No Hunger In Paradise Read online

  The underlying strain was evident more than three months later, when Giles sat in a hotel coffee shop and dwelled upon ‘a horrible experience’. His body language was not that of a corporate automaton; as he explained the background to the decision his neck became progressively flushed, and his unconscious habit of scratching the back of his hand and lower arm became more pronounced.

  He sought context rather than sympathy: ‘In a normal business there are not lots of kids, who need a clear message on their futures, involved in what is a complex process. HR law isn’t set up to accommodate such a case, so it all becomes complicated to manage and very difficult to handle without making any mistakes at all.

  ‘I had to explain the rationale to people who didn’t care about the rationale. They were just looking after their kids. If I put myself in their position I would be caring for my son, not the business logic, not the owner’s money. That’s not important. It is such a grey area.

  ‘Football clubs are effectively trading in children, trying to make money out of children. You can dress it up how you like, in terms of it being for their benefit, but as an individual I am not comfortable with being involved in that.

  ‘I am sure there would be a moral outcry if HSBC or Barclays were involved in hoovering up eight-year-olds in the area, giving them specialist training as FX traders or money managers, and swapping kids between them. It is no different to what is going on in football.’

  Piecing together the fragments of sorrow and concern felt like an intrusion into private grief. A father confided he had prepared a small speech for his son: ‘I don’t know for certain, but you may be without a club. Just steel yourself for that. It’s not the be all and end all; there’s a bigger world out there for you. It’s not the end of the world, be proud of what you’ve achieved.’

  It was impossible not to be moved by the anguished tone of a mother whose son had abandoned his A levels, after obtaining eleven A grades at GCSE, to take up a scholarship. An immediate promise by Giles that his contract would be honoured was met with scepticism, since the mood was dark, angry, bitter. The boy, Sean Bird, would eventually leave and join AFC Wimbledon.

  When a loved one is compromised, explanations about the consequences of the Premier League’s Elite Player Performance Plan, which expensively institutionalises inequality, are background noise. Giles’ revelation that Manchester City had invested £2 million in youth recruitment in London alone failed to register, since tearful sons have infinitely greater impact than economic realities.

  One boy had been through something similar at Wycombe Wanderers, Aldershot and Crawley Town, who had closed their youth systems around him due to economic necessity. According to his father, the timing of the latest setback was ‘awful, a nightmare’, and conformed to a forbidding pattern.

  ‘It is their money and if they are seeing no short- or long-term strategic return on their investment they will make such decisions,’ he reasoned. ‘Clubs feel they don’t owe you anything. They bring in trialists and if they find someone better than your son they have no hesitation in getting rid. Their job is to farm kids and find players who can potentially make the first team.

  ‘At the end of the day it is a business, kids or no kids, but that’s not what we signed up to as parents. We were very happy at Brentford since they had developed him, not just as a footballer, but as a very considered, disciplined young man. They worked on his life skills for eighteen months. Now he might only have until Christmas to make an impression on another club.’

  Other fathers, like Danny Johnson, whose 12-year-old son Alfie had left his local secondary school to enrol in the academy’s associated school programme at Uxbridge High, were concerned by the educational implications. At the very least, the demands of ferrying his son to training at a new club, which, as a lorry driver, would require pre-dawn starts, had been immeasurably complicated.

  The indoor facility at the school, featuring a fully enclosed 60-metre by 50-metre 3G pitch, learning zones, changing rooms, a gym and a physio room, was a monument to unfulfilled ambition, largely funded by the club. At the official opening on January 16, 2014 Brentford’s CEO Mark Devlin had spoken of Brentford’s ‘strategic decision to invest in youth’.

  The facility, essential if the academy was to achieve EPPP Category Two status, illustrated the dangers of being wedded to an ideal. Brentford’s boys combined study with coaching sessions during the day; teammates from other schools attended on day release once a week. The annual taxi bill for ferrying them around London, met by the club, was £100,000.

