No Hunger In Paradise Page 23

  The presence of agents at development matches at Tottenham’s training ground is tolerated rather than encouraged. The most prominent are identified by their restless eyes, fractured conversations and personalised number plates, found on black Range Rovers and white BMW saloons. Scouts are corralled between the left-hand corner flag and one of the goals.

  Parents are the most fascinating creatures in this human zoo. At Spurs they congregate around a silver-grey vintage Citroën burger van, and spread along one touchline on the main pitch. Eavesdropping on their conversations is, frankly, compelling since they drip with ill-disguised desperation, institutionalised fear, and instinctive suspicion.

  On this particular morning, the visiting parents, family groups with pushchairs and siblings in tow, were enraptured by the usual mixture of prejudice and unconfirmed rumour. One knot was scandalised by a supposed £250,000 payment to an academy player of dubious provenance; another cluster were murmuring darkly about over-training leading to a sudden spate of stress injuries. A third gaggle merrily bitched about a goalkeeper whose sliced clearances rarely ended in the same postcode twice.

  Their interest was piqued by the sudden presence of a familiar figure in a dark suit, fawn gabardine raincoat, and Tottenham club tie. David Pleat was taking in the under-18s on his way to another afternoon’s scouting session, at Leyton Orient. Prominent agents, like Sky Andrew, danced attendance; Pleat acknowledged their presence professionally but seemed glad to be distracted by the intervention of a bustling, stocky man in a flat cap.

  ‘Mr Pleat. You are a great man. Sir, could you kindly help us again? They will listen to you.’ It transpired his admirer was the father of Jacques Maghoma, the Democratic Republic of Congo midfield player whom Pleat recommended to Burton following his release by Spurs in 2009. His career has subsequently flourished at Sheffield Wednesday and Birmingham City. Another son, Paris, was progressing well in Tottenham’s under-16 team.

  A third son, Christian, was approaching his nineteenth birthday and had a critical decision to make. A tall central defender, with a languid demeanour and the obligatory diamond-studded earring, he had been offered a six-month loan at Newport County, bottom of League Two. Pleat, conscious that he had not started a competitive match in a previous loan spell at Yeovil, advised him to take it, on the proviso he would be guaranteed game time. The proposed deal subsequently fell through.

  The timing and nature of a young player’s loan is critical if he is to make the step from the tea dance of under-23 football to the guerrilla warfare of the men’s game. Pleat is intrigued by the philosophy of Jürgen Klopp, who tolerates strikers and defenders taking their lumps in the lower leagues, up to a point, but prefers to develop midfield players internally and is working towards the centralised education of young players, through shared training facilities.

  To those of us of a certain vintage, and to a national radio audience accustomed to his insight and erudition as a co-commentator, it comes as a surprise to realise that Pleat is 72, the same age at which the manager to whom he is inextricably linked, Graham Taylor, passed away in January 2017. Yet his influence, as an adviser to Tottenham chairman Daniel Levy, primarily in assessing players between the ages of 18 and 21, has endured in the twelve years since his spell as Tottenham’s Director of Football ended.

  His thirty-year association with Spurs includes four separate spells as manager, but he does not always get his own way. Levy accepted his advice to invest £5 million in Dele Alli, yet demurred when Pleat urged him to investigate the possibility of signing Duncan Watmore from Sunderland. ‘He has what I call progressive pace,’ Pleat reflected, eyes narrowing as if summoning the spirit of the ginger-haired winger. ‘We know he is intelligent. He’s had the perfect apprenticeship, scores goals, and puts the full back on his heels. He’d be perfect to bring on steadily.’

  He cautioned against signing Will Hughes from Derby because he felt he lacked a change of pace, and the three 18-year-olds he identified as the best in their age group at the start of 2016 had enjoyed mixed fortunes. Rico Henry, a full back developed by Walsall, struggled to establish himself at Brentford; by contrast Sunderland’s Jordan Pickford emerged as a senior England goalkeeper of the future and Tammy Abraham’s goal-splurge on loan at Bristol City in the Championship testified to talent too often ossified in Chelsea’s academy.

