No Hunger In Paradise Read online

  When I first met Gareth Southgate for the purposes of this book, in late September, he was manager of the under-21s and the responsibility for picking the senior team was less than a week away. Neither he nor Ashworth were aware that the end-of-the-pier show starring Sam Allardyce was about to close over a pint of white wine with undercover journalists.

  Our subsequent conversations have enduring relevance, since they concentrate on the issues and philosophies that will shape Southgate’s tenure in the most over-exposed job in domestic sport, which is scheduled to last until at least 2020. The odds on him seeing out that contract are prohibitively small; England managers might have three lions on their chest, but they are uncomfortably aware of the metaphorical targets on their backs.

  The ugliness of recrimination prompted by recurring failure was typified the morning after England’s defeat by Iceland at Euro 2016. The receptionist at St George’s Park received abusive phone calls as if she were responsible for the collective nervous breakdown endured by Roy Hodgson and his mentally scarred squad.

  Emotionally incontinent criticism, sustained by envy, ignorance, rage and a revealing enjoyment of ritual self-flagellation, amused the rest of the football world and solved nothing, as usual. Yet Something Had To Be Done. The job landed in the in-tray of Ashworth, who joined the FA in 2013 after a sixteen-year ascent from the lower-league development system.

  There is an illuminating flowchart on the wall of his office down the corridor. Entitled, simply, ‘Stakeholders’, it is the family tree from hell, a maze of acronyms, minor empires and vanity projects. Everyone on the list from fish-eyed FA Council members with a fondness for Wembley hospitality to sleek-suited marketing types who could be selling widgets instead of a tinsel-thin version of national pride has a voice. Together, they form the Chorus of the Damned.

  Successive strategic plans written by assorted FA luminaries gather dust on countless shelves, including my own. They form a timeline of good intentions and misaligned visions, from Howard Wilkinson’s Charter for Quality, which promoted the concept of an elitist academy system in May 1997, to the Future Game, which set out youth development principles in 2010. Ashworth’s England DNA document, compiled with Matt Crocker, his head of player and coach development, riffed on a familiar theme.

  Forests were felled to state the obvious, that England had to evolve a unified playing style that was modern, tactically astute and emotionally intelligent. Possession had to be cherished, but combined with penetration and applied by footballers who were not afraid of their own shadows. The DNA document ran to about 40,000 words; I managed to persuade Ashworth to summarise it in precisely 199:

  ‘What do we do when we haven’t got the ball? What are the key principles when we do have the ball, or when we are in transition? What are the key principles around set plays? They are the four most important parts of the tactical and technical game. What sort of people do we need? What sort of learners do we need? What sort of leaders do we need? How do we deal with pressure? Why not set the bar as high as we can?

  ‘We have had fifty years of either not qualifying, not getting out of groups or getting knocked out in the early knockout phases of big tournaments. Yet every single time, media and public expectation is, oh no, we will win this one. Then there’s an outcry. We didn’t get through against Iceland because the players weren’t good enough. It was an issue of non-performance under pressure. Are we just going to cross our fingers and hope next time it is going to be OK, or are we going to put building blocks in place with our younger teams? Start with the end product in mind – what sort of men and women do we need?’

  The raw material reflects modern life. Wayne Rooney, a hugely beneficial influence on younger players, worries that academy products lack leadership qualities. Everyone is looking for Cristiano Ronaldo’s fusion of extraordinary talent and unrelenting perfectionism. To use Carlo Ancelotti’s memorable description of the Real Madrid icon, ‘his belly is never full’.

  Southgate, by his own admission, is as informed by his failures, most notably as an ill-prepared Middlesbrough manager, as he is by his successes, as a player of the highest personal and professional standards, and as a notably empathetic coach. As such, he is an appropriate figurehead for the development system he effectively embodies.

  Ashworth’s astringency, as a more political animal, is better suited to dealing with the FA’s strategic vulnerability in the face of the Premier League’s dominance. Southgate is a softer character without being weaker; he is notably unafraid of voicing doubts about the commoditisation of children, who are being transported, with their families, from their communities at the age of 11.

  ‘Every club has got to ask the question, what is it running its academy for? At Middlesbrough, Steve Gibson was willing to give local kids an opportunity of a career in the game. That, in turn, would give the club an identity. Now I accept that might be a little different if you’re a bigger club, but if you look at successes in youth development, they involve kids who start at the club nearest their home.

  ‘Having kids myself, is moving a boy because of football something you’d want to do? Move him away from his friends, away from that security? I know people have sometimes to move because of their parents’ jobs, and they develop resilience, but if you, the kid, are the reason for the move, that doesn’t half pile some pressure on you at a very young age.

  ‘We don’t know if a lad in our national under-16s is going to have career in the game, never mind whether he’s going to be a senior England player, so how do we know a kid will be a pro at eight, nine, ten, eleven? We can spot a talent, get an idea of the stability of the family, but the path is so complex. Frankly, the reason that is going on is because everyone is frightened to death of losing a player.’

