No Hunger In Paradise Page 5

  Why can’t our gaudy game draw on the marketing-driven values of Red Bull, or the character traits that inform the recruitment programme of the BRIT School, which counts singers Adele, Jessie J and Leona Lewis, together with such actors as Blake Harrison, Tom Holland and Emily Head, among its alumni? Allow Levett to explain:

  ‘The common lessons involve character. Red Bull, as a brand, invest in people with a story to tell. They might spend two years to really understand someone, to know what drives them, before they think of investing in that person. At the BRIT School I asked their director of dance who gets that last audition place.

  ‘Is it the ballet dancer, trained since the age of two, or an urban street-dancer from Thornton Heath? She said, “Dancing doesn’t get you in the building, your character does.” Candidates are observed in different situations. They show something of who they are by interacting with other people, and asking pertinent questions. What comes through is the character, the person. Ironically that’s the part that is under-resourced in professional football more than anything else.’

  Academy managers, as a breed, are conditioned to trust hard numbers over soft skills. As support staffs have grown, data has been deified. The theory that the defining factor in success is one of mindset, supported by senior internationals in an impromptu survey conducted by Levett, was overlooked during his study visit to a leading Premier League club.

  ‘They had all the data, graphs of the average speed in the game of every player, comparing the goalkeeper with the centre forward, and that didn’t make any sense. Where does this link to learning? Where does it show progression over the last ten weeks, linked to learning criteria, in order to become a first-team player? “Oh, we don’t track that.”

  ‘They’ve got ten sports scientists who can churn out GPS data on how far players have run during a game. Kids are comfortable with technology, and could download that themselves. It would give them ownership of the figures. Support staff are experts in what they do, but professional clubs put people in silos. We need to be at the stage where programmes are built around the kids.

  ‘Academy systems all have an element of psych support for the players coming through. It’s important that it is embedded in the foundation phase so that the sports psychologist is just another coach. We’ve got to get away from the mindset of, you’ve got to go and see the psychologist if you’re broken. Go and lay on the couch and they’ll fix you. That’s bollocks. We need a generational change, so that one-to-one sessions are seen as an aid to improve performance.’

  Coaching is one of the fundamental weaknesses of English football, and Levett is the type of missionary worker who confesses to enduring occasional dark nights of the soul. He accepts the value of formal coach education is ‘tiny’ and estimates that 70 per cent of effective personal development involves making mistakes on the grass, learning about the nuances of language and communication with children. A good mentor and the collaborative mentality of the old Liverpool boot room also helps.

  ‘I’ve got to get away from thinking that I’m going to change people’s minds on certain things, and it bothering me that I don’t. All I can do is give you the current thinking on helping players become the best they can possibly be. What you choose to do with that information is entirely up to you. The forward-thinking coaches will change stuff. The traditional ones, with more of a closed mindset, possibly won’t.’

  The mood is sombre. The England T-shirt he is wearing appears to take on the characteristics of a hair shirt. There is a constant urge to scratch the scab of yet another example of institutionalised ignorance. Levett recounts the rejection of a boy who, at the age of 9, amazed first-team coaches with the intelligence displayed in a ten-page document he had written, detailing his tactical dissection of three senior matches.

  ‘That boy was released at twelve because he couldn’t get around a massive pitch. They told him they didn’t think he had the confidence to play in front of forty thousand people. This boy is the chairman of the school debating society. He played the lead role in the school play. Confidence? This boy will achieve in life …’

  I didn’t have the heart to share an all-too-familiar story, outlined in the Manchester Evening News. Jaxon Lal had been headhunted by Manchester City scouts after his mother Joanne posted a video on Facebook of him playing football in the garden with his brother Riley. She shared her hope that her sons would have a career in the professional game. The accompanying photograph showed Jaxon posing, foot on a ball, in a Barcelona kit. Messi’s name was on the back of his ludicrously over-sized shirt.

  Jaxon Lal was 3 years old.

  3

  X Factor Every Day

  THE CHALLENGE TO the conscience was framed by a deep, wide mirror in the men’s toilet. Inscribed on white ceramic tiles above two washbasins, it was aimed at the only users of the facility – fathers waiting for their children in the parents lounge at Manchester City’s impossibly opulent academy.

  Does your child getting selected or dropped, scoring the winning goal or missing an open net, getting man of the match or getting subbed at half time, represent your parenting? Or does a child who is a decent, polite, respectful, humble, hard-working teammate actually reflect the kind of parent you are?

  Such a stark message, in a strangely logical setting since it addressed a captive audience, had greater impact than even the vast image which filled the facing wall in the gymnasium along the corridor. It was of Sergio Agüero scoring the goal that won City the Premier League title in added time against Queens Park Rangers in May 2012. The time, ‘93:20’, was emblazoned alongside the invocation ‘Every Second Counts’.

  Other slogans in the performance centre are aspirational (‘We are building a structure for the future, not just a team of all-stars’), motivational (‘Practise again and again … make it count’) and educational (‘Train like a professional. Eat like a professional. Drink like a professional. Tweet like a professional’).

