No Hunger In Paradise Page 31

  He first registered his concerns with the academy manager in March 2016, and escalated them by contacting the head of the club’s HR department in May. A member of the safeguarding team, approached in June, failed to follow up on promises to meet his son at home, where he felt safe to speak openly about the toxicity of the situation.

  The father’s initial letter to the safeguarding officer, which he signed ‘sincerely, a very concerned parent’, insisted ‘we are not trouble makers’. A second amplified his worry that his son would ‘fall victim to more prejudice and isolation after daring to stand up and complain’.

  He contacted the Professional Footballers’ Association, the Football Association and the Independent Football Ombudsman without satisfaction after what he thought was a cursory club investigation.

  His son, meanwhile, had escaped an increasingly toxic situation. He was excelling on loan and had no plans to renew his contract, which was due to expire in the summer. His parent club were neglecting to pass on bonuses and appearance money to which he was entitled.

  Football’s child-protection practices have improved exponentially since the late nineties when a scandal at British Swimming, whose former chief coach Paul Hickson was sentenced to seventeen years’ imprisonment for a fifteen-year sequence of attacks on teenaged girls, prompted a far-reaching review.

  A change in legislation has shifted responsibility from the FA, as an umbrella body, to individual clubs. Those in the Premier League are ‘expected to provide robust and consistent evidence’ of their safeguarding provisions for ‘vulnerable groups’; reports are collated and sense-checked on a quarterly basis by the NSPCC. Academy staff members are expected to follow a code of ethics and conduct in which relationships are ‘based on openness, honesty, trust and respect’.

  Yet the process of discovery, in areas other than sexual abuse, is damning. In the words of a highly respected administrator, ‘some of the clubs historically kept their academies at arm’s length. Now they’ve lifted up the rock and taken a look, they’ve been shocked by what’s going on beneath.’ Mental abuse, where boys are ostracised or shamed into submission, is common.

  Younger coaches, in particular, are appalled, but have careers to protect in what remains a hierarchical industry. The vast majority of coaches and academy managers are diligent, socially conscious people who find the process of rejection upsetting, but a malevolent minority act as if they have a vested interest in a boy’s sustained failure, since his success would encourage questioning of their wisdom.

  One individual, described to me as ‘the most hated man in football’ by a peer who has known him for more than twenty years, is notorious for using his network of personal contacts to spread malicious gossip about certain players, or parents, in an attempt to prevent other clubs offering a chance of redemption.

  The chasm between damaged children and heroic parents, enlightened coaches and hometown despots, must be bridged. Everyone in football talks about ‘the journey’. No one has given me a better insight into its complexity, in a human sense, than Simon Edwards, a Harley Street-based behavioural specialist who works in senior football but has tangential experience of academy players through his work at MK Dons:

  ‘We learn right from the word go. In the first year of life we learn to trust. We like consistency and security. Confidence builds because we are used to procedure. Over a lifetime hundreds of billions of little files are absorbed into the subconscious mind. All the way along the line there is unconditional love.

  ‘In telling someone what not to do you are suppressing them. If we are suppressed we really become dependent on others. We can see a footballer becoming dependent on the coach, especially if they come from a non-sporting family, because there is no one to be a filter. If suppressed through criticism or control, we develop a sense of guilt.

  ‘Think of the six-year-old who thinks he is a nuisance because he is being told off all the time. We feel we are getting the worst of those around us. We become followers and allow others to control us. That is very significant. If you have a bully as a father, coach or teacher, who is shouting and screaming, that is not helping at all.

  ‘All kids really want to do is celebrate, jiggle and do their silly little dance by the corner flag. But between the age of six and puberty, a phase known as “industry and inferiority”, that person is developing a sense of pride in their achievements, not necessarily from the ambitions of others for them. We start to dig deep. We start thinking of winning, not just being picked.

  ‘If children are encouraged, they are more industrious, confidence builds. If discouraged, inferiority creeps in, and they doubt their ability. They only hear the negative. It is hard to move on. They are tropical fish in shark bay, vulnerable because they are just pleasing people. They are independent only if they are allowed to be so.

  ‘We expect boys to be strong, but they might not be. One of the things that shocked me about footballers was some of them are tiny, smaller than you ever imagined. We know about the physiology because we can see it and measure it. Emotional intelligence, who knows? I look to measure what people want to do for themselves, not what they want to do for everyone else.

  ‘The importance of being successful for somebody else is bigger than we think. That doesn’t have to be a parent; it could be the coach, the gaffer, the crowd. Football has an intimacy that most young people wouldn’t experience, but what you can’t do is talk about your inner feelings. Everyone knows it is a transitory, superficial world. There may be camaraderie but there is no loyalty. You are blooded along the way, in a negative way.

  ‘Bullying is everywhere in modern life. There are some fantastic people in football, but if coaches were in a legal firm in the city, or a regional supermarket manager, they wouldn’t be able to say those things to their employees, or each other. Everyone in football has the caveat, “Well, it has always been like that.” It’s the dinosaur effect: “I was treated like that, so I am going to treat you like that.”