  The earnestness by which I was first struck, when he was a Crystal Palace player discussing the pros and cons of his initial ambition to become a sports journalist, has been concentrated by experience. He leans slightly forward to engage in conversation; the tidily trimmed beard and open body language gives him the air of a college lecturer conducting a sociology tutorial.

  Southgate cites the example of clubs like Tottenham, Southampton, Middlesbrough and, latterly, Liverpool, who are willing to risk the loss of precocious players because of a more considered, strategic system of financial reward. He would like to see the Elite Player Performance Plan amended, to incorporate a trust fund system.

  ‘Owners and chief executives are all frightened of losing a player, and until people say, “Actually, we might lose him but we’re not prepared to break what we do, on you go, good luck with it, let’s see where he ends up,” the problem will remain. There’s no evidence of players being paid more and performing better. In fact I can see the opposite. The best players come through because they have that intrinsic motivation.

  ‘The defining factor in a successful pro is mentality. When a player comes into a club you’re assuming he is at a high level technically, but there is something very important about the ability to learn, to keep wanting to learn and improve. It’s about dealing with the constant setbacks, the constant need to adapt and adjust.

  ‘If you take the under-21 squad we had in September, twenty out of twenty-three were working with a new manager this season. Five were playing in their first team, and three were going really well. Two weeks later, two of those were out of their first team. You notice the constant flux when they meet up with England. It’s a snapshot. You’re never going to get the same person through the door.’

  Personal development is football’s final frontier. There are few additional gains to be made in physical preparation, and psychology is gradually becoming embedded in the performance system. The business of professional sport encourages a more holistic approach to an athlete whose brand value can be commercially decisive. Southgate is on message, in tune with the whole person:

  ‘We’ve got to be careful we don’t dismiss the player who is more difficult to manage, in favour of the player who i
s easier to look after, the one you can have a more rational conversation with. Talent travels on different routes, and most of these boys are a consequence of where they grew up. Get to know the family, what their individual motivations are, how much they are prepared to suffer to get there, and then you’ve got an opportunity to work with them.

  ‘Without knowing those things it’s scratching the surface really. It’s a bit shallow and I’m not sure how much you are affecting them. You are putting sessions on and you’re picking them, but you’re not really getting to the core. Some of these boys are on huge money but inherently they want to play football. That’s their source of frustration. That’s why I’ve spoken to them about relating to the challenge of breaking into a first team.

  ‘I didn’t get into the first team at Palace until I was twenty, partly because they went through a season where they got promoted, then a season when they finished third in the league. There was no way Steve Coppell was going to risk a young player. I had a hundred-odd reserve games before I got my chance.

  ‘Sometimes in the reserves we couldn’t field a full team, so we’d have lads from Carshalton Athletic to make up the numbers. They were hardened non-league players. We had people like Chris Coleman, Stan Collymore and Steve Claridge, but a lad called Bobby Armitt, who’d been up at six in the morning getting the flowers out at Covent Garden, was our best player. That’s the bit the lads in under-23 football don’t get now. They are used to lots of things we wouldn’t have put up with, workshops, classrooms and flipcharts, but an academy is a fantasy world, isn’t it?

  ‘I don’t think we talk enough about the hardness of football. It’s a shitty, horrible world really. I was a YTS at Palace when five or six lads were called into the office and told they weren’t going to go on. The tears … flipping heck. It was one of the worst days I can remember because these were lads I played with from Sunday football. I knew what it meant. It drove me on.

  ‘Looking back, Alan Smith, who was my youth coach and later my first-team manager, reminds me of development people like John McDermott, Warren Joyce and Dave Parnaby. They give the kids really good values. They are tough with them, want them to develop as players but know there’s another side. They care for what the kid is about.’

  Parnaby, Middlesbrough’s influential academy director, mentored Southgate when he was working towards his UEFA B coaching qualifications as a senior player. The consensual environment extended to manager Steve McClaren and Bill Beswick, the sports psychologist who assisted him. They took Southgate into their confidence on selection issues, and the type of culture they were seeking to promote.

  The challenge evolved from the theoretical to the terrifyingly practical when McClaren left to manage England. Southgate, his captain, had a year left on his playing contract. He spoke with the club’s owner Steve Gibson about his interest in gaining additional coaching experience alongside a new manager, and was entirely unprepared for the subsequent leap of faith:

  ‘Steve wanted Terry Venables, really. He’d been there before. He spoke to Martin O’Neill, but neither of them wanted to take the job. They probably knew what I didn’t, in terms of where we were financially. So, I get a call on holiday. Steve asked me to think about being the manager. I knew some of the difficulties, but didn’t really know anything about what I was taking on.

  ‘I’m thirty-five, managing in the Premier League. I’ve never even taken our under-14s, never planned a pre-season. I don’t know anything about the development of players, or recruitment. I have an idea of how I want to play but not how that needs to be coached, and the amount of data coming at me is amazing. I’m pretty good with people because that’s a skill set I developed as a captain, but I’m on this bizarre pathway of not knowing how to manage a team of staff.