  In such concentration, in such an environment, they beg questions: is this a corporate PowerPoint version of football, or a sky blueprint for a dynasty? Is it an artfully packaged marketing initiative or a substantive socio-political statement? Does it represent enlightened thinking, or is it a billionaire’s workhouse? In truth, it supports elements of many contrasting assumptions.

  To the cynics, the City Football Academy, the CFA, to give it an appropriately modern acronym, is the Death Star, the manifestation of a malign and voracious philosophy that warehouses talented teenagers from around the globe. To the supplicants, true believers in the vision funded by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan of Abu Dhabi, it is Utopia.

  In terms of social transformation, its impact on east Manchester is undeniable, and infinitely preferable to a short-lived alternative, a government-approved super casino. A total of 883 building contracts were placed with companies within the M60 corridor. Sixty-two per cent of the workforce, including ninety-three previously unemployed men and women, came from the local community.

  When I first visited the area, twenty years previously, terraced houses beside the newly built Velodrome nearby were available for less than £10,000 on a ‘buy one, get one free’ basis. The 80-acre academy site was a polluted post-industrial wasteland. More than £200 million and 6,000 trees later, the complex is a world leader.

  The detail is thought-provoking, product of unprecedented research into more than thirty sports development initiatives on five continents. Plans underwent nineteen drafts, and were informed by the culture of sports as diverse as American football, Australian rules football, basketball and softball. A 7,000-seater stadium dominates the entrance; sixteen more pitches are augmented by a half pitch on which to train goalkeepers.

  All replicate the pitch at the Etihad Stadium, which is reached by a symbolic bridge. Three lengths of grass imitate conditions on opposition grounds. Six hydrotherapy areas, featuring a three-lane main pool and plunge pools with a temperature range between 4 and 36 degrees centigrade, aid rest and re
habilitation.

  Two thirds of the building is devoted to youth development. Even the dressing rooms are aspirational; the first team’s circular changing area, the only one used regularly on the right-hand side of the facility, is reminiscent of those in Major League Baseball clubhouses. The success of the project will be gauged by how many boys progress to the privilege of being able to toss their soiled kit down a centrally situated wooden chute into the unseen laundry rooms below.

  City’s under-10s, -11s and -13s were national champions in the 2015–16 season, the under-11s defeating QPR 29–1 in their final fixture. The under-15s won the national Floodlit Cup and the under-16s were undefeated. Though the under-18s were national champions, they lost in the final that mattered, the FA Youth Cup, to Chelsea. If you believe such dominance does not breed envy and resentment, give my love to the fairies at the bottom of your garden.

  The Premier League took time to ratify City’s transfer of Liverpool’s under-15 goalkeeper Louie Moulden as part of a new Five Step Process, which involves formal interviews with players, parents and clubs involved in moves between Category One academies. Though they are reluctant to confirm their unhappiness officially, it is widely believed that Liverpool, Manchester United and Everton discussed refusing to play City at more junior levels.

  City’s recruitment is global and aggressive, especially around the pivotal age of 16, when scholarships are at stake and professional contracts beckon. Relocation packages, offered to families of boys as young as 11, are unprecedented in their scope and generosity. The golden eagle, which dominated City’s club crest until a redesign in 2015, might have been consigned to history but its predatory tendencies endure.

  Some boys are steeped in City’s traditions. Tommy Doyle, arguably England’s best under-15 midfield player, has two club legends, Glyn Pardoe and the late Mike Doyle, as grandfathers. Phil Foden, the winger who made the bench in a Champions League tie against Celtic at the age of 16 years and 192 days, has been with the club for a decade. Yet his classmate and international colleague Jadon Sancho, an extravagantly gifted winger signed from Watford at the age of 14 in a deal worth potentially £500,000, represented transplanted talent.

  Unnoticed amidst the flurry of controversy inspired by Moulden, City signed a future rival, 16-year-old Polish goalkeeper Pawel Sokol, from Korona Kielce at the end of the summer transfer window in 2016. The delicacy of international transfers was underlined in September, when FIFA cleared City of illegally approaching Benjamin Garre, an Argentine midfield player signed from Velez Sarsfield despite the interest of Manchester United and Barcelona, when he was only 15.

  This did little to quieten murmured accusations about the application of unreasonable advantage, extreme wealth in an inadequately regulated environment that invites greed and expedience. Mark Allen, the former MTV executive who has been City’s academy director since July 2009, chooses to confront such criticism head on:

  ‘I’m going to be very open and honest on this, because I have a very strong view. I have two daughters, who are runners, and my overriding goal was to get them into the very best institutions that I could, based on their abilities. If I had a son who was, say, an outstanding cellist, I would want him to go to the best school I could find.

  ‘That is going to be an ambition of most parents, I would say. They are looking to do the best for their children. Here we have an outstanding facility, a comprehensive football and non-football programme that probably very few match, even though they could if they wanted to. We’re very, very strong about a holistic approach to development and investment in youth.

  ‘We come up against criticism in terms of recruitment all the time. I know we have to face this, but I think it’s less about poaching than opportunity. We are inundated on a regular basis by parents saying, “Look, how do we get our son to this academy?” And that’s a fact.’