  Pleat, a former England schoolboy international, was once Nottingham Forest’s youngest player. He made his debut thirty-three days after his seventeenth birthday. The first team trained in the car park at the City Ground the day before matches in the old First Division; beer barrels were used as goalposts in intra-squad matches between four seven-a-side teams.

  There were no sports scientists urging caution because the numbers suggested players were in the red zone of potential fatigue. Knees were grazed, knocks were accepted as an occupational hazard. This is not romantic self-deception, an anthem to a post-war, pre-space-travel generation. Pleat merely asks for greater respect for balance:

  ‘Uneven surfaces improve your control, but the modern grass, or 3 and 4G, pitches allow a player to learn how to be controlled and restrained in the challenge. Why not accept the merits of both? Ron Greenwood was right. This is still a simple game, in which successful, balanced teams do the right things quickly and accurately. We have become too regimented, too rigid. It’s a form of follow-my-leader. I can’t remember the last time I saw an academy team playing their way, instead of the way they are told they should be playing.

  ‘Leicester City won the Premier League because they did something differently. They were happy to concede possession, funnel back and counter. When I watched them I often used to visualise Cloughie shouting at his son Nigel to get back to the halfway line, knowing the damage they were able to do on the break through Bowyer and Robertson. Going back further to 1962, Ipswich Town played a deep-lying outside left, thirty-four-year-old Jimmy Leadbetter, and two strikers, Ray Crawford and Ted Phillips. By the time the rest realised what was going on, the season was halfway through and Sir Alf Ramsey had effectively won the league title.’

  This is no ramble through football’s version of the Natural History Museum. Pleat embraces modernity on his, and its, own terms. He would cap young players’ salaries, employ more welfare staff, and allow no boy younger than 12 to join an academy. He believes clubs should prove their commitment to development by offering four-year contracts, essentially extended scholarships, to their most promising 14-year-olds.

  ‘They might get more coaching time these days, but they’re too young. Their minds have to develop. I see so many young players do something well in a match, immediately turning to the bench, seeking the approval of the coach. It’s frightening that they’ve not been able to acquire enough confidence to relax and play. We don’t realise there are a lot of anxious, nervous boys out there. It’s very difficult for them.

  ‘Money is a massive problem, because that fear of failure can sometimes spur you on. I remember my first job as a manager. We had our first child, with another on the way. I had nothing but football. That meant I had to put my heart and soul into the game, give it all my time. When players out of the team are insulated by money they simply can’t be as hungry as they should be.

  ‘There are so many factors in a boy making it. The right environment and pastoral care are very important. Injuries affected my pace as a player, but I don’t think I failed just because of that. I lacked a mentor, a sympathetic coach, a proper man to guide me. I see loads of little kids on Saturday mornings. They’re tiny. They’re not ready. I see parents who have no idea. Then the agent comes along, gets into them, and the boy is on the wrong road.’

  Pleat was alarmed by an early experience of football’s dark arts, when he was told an agent paid another agent £10,000 to acquire the rights to promote a teenaged player he mistakenly believed had a chance of forging a professional career. Another dubious alliance involved a chief scout whose best youngsters used mysteriously to join a rival club represent
ed by his partner in a property deal.

  Poaching of players between the ages of 16 and 18 has become so endemic that Tottenham’s principled stand on their pay scale for emerging players leaves them vulnerable to predatory competitors. Marcus Edwards, the 17-year-old attacking midfield player injudiciously likened to Lionel Messi by Pochettino when he gave him a first-team debut at Gillingham in the autumn of 2016, was stalked by several clubs during a six-month dispute that preceded his first professional contract.