  ‘I’ve got to thank Steve for having that trust in me. I think he understood I cared about the club. I felt the club’s money was his money and I wanted to protect it. Without him, that club is nothing. Dave, from another part of the club, helped to give it an identity. I wanted to bring young players through, a bit too much actually.

  ‘I probably underestimated what was needed to stay in the league, but we finished twelfth and thirteenth in the first two seasons. We had some very good players, great senior pros like Mark Schwarzer and Mark Viduka, and I had experienced coaches around me, like Steve Harrison and Malcolm Crosby. But the budget meant we had to get recruitment bang on.’

  His final appearance as a Middlesbrough player was in the 4–0 loss to Seville in the 2006 UEFA Cup final. He then needed special dispensation from the Premier League to take charge because he lacked the necessary Pro Licence. His final match as Middlesbrough manager was a 2–0 win over Derby County on October 20, 2009, when they were fourth in the Championship following relegation from the Premier League. Gibson explained he had taken the decision weeks earlier, to safeguard the club’s best interests.

  ‘I know this sounds a bit wanky, but it is an incredible journey of learning. You learn by your mistakes in life, and in this world those mistakes can finish you. After being sacked you need to go away and think. It was the first time I’d experienced not being in work, and I felt what every man in the street feels in terms of lack of self-worth.

  ‘You feel like you’ve let your family down. There’s no structure to your day, no routine after having been part of something. I didn’t have financial worry because I could do bits of media work; it was more that sense of missing a community. I applied for a couple of jobs and didn’t get an interview, which was the best thing that could have happened to me.

  ‘I needed to go and live life a bit, have some Christmases away, go skiing, which I couldn’t do when I was playing. I wouldn’t have done that if I’d been on the managerial treadmill. I had time to think about what I really wanted to do. TV gave me a nice quality of life, but I’m always uncomfortable criticising people for having a go at something, and not being prepared to put my neck on the block to do it.’

  Trevor Brooking, who was then the FA’s technical director, invited Southgate to shadow him for a year, until he was appointed England under-21 manager in August 2013. It proved to be a unique, elevated internship, which gave him a general’s view of what is, to all intents and purposes, a battlefield populated by committee-room politicians and parochial class-warriors.

  ‘That gave me a brilliant insight into every aspect of youth development, from grassroots upwards. I travelled around the county FAs with Nick Levett, seeing how difficult that was. There’s the guy who comes up to you and says, “Kids up here are different.” Oh, right, are they? Why is that? I experienced everything from skills programmes to being involved with some of the talks with Ged Roddy at the Premier League around EPPP.

  ‘I travelled around the clubs, meeting the academy managers. I got a good look at the national junior teams. It was fantastic for me. I can see how difficult Dan’s job is because of all the strands that have to come together. It’s a miracle how any kid becomes a pro because the journey is so individual. There are so many things you have to overcome.’

  At 45, Ashworth is six months younger than Southgate. He may be small in stature (‘At five foot seven I was never going to be a goalkeeper’) but he wields huge influence as a kingmaker, despite the fate of his pivotal supporter, Roy Hodgson. His instinct is to make the FA, an organisation hidebound by bureaucratic tradition and self-interest, more technocratic, outward-facing and partnership-driven.

  He has established a People and Team Development department, taken strategic guidance from Lane4, the performance management consultancy established by Olympic swimming champion Adrian Moorhouse, and employed support staff from rugby, cricket, hockey and organisations with Olympic oversight, such as the English Institute of Sport.

  Since I once took a sabbatical from sportswriting to help establish the EIS, as deputy to the founding director, Wilma Shakespear, I empathise with Ashworth’s aims. There are parallels with the Institute’s ambition to create a new culture in Olympic an
d Paralympic sport through the transfusion of intelligence, insight, passion and creativity provided by young professionals unencumbered by systemic straitjackets and straight-line thinking.

  I lasted four years before tiring of the duplicity and inanity of the small-minded mediocrities that sports administration tends to attract. Ashworth is more durable; he understands the principles of power, but has a wider field of vision. He has committed the FA to an annual ‘health check’ by UK Sport, in which process, progress and efficiency are gauged by measuring more than ninety components.

  ‘UK Sport are ruthless. They do what it takes to win. If you are not on track as a performance director your funding gets pulled. It would be remiss of us, in football, not to look at outstanding sports and organisations. Their landscape might be slightly different, but by taking their example, and tapping and tweaking what we do, we can be more planned and strategic.

  ‘It is not as difficult to operate politically as people make out. I get on well with Ged at the Premier League, and David Wetherall from the Football League. It is about being transparent and open. At some stage we have to leave our egos at the door. Who does what? How does it look? There are lots of stakeholders involved. We won’t always agree but we have all got the same success criteria.

  ‘Clubs want young players coming through to play in first teams. Otherwise their academies are not cost-effective. So do we, since in the main that means greater opportunity for English qualified players. Richard Scudamore wants the best and most attractive league in the world. So do we, since players and coaches are challenged every day. I say this with all respect because we are only ten per cent of the player development programme. We have to join it up and make sure it is a parallel process.’