  Greg Dyke, then the FA chairman, was guest of honour on that Thursday evening, when the school’s motto, ‘making success happen’, seemed apposite. He hailed the commitment to a new, homegrown generation. Devlin spoke of ‘three or four’ boys from the programme graduating quickly into the first-team squad. Aibangee’s prediction that Brentford would produce a senior England international within five years mirrored the mood.

  Now, despite the diligence of Allan Steele, who combined coaching duties with widely admired work as Brentford’s education and welfare manager, the situation was fraught with uncertainty. Uxbridge High, rated ‘outstanding’ by OFSTED inspectors in 2011, had regressed in the following three years. An inspection undertaken on February 12 and 13, 2014 concluded the school ‘requires improvement’.

  The principal and his deputy resigned in October 2014, for failing to protect a 13-year-old pupil from abuse at the hands of a learning support assistant, former Commonwealth Games decathlete Kevin Sempers, but were allowed to resume their careers in April 2016. Sempers was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment after admitting two counts of sexual activity with a child.

  The issues raised by the academy closure went straight to the heart of what a modern football club is, and who it represents. Is it a community asset, a commercial enterprise or a test bed for an alternative sporting philosophy? Is it a rich man’s indulgence, a politician’s plaything or a supporter’s heirloom? Brentford’s academy was deemed to be a stain on the balance sheet, yet it added colour, vibrancy and hope to the local area.

  I had seen it flourish under Aibangee’s leadership over several years, but the culture shift at the club, confirmed by the arrival of Giles and Ankersen in May 2015, left it vulnerable. Formative figures in the academy’s development moved on; Shaun O’Connor returned to Arsenal to take up a youth recruitment role, head of coaching Stuart English left for Birmingham City and Miguel Rios joined Fulham’s senior recruitment team.

  They were badly missed, because rather than buying into the club, or its brand, the most balanced parents buy into the individual who sells the ethos of the club to them. Rios, in particular, was praised for his courtesy, integrity, intelligence and affinity with the ambitions and backgrounds of the boys he helped to recruit.

  Aibangee was also held in huge regard. One father spoke for many when he said: ‘I’ve always found him a very decent guy, very approachable, very regular. You could see that this had broken him. He looked tired, stressed. He feels it for the staff. He was leading the group. I hope he doesn’t feel responsible for what’s happened. He could only do what he could.’

  Another parent spoke of how he had been convinced by Aibangee’s credo – of recognising the innate potential of the individual. He had been unsure about allowing his son to remain in the system, since he had been so concerned by his treatment at another club’s development centre he had considered calling in the NSPCC. ‘I felt I had a very good case against them,’ he said. ‘They mistreated boys, had them shivering in the freezing cold. One of the parents intervened, took his son away, and didn’t come back. Looking back, I should have had the courage to do the same.’

  A bag at the back of Andrew Mills’ garage held clues to the contradictions that led to the closure. It contained Brentford kits and tracksuits of various vintages. They were once used by Barry Quin as tokens of esteem, given to boys he sought to recruit to the Centre of Excellence that preceded the academy. H
is was a hand-to-mouth existence, which included a three-game spell as caretaker first-team manager in 2007.

  Quin is now Head of Coaching at Watford’s academy. One of Mills’ first actions, as Brentford’s chief executive in 2010, had been to release him, following a review of the club’s youth development strategy. Mills was obliged to lay the foundations for Aibangee’s regime, but the decision weighed heavily.

  ‘I wasn’t particularly comfortable with that,’ he admitted. ‘Barry was a good guy. He had brought through so many boys from the estates. Like most in football, he had battled against limited budgets over the years. There was a wave of optimism about academies and EPPP, but I wondered whether it made business sense.

