It’s 10.15pm and I’m standing outside the away dressing room at Bristol City’s Ashton Gate stadium with 10 other 17-year-old YTS players. We are politely but impatiently waiting after a first-team match for the last players to leave so that we can begin sweeping and mopping the dressing-room floors and cleaning the toilets as part of our duties as apprentices. The impatience is justified as we know that if we don’t get our jobs done quickly enough we will miss the last bus back to our digs and will have to club together for taxis, which would be a financial disaster as it would eat a huge chunk out of our £45 weekly salary.
At the time we all hated these tasks, which we thought were a waste of time. “What has this got to do with football?” and “What’s the point of this?” were questions that, at that moment in our lives, it felt extremely pertinent to ask. As young players we all dreamed and believed we would be embarking on a journey that would end up with us finding fame and fortune as top Premier League players and there wasn’t one of us who didn’t believe we would make the cut.
Sadly, the reality of the situation 15 years on is that I’m the only one out of that group still involved in professional football. Every year at every club there is an intake of young academy players on professional contracts, all of them believing they will break into the first team and go on to live the glamorous life of a top professional footballer.
But with the huge amount of money in our game I’m worried that reality and normality are becoming harder for young players coming through our academies to relate to, with many being paid so much they have little chance to plan or live a normal life when earning such amounts before they’ve even made the first team. Trust me, being an impressionable young, rich footballer is a dangerous place to be and I’ve been offered numerous vices – drink, gambling, drugs, women, dodgy financial ventures. It is easy to fall on the wrong side of the tracks.
The book and TV documentary No Hunger In Paradise by Michael Calvin illustrates this growing problem within our game. I would never begrudge any individual in any industry the money they earn in their respective roles but we have a duty in our game to protect and educate young players coming through about the perils and dangers of having too much, too soon. I speak with a lot of senior professional players who are the same age as me and had the same YTS upbringing – training, cleaning the professional players’ boots or sweeping out the dressing room while earning next to nothing. This not only grounded us and made us appreciate how difficult it was to make a living but instilled in us a hunger and desire to keep working hard on our technique and fitness in order to become the very professionals we were scared of upsetting if their boots weren’t up to scratch.
My generation is the last to have come through this culture. Now our top academies’ facilities are absolutely perfect, with bowling greens for pitches, pristine kit washed by the laundry staff and restaurant-quality food every day for our youngest of age groups, where the culture of “doing your jobs” has been consigned to the scrapheap. Coupled with the fact that some of these young professionals are earning a small fortune, it’s human nature that the real passion and need to improve and push themselves to the limit is becoming harder and harder to find.
Not only that, but these young players, most of whom won’t make the first team at the likes of Chelsea, Manchester City or Arsenal, will face a shock when having to work their way back up the footballing ladder from Leagues One, Two or the National League, no longer with the luxury of a fantastic training facility or a healthy pay packet coming in every month. And I guarantee that most of them haven’t had the benefit of sound financial advice, something that most people don’t have to think about at the ages of 17 or 18.
It’s normal for young players to make mistakes. It’s how you learn and is the case of Alex Iwobi allegedly being out when he shouldn’t be the first of its kind? Of course not. It won’t be the last. I understand the argument that we need to give young players the best footballing education possible for them to be top players in the future but I feel we also have a responsibility to ensure we are doing enough to give them lessons in life so they can also be the best people they can be too.