  ‘A youth coach is theoretically in a more responsible position than the first-team manager because you are preparing people for what’s next. Is it living the dream, the ridiculous expectation that the young player is someday going to play for Real Madrid? Anticipatory feelings are very powerful. In therapy the most powerful negative is, what if?

  ‘There is no reality in football because there is randomness going on. How can you promise someone it is going to be OK, that they are not going to have a terrible knee injury, or another misfortune? Those who speak negatively without offering encouragement will say, “We are showing them the real world.” Well, you wouldn’t send your children to a war zone or a ghetto. You wouldn’t allow a five-year-old to play with scissors.

  ‘An adolescent wants an identity. Yet in that phase of their lives, footballers are either being told they are rubbish, or amazing. That is not healthy. There is no consistency. They’re all over the place emotionally. That’s why you get lots of loners in groups. There are no real friendships because football is one-dimensional and ultra-competitive.

  ‘They are the meat in the sandwich between over-the-top parents who are convinced their sons will be soon earning £50k a week and coaches who are saying, “Just listen to me because I am three times older than you.” That is stunting because they are not being allowed to grow organically. Who are they? They don’t really know. They’ve had part of their emotional growth taken away.

  ‘What are their reference points? How are they developing as people? They are not. They are commodities either for the parents, the coach, or whoever has a commercial interest in them. Their emotional needs are probably enormous. Anyone close to them, parent, coach, agent or medical staff, has to be true and honest because that person is wide-eyed and believing.’

  Innocence is a liability, a luxury when even captains of the football industry admit the view from the bridge is unedifying. One confided that he had no wish to expose his children to such a compromising environment. Poaching of young players is
most prevalent in the delicate, academically sensitive phase in which scholarships are offered. The Premier League confirm they are dealing with ‘ongoing reports and complaints involving multiple clubs and multiple players’.

  Expedience – which prompted club chairmen to reach a so-called ‘gentlemen’s agreement’, leading to an amnesty on poaching offences before the introduction of the Premier League’s Five Step Process for transfers between Category One academies – remains a dominant factor. Several clubs in London and the North-west have come to an informal, mutually beneficial arrangement, in which they have pledged not to recruit from their respective academies.

  The Five Step Process reinforces Premier League rule 299.1, which prohibits clubs from inducing, or attempting to induce, a player to join their academy by offering incentives of any type, whether in cash or in kind. Private investigators employed by the league have the power to seize phone records and bank statements from parents, or boys, in the search for illicit activity.

  The process begins with a young player’s new club submitting a signed registration form to the league, as usual. Exit interviews are conducted with the player, his parents, and both clubs involved in the transfer. Clubs and parents are required to sign a declaration that no financial or value-in-kind inducements, including contra deals, have been employed. A written assessment, together with recommendations, is presented to the Premier League board, which has the power to refer the case for review by an independent commission.

  A Premier League executive acknowledged: ‘This is going to take a bit of time, because you are shining a light on individuals, and a certain way of doing things. It would be naïve to think there are not a range of issues at play. The clubs, as a collective, all have their stories that “This boy was taken from us.” But nobody was making any complaints, and nobody was saying, “Please hold this club to account.”

  ‘It all depends on what foot the shoe is on. Getting the Category One clubs to say, “We want to do something,” is a big first step. Does it mean these murky practices will be eradicated overnight? Of course not. It is cops and robbers. You have to have the willingness of people who engage in what is a micro-society to say, “Actually we want to live under a different set of rules, and we want to abide by those rules.”’

  Good luck with that. Clubs and agents, concerned by the prospect of paying compensatory sums in excess of £1 million for sanctioned transfers between Category One academies, are already investigating the political and financial practicality of what could best be described as a ‘foster club’ scheme.

  It demands the complicity of a young player’s family, since, in theory, after being tempted away from his original academy, a boy would be housed, most probably for a season but maybe two, in a low-key league like Serie B before being signed by his original, secretive suitor in the Premier League. The pre arranged fee for that transfer would be moderate (£200,000 has been mentioned as being suitable for a recycled 18-year-old) and sweetened by the loan of further players to the foster club.

  Club owners tend to speak about the iniquities of agents in splenetic terms, without appearing to draw breath, but many impulsively feed the multi-headed monster that threatens to devour them. There is widespread distaste for commercial activity around children, especially with the intrusiveness of the recruitment process, but punishments do not appear to fit the crime.

  Danny Webber, who retired in June 2016 after a sixteen-year playing career that began at Manchester United, is developing a media career alongside his work for the Platinum One agency. He denied breaching FA Rule E1(b) by approaching a player ‘in relation to intermediary activity before the 1st day in January of the year of that Player’s sixteenth birthday’, on November 17, 2016, and requested a personal hearing, at which he was found guilty on December 13. Webber was fined £1,000 and immediately banned ‘from all intermediary activity’ for twenty-eight days; the other fifty-six days of the sanction were suspended. The reputational damage, even for someone in the public eye, was relatively limited and the financial penalty was insubstantial.