  Tottenham are understood to have considered reporting Chelsea to the Premier League for an alleged illegal approach to Nya Kirby, an England under-16 international who was also linked to Manchester United and Liverpool when Spurs were informed he wished to leave at the end of the 2015–16 season. He played for Chelsea in the summer, before a proposed move was scrapped, and underwent a trial with Arsenal before signing for Crystal Palace.

  Andrew Mills became the UK’s first FIFA-licensed agent in 1993, when the system at least maintained the pretence of incorporating the professional safeguards effectively abandoned when individuals were given the opportunity to register as deregulated intermediaries for £500. He still runs the Treble B Management company, but a parallel career in football administration and recruitment has merely emphasised his disaffection with the youth game.

  A lean, expressive man, who speaks with his hands, he sits in a hotel bar, close to Chelsea’s training ground at Cobham in Surrey, as a survivor in a brutal trade. Yet his reference point, from a human perspective, is of himself as a teenager crying in his mother’s car outside the Richardson Evans leisure centre, beside the A3 in south-west London, following his release by Wimbledon.

  His melancholy is affecting: ‘They told me I didn’t need to come back, and I had to ask myself some questions: “What am I now? How do I fit in? How am I going to tell my mates at school?” There was no mechanism of transition even then, when the dream wasn’t as big, fluffy and champagne-fuelled as it is today.

  ‘At what point does football become a job? When you’re eight, ten, twelve? I see these boys around here in their Chelsea kit and I know they are being treated differently at school. They’re superstars. But I also know that for every positive element that attaches to them, there’s a negative.

  ‘What we’ve done in professional football is to over-complicate every layer of their development so they don’t know what to do when they come out of academies without a job. They have very little ability to self-generate the internal strength it takes to actually get to the sharp end of this career. The academy system has softened them. We’ve taken that resilience away from them.’

  To reinforce the point, he spoke of a boy he had just been asked to mentor by a friend. A former age-group captain at a Premier League academy, he was approached on his release by six individuals claiming to be established agents, on the strength of a single YouTube clip of him scoring a twenty-five-yard free kick. Mills was disgusted by their reckless opportunism:

  ‘I’d never heard of a single one of these agents. I’d never heard of the companies they said they’d worked for. I don’t believe they were agents. I believe they travel around youth games, trying to attach themselves to the best kid for a slice of the action. Football has created that environment. The boy is now on the phone to me every day, asking, “Where do I go? What do I do?” He’s a lovely lad but he has lost his ability to make something happen for himself. He’s been used to a protective environment, first parentally, and then through the academy, where he’s been told only positives, right up until the significant negative of, thanks, but no thanks.’

  Mills understood the nature of the problem when he watched the boy’s last game for his club. A typically callow end-of-season team containing boys playing one or two years up were beaten 6–1 after trailing 5–0 at half-time. The debrief was delusional, since the coach chose not to acknowledge the magnitude of the failure.

  ‘As I wandered over to see this lad, the coach put his hand on his shoulder and said to him, “Different class today, son. You did really well out there. I thought you bossed the midfield.” Then he walked off. This is not a dig at him, because I think coaches are told in their manual they have to find a positive, but, in my vocabulary, that team had just been dicked.

  ‘Now, there were some positives, because in my mind they did well to draw the second half, but that wasn’t the point. I turned to the parents and said, “This is where we’re either going to fall in, or fall out.” The lad didn’t boss the midfield. If he’s not sat there gutted, maybe even disgusted, then there’s something wrong. You don’t want it enough and you’re never going to want it enough. The system, the industry, lets these boys down.’

  Yet what about the agent, the speculator who can walk away from the wreckage with a lightness of stride that compensates for a marginal lightness in the wallet? What responsibility does he, or she, have for the broken boy for whom help never arrives? Mills laughs mordantly at the implicit innocence of the challenge.

  ‘I’ve never been asked bluntly about it before. The truth is, agents have zero responsibility. Unless they are that way inclined, and have an interest in the human element, that won’t change. The agency business is, in its most basic form, the jungle. You eat what you kill. Football has kept the agency business in that position, because of an offhand approach to it.