  ‘I was brought into the club two years before I became CEO, on the basis of, we’re losing £680,000 a year, can we break even before we go on to the next development phase? We almost got there. Brentford’s catchment area gives the club a great ability to garner kids, but does throwing three million at an academy mean we are suddenly going to produce elite professional players?

  ‘It just won’t. It’s going to mean that players will be better educated. It’s going to mean that they have a better-structured pathway, but I don’t think the end result is going to be any more positive. I was arguing against myself to a degree, because I believe in what a successful youth policy stands for, but from a purely business perspective I felt we couldn’t afford to commit such revenue.’

  EPPP is, in essence, a political and financial project under the guise of a philosophical statement of faith in English football, based upon enhanced coaching, youth development, education and performance. It was drafted by representatives of six Premier League clubs, including Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester United, and is characterised by the certainty of the colonial bureaucrat.

  Predatory clubs can sign products of smaller academies with minimal compensation, which ranges from £3,000 for each year a boy has been developed by a club between the ages of 9 and 11 to £12,500 or £25,000 for each year a boy aged between 12 and 16 has been developed by a Category Three or Category Two club respectively. Support of the scheme by Football League clubs was only guaranteed, at a meeting in Walsall in 2011, by threats to withhold the Premier League’s £5.4 million annual solidarity payment, a contribution to the collective cost of youth development. Mills’ memory of the process is instructive:

  ‘EP3 was a fundamental change to a system that certainly needed improvement, but it was not the type of change that was required. The way the benefits for the bigger boys in the business were swept under the carpet destroyed the Football League’s integrity in youth football. I, and others, thought it was time to draw a line.

  ‘What happens in the Football League meetings is that you have a group meeting, you split off into your own divisions, and then effectively have a debate before returning to the main room. Ultimately, seventy-five per cent of the Championship vote is effectively the casting vote, so the lower leagues are always subservient.

  ‘Football tends to throws around numbers. It’s almost like negotiating with my girlfriend’s four-year-old about how many carrots she’ll eat. If I ask her to eat four carrots, she’s going to eat one. If I ask her to eat ten carrots, and then work it down, there’s a chance I might get her to eat five. So it’s all about manoeuvring around reasonable chunks that you can digest.

  ‘Here we were being threatened: “If you don’t do this there will be zero solidarity money.” People were saying, “The money’s not worth it for what we’re giving away, and actually, they won’t do this. The negative connotations of the Premier League pulling the money will be far too significant.” I can’t remember word for word but we were being urged by Greg Clarke that it was this or nothing. Shit or bust.’

  Clarke continues to cling to a particularly greasy pole, having progressed from being Football League chairman to a similar position at the Football Association. The machinations of football politics, the power plays, financial forecasts and shifting allegiances, will have long-term ramifications.

  Giles has been obliged to learn quickly, as an outsider in a sport suffused by the spirit of the insider. He was forewarned about football’s introspection and conservatism, having spent the previous decade working as Head of Quantitative Research for Brentford owner Matthew Benham at Smartodds, providing consultancy services, statistical research and sports-modelling advice to professional gamblers.

  Yet managing twenty mathematicians and operating with academic rigour in relative isolation is an entirely different commercial and cultural challenge to overseeing the contracts of players aged 8 to 35. He was obliged to transfer from a collaborative environment to a proscriptive, insecure world in which the focus changed from making money to trying not to waste too much of it.

  Analytically, he supports the principle of affiliated boys being nurtured in local development centres, junior clubs given coaching support, until they enter the professional game at 15. Realistically, he appreciates such a concept would simply invite less scrupulous rivals to poach the most promising youngsters, without legal or financial restraint.

  Brentford’s experimental development model, involving a B team operating outside the system, is being studied closely by other clubs, since the average cost of running a Category Two academy, £1.5 million, can more than quadruple at the highest level. The iniquity of the current system led to them being poorly rewarded for losing their most prized young players, Ian Carlo Poveda and Josh Bohui, to Manchester City and Manchester United respectively.

