| I received a phone call last week from my local
sports club. They invited my six-year-old son, Louis, to join the
Elite Tennis Academy. The coach was quite affronted when I laughed
and told him that I didn’t think we’d make the twice-weekly 6.30am
training sessions. Why did I sign up my children for tennis
coaching, he asked, if I wasn’t going to take it seriously?
If I sound blasé, it’s because I’ve been there before. Last
autumn, a Chelsea FC scout approached us in the car park by a local
under-7s football match in Richmond and invited the same son to
train at the Chelsea academy every Friday evening. That’s a
45-minute drive each way after a week at school, plus 90 minutes’
training. If he’s good enough when he’s 8, they’ll sign him to the
club.
I love sport; it’s in my genes. My grandfather won bronze and
silver medals for rowing in the 1924 and 1928 Olympics and his
brother played cricket for England. So I’m not underestimating my
children’s talent — seeing Louis, 6, or Rory, 9, score a goal brings
a lump to my throat every time. But a maniacal spirit seems to have
taken hold of children’s sport and it’s something that none of my
forebears had to cope with.
Traditionally, clubs brought young players up through the ranks
as teenage apprentices. But in 1997 the FA decided that clubs needed
access to even younger players, so it made it mandatory that every
Premiership and Football League club had an Academy or a Centre of
Excellence and a coherent youth development programme.
Earlier this month, the Leeds chairman, Ken Bates, accused his
former club Chelsea FC of “stealing” academy youngsters Michael
Woods and Tom Taiwo. Chelsea vehemently deny the “tapping up” of the
under-16s. But it goes to show that today, competition for child
protégés is tougher than ever.
Money is a strong incentive. Even if a club produces only one
first-class team player every couple of years, they have still
recouped the cost of the academy in saved transfer fees, and they
can sell on good academy boys from 16 for as much as £250,000 each.
So the clubs look for six and seven-year-olds with a combination
of speed, strength, technique and attitude, and invite them to train
once a week. Most of them are taken on for a term, kept on if
they’re good and released if they’re not. If they make it to the
Under-9s they are offered a year’s contract with paid expenses; they
train a couple of times a week, play matches at weekends and in the
holidays and, congratulations, football has officially taken over
your life.
If you’re still there at 16 you drop out of school, are paid a
couple of hundred quid a week and attend the academy full-time.
Officially you train for an NVQ in sporting excellence but in
reality, training comes first.
Of course it’s seductive to be approached by a Premier League
club. But will it cause problems later. Who’s going to bother with
exams if they think they’re going to be the next John Terry?
Academy staff are decent people. But this is a business and, at
some stage, an estimated 99 per cent get chucked out. There’s no
nice way of telling a child they are not good enough, and it’s worse
if their parents are desperate for them to make it. And once they
feel like a failure, is sport ever fun again?
The coach at our local amateur club says he has seen too many
children ruined by the academies. “Either they come back with their
confidence shattered or they think they’re better than the rest of
the boys. Recently it took me 18 months to build up one kid’s
confidence after an academy had let him go, and what happens? A
different bloody scout starts nosing around him.”
Peter Kay, who set up the charity Sporting Chance with the former
Arsenal and England player Tony Adams for sportsmen with addiction
problems, says that too often he is brought in to pick up the
pieces. “The academies want the children to be arrogant and
one-dimensional, to dream the dream. Which is good in one sense but
for a 14-year-old boy who gets released, there’s often no emotional
outlet for all that. Combine that with a patchy education and it’s
asking for trouble.”
Why am I worrying so early, people ask. I need to know what I’m
in for. Sports medicine is already flagging up injury worries for
children who start early, and no decent secondary school will be
impressed if one of its talented pupils won’t play in the school
team for fear of getting crocked.
Yet there is always this wretched niggle at the back of my mind —
what if he did actually make it?
A friend who drills his son at golf every day thinks my
ambivalence is exactly why this country lags behind in the
international arena. He says I lack passion for sport. But it’s
precisely because I value sport so highly that I fear for my
children.
To me, sport is about companionship and community: scoring a goal
for both your benefit and your team’s, and combining the drive to
win with grace in defeat.
It is not about being hauled out of bed at 5.45am aged 6, being
encouraged to beat the other kids at all costs and feeling
disappointment from the minute that you make contact with a ball. |