  ‘There are hundreds, thousands, of these intermediaries. Only the top ten will make real money, and I will have issues about how some of them behave. I think any of my players would happily speak to me now. As an agent I was bothered by what happened to the boys whose one big deal had gone, and their agents suddenly weren’t there.

  ‘I had a call yesterday from a boy at PSV Eindhoven, who is coming back from a significant injury and wants to come to this country. He’s reviewing his agent’s advice over the past three years and wondering if the agent was acting in his best interests. He had some responsibility to ask himself those questions before. There are so many layers to the miseducation of these boys, and the misguidance quite often starts at home.

  ‘Clubs should, unless there are exceptional circumstances, allow young players to see through a minimum development period with the club. If, say, you take a thirteen-year-old he should have a minimum of five years. You shouldn’t be able to get rid of him as a fourteen-year-old. Get rid of the scout that saw him as a thirteen-year-old instead. But football has no interest in that, because there is no benefit to anyone other than the boys.

  ‘I hate to say it, but academy players, all players for that matter, are products. Football doesn’t give them the ability to look you in the eye and have a conversation. FIFA don’t want to know about good and bad agents because they’ve worked out there’s not a simple set of rules they can put in place that can police the industry. The easiest thing for them to do is reverse out and say to the FA, “You do it.” The FA have done the same thing, because, well, why wouldn’t they? They’re being led by FIFA. They have looked at it, tried to do it, said, “Well, actually, this is too complicated.”’

  His pessimism seemed pertinent in the FA’s winter palace at St George’s Park, where they held their annual Talent ID Conference in early December. The star turn was Stuart Worden, an occasional playwright and theatre director who, for twenty-two years, has been principal of the BRIT School, a creative oasis situated 600 yards from Selhurst Park that has produced stellar musicians, actors, fashion designers and electronic-games entrepreneurs.

  Together with five dancers from the school, he outlined a compelling vision of nurturing creative young adults, imbued with originality, responsibility and ambition. He spoke of breaking free of the shackles of formal education, which values science above art. He recognised the legitimacy of comparisons to football’s development system, but his version of an academy was ‘a home for people to express themselves, to feel connected’.

  Spot the difference, people.

  ‘Don’t do community projects because they get you on Match of the Day 2,’ he ur
ged his audience of coaches, scouts and club officials, as he discussed a link to a local hospice, through which pupils at the BRIT School work with terminally ill patients on a range of creative projects from radio shows to drama assignments. He had no intention of demeaning his host’s efforts, since he was still entranced by the fact he had awoken that morning in a hotel room bearing the name of Sir Bobby Robson, a family idol.

  He understood the difficulties, because they mirror those in many creative industries, and accepts the BRIT School’s status gives him an additional layer of protection, since he has legislative authority to ban agents from contacting pupils until they have completed their GCSEs. He used the singer Katie Melua as an example; musical impresario Mike Batt was forced to wait six months before she could record her first album for him. The appropriately entitled Call Off the Search sold three million copies.

  The critical difference involves the talent drain; unlike football’s penal drop-out rates, around 70 per cent of BRIT School pupils are still working in the arts seven years after graduation. Their process is demanding, with eight-week assessments designed to build resistance to criticism, but more organic, less cluttered with commercialism and discord:

  ‘We need to question talent, but also value it. We don’t have a set theory about it, but we assess it on a hunch. Our end game is sustaining the lives of our pupils, and fear is a terrible thing to give a teenager. Everyone says, “Put them under pressure.” Rubbish. Get on there and give it some.

  ‘These facilities are extraordinary but I have to say that reducing the number of people in young footballers’ lives would be a good thing. There are a lot of voices in their ears, because an industry is being built around them. Our dancers, for instance, have two or three teachers to respond to. They don’t have to listen to the whole world.’

  There is nothing remotely impertinent about suggesting the football world should listen to him.