  Two more agents were disciplined for similar offences at around that time. Glen Tweneboah, found to have entered into a contract with a minor despite not being authorised to do so, was suspended for three months from November 18. Former Arsenal and Watford midfield player Paolo Vernazza was found guilty on December 4 of attempting to enter into a contract with two minors, despite not being cleared to work with children under the age of 18. His six-month suspension and £2,500 fine reflected the fact that one of the contracts had not been signed by the boy’s parent or guardian.

  Vernazza, who won two England under-21 caps, is Head of Football, UK, for the Platinum One Group, which bills itself as ‘Britain’s No. 1 Agency for Young Footballers’. His appeal was heard at Wembley Stadium on December 29 by a three-man panel led by Christopher Quinlan, QC. He argued that his errors were administrative in nature and stressed he retained the support of both boys’ parents. However, his complaints about the severity of his punishment were dismissed. The episode received minimal publicity, despite written reasons for the decision being published on the FA website and the fact that one of the boys involved, Yosin Farah, is the cousin of multiple Olympic champion Sir Mo Farah. In a broader sense, such punishments pose few long-term problems to the transgressor, if any. A more substantial fine and a minimum of a year’s suspension would have infinitely greater impact, especially if it were linked to a programme of re-education, most appropriately in a community coaching setting.

  The football bubble is more of a shroud, since it is rarely transparent. Unanimity is even elusive when it comes to the deregulation of agents, a classic case of administrators abrogating their wider responsibilities to the game. When poachers and gamekeepers share the same world-weary caution there is little reason for optimism.

  The Premier League executive is bleakly realistic: ‘The activity of agents has been the big question facing football at many levels over a number of years. When they were regulated to within an inch of life, people thought, “Christ, that has sent everything under the table. Let’s change to light-touch legislation so we can see what is going on.”

  ‘It is still an area of concern. Things are happening that shouldn’t be happening, but how you stop them is a very difficult, very thorny issue. There is, at least, a mood that enough is enough. Will that effect a cultural shift? We will have to wait and see.’

  The principal of a major agency, who claimed he had disciplined a junior member of staff who had contacted a 13-year-old player on Facebook, asking for his father’s contact details, is more sanguine about the surge of newcomers to his profession, since he believes ‘they are completely out of their depth’. He is, however, less confident of the black economy being broken:

  ‘The system is as bad as it has been for years, but I don’t think it has ever been right. Clubs were paying parents in the seventies. I can remember a captain of the England schoolboys’ team getting £100k to sign around twenty years ago. No one questioned it, because everyone knew that was the sort of thing that happened. I can’t see that changing. Relatives of players are getting involved in negotiations and they haven’t got a clue.’

  A League Two manager like Crawley Town’s Dermot Drummy, a mediating force, understands both arguments: ‘Loads of great work goes on in academies, getting the boys there, giving them food. People like Roy Massey and Steve Leonard at Arsenal have spent twenty years running up and down Camden Road, picking them up when their parents are at work. Neil Bath at Chelsea has a holistic care programme that helps lads on their way.

  ‘When someone gets released at seventeen, eighteen, people tend to shut the door. Agents stop giving them a bell. They’ve had all these piranhas around them since they were fourteen. Money has always changed hands with parents, and I don’t think it will ever stop. It is hard, on the breadline, to turn it down. There is money, but there is also failure. The player is not a commodity, but a person.’

  Self-interest
has been institutionalised by the Premier League’s youth strategy, the Elite Player Performance Plan. Nearly £400 million has been invested over its first four years, a sum that will double by 2020. It represents a spectacular piece of empire-building by Ged Roddy, who has been promoted from his initial position, as the league’s head of youth, to an overarching job as head of football development.

  He has been a polarising figure since I first knew him in 2002, as a board member of the English Institute of Sport. He was obviously politically astute, but I found him glib and superficial. An interview, requested for this book, did not materialise, but officials argue that, although ‘there will be bumps in the road’, EPPP can only be judged fairly over a decade. In the words of one executive: ‘No one says it is perfect. The idea is that it changes and develops. This is the most interventionist thing we have done. We are trying to effect an overall cultural shift and it will take time.’

  Roddy suggested the rebranded Premier League 2, for under-23 teams, would make an ‘immediate impact’ when it was unveiled in July 2016; he was prescient, but perhaps not as he intended. It has been dismissed as ‘crap’ by Nicky Butt, director of Manchester United’s academy, and ‘a waste of time’ by Gareth Southgate, the England manager.

  The league plan to ‘increase jeopardy’ by promoting it more extensively on television, but the majority of matches are stripped of passion and pressure. Technical quality has undoubtedly improved, but tactical orthodoxy leaves most players with the improvisational instincts of the zombies amassing outside the pub in the film Shaun of the Dead. The top six clubs, increasingly operating in concert as a lobbying group, have been critical of several initiatives.