  Brentford received support for their stance in closing the academy from an unlikely source, a leading agent who, unusually, had no vested interest. ‘Why should they spend time and money developing a young player they are probably going to lose for nine tenths of bugger all?’ he asked. ‘The old system worked because it offered due reward and kept the money circulating among the smaller clubs.’

  Footballers have a sixth sense for the Chosen One and at 15, Poveda, a diminutive attacking midfield player with Colombian heritage who had earned England recognition, turned senior pros into spectators at training. Courted by Arsenal at 12, he played for Barcelona until he was 14, when legal issues led to his recruitment for Brentford by Rios.

  His parents were measured and protective, steering him clear of agents attracted by the mesmerising skill that led to Steadman Scott christening him ‘Messi’ when Bohui took him to the Afewee Academy for an impromptu training session. Before the imposition of EPPP he would have commanded the sort of transfer fee capable of underwriting academy activity for a season; Giles passed him on for the guarantee of two fixtures against a City development team.

  ‘At sixteen I have no control over whether he comes to us or goes to Manchester City. So in an academy you are committing millions of pounds in the hope, rather than the expectation or the certainty, that you will get a return on your investment. If you bring a good player through, the better he is the worse it is likely to be for you, since he will be playing for England. Everyone else can see him.’

  Similarly, Giles failed to persuade Bohui’s agent that proximity to first-team football at the Championship club outweighed the inherent uncertainties of a new era. Brentford received no immediate compensation when Bohui signed a three-year contract at United, who were rapidly restocking an underperforming academy with players aged between 16 and 19.

  The vacuum at Brentford was partially filled by those surplus to requirements at bigger academies. Defender Manny Onariase, released by West Ham, settled well and was given a more competitive outlet by spending the second half of the 2016–17 season on loan at Cheltenham in League Two. Nathan Fox, released by Norwich, revived his career in non-league football before joining from Cray Wanderers. Marc Río, a striker from the Juvenil A team at Barcelona’s academy, signed a two-year development contract.

  Ilias Chatzitheodoridis, a left back discarded by Arsenal, quickly progressed to the fringe of the first team; Danish youth international striker Justin Shaibu, signed
from HB Køge for £40,000, made his senior debut in a League Cup tie at Exeter. The call-up of goalkeeper Ellery Balcombe for the England under-18 squad confirmed his status as the most promising survivor of the academy cull.

  Brentford are pursuing a three-year plan, which will ultimately be decided by the quality of the relationship the club builds with agents, and the credibility of their unofficial games programme, leavened by regular exposure to high-quality international opposition in Southern Europe and Scandinavia. Giles depicts it as a relatively low-stakes gamble, a work in progress that will acquire greater relevance as it matures:

  ‘I meet a lot of chief executives who don’t like spending up to £2 million on an academy from a business perspective, but feel they can’t do anything about it because everyone they speak to says it is essential to bring homegrown players into the first team. There is a moral and emotional aspect to the debate.

  ‘Football academies, and the staff that run them, are fully aware that the vast majority of the kids are not good enough and are only there to support the very best coming through. Most of the kids, and to an extent their parents, are being used. My personal view is that the whole venture is morally bankrupt and I’m glad that Brentford is now out of it.

  ‘In an ideal world, we would have made the decision sooner, but I made sure we met our educational responsibilities, and supported our Community Trust [where coaching is supervised by former Wycombe and Millwall defender Danny Senda]. I can take a fresh perspective. Certainly, there were a lot of upset parents who will never forgive the club, but in terms of the wider impact of the decision on our fan base, it didn’t have a negative connotation.’

  Such a conclusion may be bleak, but it fits football’s myopia. Chairmen and club owners crave reflected glory. Coaches and managers are slavishly short term in their outlook. Fans care little for the game’s harshness, as long as they have a result to toast in the pub. No one gave a moment’s thought to the anxiety of those parents who struggled to restore their sons’ morale.