear of pushing them that extra yard, because of the blame culture, the litigation culture.

  ‘I want to stress that if bullying is going on it should be dealt with, as harshly as possible. But at what point are we allowed to make kids uncomfortable? Because it is only by stretching and testing people that you find out whether they have got what they need to survive in the first-team dressing room. The manager wants those who can tough it out, who can take a bit of ribbing without taking things too far.

  ‘You can’t measure attitude on a computer. Football can’t be an elite development environment, because it is a team sport. If it was a true elite development environment we’d have twelve kids aged between eight and eighteen in our academies. They’d be the absolute top ones in their age group. Of course that will never happen, because we need other boys around them to play the game.

  ‘I’m a great believer in judging players in a match situation. Are they comfortable on the ball? Do they understand the game, the position you are asking them to play in? Do they understand the style of play required? Do they have the right instincts, the correct decision-making processes? Make your decision, as a coach, based on that. And always remember, it is an opinions game whether you are dealing with the England national team or Scunthorpe United under-9s.’

  Mee accepts the reality that youth coaches are unlikely to break into the old boys’ club of first-team football. McCool is a little more militant in nature, but the pair are kindred spirits, in that they care for art rather than science. Apparatchiks at the Premier League might brand them as outmoded malcontents, but they would, not for the first time, be utterly wrong.

  ‘If you question things you’re old school,’ reflected McCool, with a thin smile that registered ill-suppressed irritation. ‘I’ve worked in performance analysis for twenty years, and you’re calling me old school? I wouldn’t survive in that industry if I wasn’t susceptible to change. I accept change has got to happen, so I’m not some sort of anarchist by questioning EPPP.

  ‘It has created a lot of jobs, but also created a certain type of person, where it’s about me, my career, my future. I will trample over everyone to get there, and if anyone questions that, I’ll trample on them, too. I suppose you could say, well, that’s just football, but good coaches are walking away from the game.

  ‘This is an industry where experience counts for fuck all. I’m not saying we should go back to writing the team down on the back of a fag packet, or chucking a bag of balls on to the training pitch, scratching our head and saying, “What the fuck should we do today?” I love the fact that we’re planning, that there should be a structure, a syllabus. I get all that.

  ‘But this is like a cult. You see coaches bamboozled by the phrases, caught in the headlights. There are too many perceived elite players. I talked to a grassroots manager who couldn’t raise a team for their cup final because six of his players were travelling abroad with a development centre squad. Surely that can’t be allowed to happen?’

  It is, and it does. No wonder McCool’s return to his roots is a bittersweet experience. If padlocks and jobsworths dictate that this generation cannot play, how can we expect our teams to perform at the highest level? The question has undoubted relevance, uncomfortable resonance. It echoes around the National Football Centre, nestling in a 330-acre site set in the Staffordshire countryside.

  12

  Room with a View

  DAN ASHWORTH PUNCHES a security code into a console on the right-hand side of a door on the top floo
r of the National Football Centre. The password-protected room gives up its secrets quickly, because within three steps the visitor’s eye is drawn to a rectangular digital clock, where red numbers are counting down to the World Cup final in Qatar on December 18, 2022.

  This clock, according to Greg Clarke, the Football Association’s latest blindly opinionated chairman, is ‘a joke’. It might be wild, emblematic optimism, yet, since it signals England’s avowed ambition to win the global game’s greatest prize on that day, it is an inevitable focal point of an office that has the feel of a draft room in the NFL, NBA or Major League Baseball.

  The walls are lined with names and thumbnail photographs of England’s best young players, arranged into seven age-group squads, from under-15 to under-21. Each section features a fixtures programme and an optimal starting eleven set up in a 4–2–3–1 formation; potential substitutes are arranged around the team, like moons orbiting the mother planet.

  This is a visual representation of the talent pool available to the men who occupy eight chairs, tucked under a table on which a gaudy green representation of a football pitch is etched. There are workstations available for the national age-group coaches, and the manager of the senior side. On one, in the corner, rests a replica hand grenade.

  This symbolises a running joke launched by Aidy Boothroyd, the under-20 coach, who tosses the toy on to the table whenever he wants to make an incendiary point during post-tournament debriefs, which cover everything from travel arrangements to tactical substitutions. Coaches are encouraged to challenge one another; they, like senior support staff, are also expected to stand before the group and name three young players they believe will make the full England team. FA talent reporters continually assess youth football. Fifty-strong longlists are drawn up for the under-15 and -16 squads; older age groups select from thirty-three players. Ashworth classifies 459 players, from under-15 to under-21 level, as England’s elite. One hundred and seventy-five are female and statistics suggest 19 per cent of them will represent the country at senior level. Only 5.28 per cent of the 284 males in the international programme will progress to the senior team.