  Equally undeniably, his operation will be obliged to justify itself financially in the medium term. At current, grotesquely inflated, market rates, it would take the emergence of four regular first-team players from the academy to write off the initial £200 million investment. Until then, the balance sheet will be supported by the sale or loan of fringe players who are good enough to realise what Grant Downie, the academy’s Head of Performance, terms their ‘asset value’.

  The severity of the phrase hints at fundamental contradictions, yet Downie is a gently spoken, emotionally intelligent Cumbrian, who received the OBE in 2013 for services to physiotherapy in sport and young people. He has spent nearly thirty years in the professional game, progressing from Lilleshall’s national rehabilitation centre to Glasgow Rangers and Middlesbrough before assuming a development role at City, initially as Head of Medical Services in September 2011.

  Can hunger be sustained in such a paradise?

  Downie has a singular reference point: ‘At Rangers, we had boys from Castlemilk, a really rough housing estate. It’s one of the most parochial places, but the fact of the matter is in these harder housing schemes in Scotland folk generally try to look after themselves, because they have values and appreciate things. You could argue, when you look around this beautiful facility, that maybe we’re doing the opposite.

  ‘We’re not, but I can see why people would see this place as maybe being too good. If all we did was concentrate on the bells and whistles, we would be wrong. We’ve got to ensure that the scholars coming into it appreciate it for what it is, and maximise it for their benefit, because many will not be here in the longer term. Hopefully this can be the catalyst not just for their football career, but for their life.

  ‘Football development is pretty straightforward. The boys who come through the doors here are pretty talented. What derails them is not necessarily football, but other things in their lives. It could be family, agents. It could be where they are from. We must develop the person. What would make me proud, and I’m sure Mark would say the same thing, is that when these boys are playing for Walsall, or Colchester, their coach can say to us, “Your boy is great. He knows how to look after himself, and conducts himself properly.”’

  City’s academy squads are taught to cook, and put through bronze and silver levels of the Duke of Edinburgh award scheme. A life skills programme, aimed at those aged between 16 and 19, involves community work. Perspective is gained through serving at a soup kitchen, or playing on crutches and losing heavily to the club’s amputee team.

  The coaching syllabus for players under 11 years old is highly technical. It tests a boy’s ability to operate in tight areas: can he take the ball on the half-turn? Is he two-footed? Has he an appreciation of space and others around him? To guard against the dangers of excessively early specialisation, boys undertake alternative activities like boxing, canoeing, judo, Pilates, yoga and freerunning.

  Younger groups are let loose on an adventure playground alongside the main building three times a week. The aim is to recreate the organic pleasures of climbing, the accumulated resilience of falling. Play encourages a natural sense of balance but, above all, offers a cooling-down period in a hothouse environment.

  On one of the days I visited a vanguard of half a dozen boys from the under-13 squad prepared to train on the largest indoor pitch in the UK. The timeless innocence of their childhood ritual, a game of headers and volleys which preceded the arrival of their coaches and cadre of support staff, masked the relentlessness of the scrutiny.

  ‘I’ve often described this environment as X Factor every day,’ Downie reflected. ‘Big Brother is watching everything you do, and monitoring it. We are trying to provide a pathway that is challenging at every opportunity, but supportive. We have two full-time psychologists in the academy, plus additional support where we need it, so therefore there’s a sense-check.

  ‘Some lads, at times, are going to hit lows, but what we don’t want to do is put so much bubble wrap on them they can’t cope. You can go to the other extreme, where a footballer can turn up at a game and he doesn’t have to do anything. He doesn’
t bring his boots and shin pads. He doesn’t provide soap or a towel.

  ‘Here things get done for you as you go further up the chain, but we use self-education, empowerment. Take soft-tissue massage as an example. We give them foam rollers, so they can learn how to do it themselves. Ultimately, when you’re in front of sixty thousand people, and you’ve got to make what appears to you and I in the crowd to be a simple ten-yard pass, you rely on yourself. The difference between doing that in a match and in training is pressure. What we’ve got to learn is when to exert pressure.’

  Such a delicate process, balancing sensitivity and cold-bloodedness, blurs boundaries and strangles language. Sir Dave Brailsford, embattled architect of Britain’s Olympic cycling programme, employs ‘compassionate ruthlessness’ in the pursuit of perfection. City’s strategy is one of exposing children to ‘supported trauma’.

  Downie used as an example their under-12s, who were at a tournament in Japan, playing in exceptionally hot, humid conditions, dealing with homesickness and the debilitating effect of jet lag. He consciously created additional pressure by imposing the target of winning the event (they eventually finished fifth) but took the precaution of briefing support staff to be compassionate in the event of failure.

  Learning is contextualised. An experiment involving the under-15s tested their standing jumps before and after a video presentation featuring the heading ability of Cristiano Ronaldo at set pieces. On average the boys leaped 20 per cent higher when the images of the icon’s impact were fresh. They couldn’t explain why, but evidently understood the point, since it was not a training routine conducted in isolation. Similarly, nutritional messages are couched in everyday terms.