Last April, Danny, 16, received devastating news. After six years at a London football academy he was told he was no longer wanted. For those years his parents had driven three times a week from their home in south London to the training ground (plus matches on Sundays) in pursuit of Danny's dream to play left wing for a London Premier League side in 2013.
Danny is obsessed with football. He has a framed photograph of Steven Gerrard on his bedroom wall, could do a Cruyff Turn at the age of eight, has the balance of a gazelle and can do so many keepy-uppies even he loses count. Being scouted for that academy was the best day of his life. He worked fantastically hard. He loved the training, camaraderie and free drinks - 'loads of Lucozade, Yazoo. You could take as many as you wanted!' He loved feeling special. 'Saying who you play for at school makes you twice the man you are.' Football is his life.
But now his fantasy future is over. 'You feel like your head has been cut off,' he says. 'He was so quiet,' his dad says. 'Just destroyed. It was awful.' And now he has his GCSEs coming up and the last thing he wants to do is study. 'You're thinking, I want to be a footballer, I don't even need this stuff – and your mum is saying, "You've got to work." And you think work is just a back-up because your real aim is to be a footballer.'
Danny has not turned his back on the dream. He still plays for a local club and for his school. He still works phenomenally hard training in his back garden. He still hopes he will be spotted. The trouble is, scouts like potential: six-, seven-, eight-, nine-year-olds. But should a scout turn up tomorrow, next week, whenever, Danny is ready. 'I feel I'm still standing out,' he says, 'I'm killing these guys!'
Danny is not unique, of course. Any elite sport or rarefied field with few slots at the top is underpinned by an invisible stratum of talented also-rans. They are very, very good and work very, very hard. They deserve to be rewarded, but they won't be, because they are not quite good enough. But the big difference with football is volume. All the Premiership and leading Cham­­pionship clubs have academies. The rest have schools of excellence. In all, there are some 9,000 boys attending these intensely competitive places. More than 90 per cent of those who join a Premier­ship academy will fail to make it into the first team. Most won't even become professional footballers.
'You're talking about a lot of kids chasing very, very few options,' points out Jim White, journalist, broadcaster and the author of You'll Win Nothing with Kids: Fathers, Sons and Football. 'One of the problems with the academy system is that its ethos, basically, is to throw enough **** against the wall and hope that some of it sticks. They take in 30 or 40 kids at eight, knowing full well that the chances of any of them becoming footballers is pretty unlikely. The trouble is, those kids who come in at eight think they already are footballers.'
A friend's eight-year-old was scouted for Chelsea, and he went from being top of the class to the skiver in the back. 'Why aren't you trying any more?' his mother asked. 'I'm a footballer and I'm going to be rich,' he replied. Needless to say, he was 'released' a year later. At eight he still had time to recover. At 15 he might have sunk into a depression for the rest of his life. 'The shedding of people at 16 has always been football's hidden secret,' White says. 'The brutality of axing kids hasn't been improved by the academy system in any way. In fact, it's probably made it worse.'
At academies, boys are signed from age eight to 16. Signing seals mutual commitment: the boys agree to good behaviour and morals and to turn up to training; the club agrees to provide elite coaches, tournaments, physiotherapists. Boys are initially being offered yearly contracts ('retain' and 'release' are words that quickly enter boys' vocabulary) extending to two-yearly at age 12. At 16 boys become full-time 'scholars', often moving near the club to lodge with landladies. They are paid £100 a week as an apprentice, and education becomes the responsibility of the academy. (Every Thursday, Tottenham converts its hospitality room at White Hart Lane into a classroom for 'education day.') At 17 they sign a 'professional' contract, which means they can start earning money. Just how much is down to the club. I was told the average is £15-30,000; more if you're a Jacob Mellis (Chelsea), or Danny Welbeck (Manchester United).
The FA rule is that 8-11s have to live within 60 minutes' travelling time of the training ground; 12-16-year- olds within 90 minutes. This gives Tottenham a catchment area that runs from Bedford and Buckinghamshire through north and south London around to Essex, and a pool of 15-20 million people. South­ampton academy, on the other hand, is less lucky. Half its radius is the English Channel.
Now, of course, academies are under attack. People argue boys are brought in too young; that clubs do too little for the schools and amateur clubs from which boys are taken, and that, ultimately, the pressure on boys and families simply isn't worth it because there are too few places at the end of it all, and those that do make it aren't good enough anyway.
'Opportunities [at the top level] are very tight,' agrees John McDermott, the academy head at Tottenham. 'Boys have to realise the path is not what it was 10 years ago.' You once had to be among the best players in Britain, now you have to be among the best in the world to make it here. Three of the 23 scholars at Tottenham are European (a Swede, an Italian and a Belgian).
At age 16 the 90-minute rule goes out of the window and clubs start to bring in boys and their families from all over the world. 'It must be hugely frustrating for kids at English clubs to be told they're not good enough at 16 because of the number of overseas youngsters filling academies,' commented Trevor Brooking, the Football Association's director of football development, in a recent attack on youth football. 'When we set up the academy system, I don't think anyone envisaged it would be filled with anything other than Brits.'
McDermott, a former FA national coach, takes a Darwinist line. 'My belief is that talent will get you through. Cream will rise to the top.' But not necessarily the very top. 'If God has given you the ability to play in the second division and you achieve that, then that is a success. (Jim White told me that non-league football, which used to be filled with butchers, bakers and lorry drivers, is now full of kids who have gone through the academy system, but haven't quite made it.) Plus, McDermott urges, give academies a chance. They're only 10 years old. It's only now and over the next year or two that you will see the real worth of the system, and he has several players who are 'very interesting'.
He is keen for me to meet one of them, Ryan Mason, 17, a Tottenham scholar who is tipped to be a potent force. I find this hard to believe because the figure who emerges is unequivocally unathletic: pale, nervous, gangly, shuffling into the meeting room at the academy HQ at Spurs Lodge, Chigwell, with none of that high-testosterone swagger of pro footballers. 'Physically he is very underdeveloped,' admits Allen, who remembers him being so scrawny at 12 that he couldn't even kick the ball across the pitch. But this doesn't matter – everyone agrees he is brilliant and scores loads of goals and in fact recently played with the first team in the Uefa Cup game against Dinamo Zagreb.
Everyone is looking to Mason as evidence that the academy system works. He joined Tottenham's academy soon after it launched in 1998, when he was seven. His father, a BT engineer, got him playing aged six for a Sunday league team near his home in Cheshunt, Hertfordshire. Mason says he's thrilled to be here. It's fun, but also very hard. 'I've seen around 100 boys released,' he says. One was a good friend. 'We'd been close for about six years, our families too. My dad would drive us [to training] on a Monday and his dad would do Wednesday, and then he got released.' He shrugs. 'But that's football isn't it? Technically he was fine, but mentally he wasn't there. He would go out with his mates,' he explains in a tone that says, 'Need I say more?'
Martin Tolworth knows what happened to his son, Robert, 24, after he was 'dumped' from Crystal Palace Academy, aged 16, after six years with the club. 'He went from being as high as a kite to devastation,' he says. 'One Saturday he was told he'd been picked for a scholarship, that after six years of waiting he'd got to the first rung of the ladder, a young apprentice. But then a new manager went in and the following Saturday, he said, "No, we're not going to pick you."?' Robert's mother, normally a placid woman, was very upset. 'How can you treat boys like that,' she raged. 'Cut their ties and just get rid of them. He's just like a piece of meat hanging in the butchers.' Robert got angry, put on weight, drifted out of football and is now a carpenter in Spain. The problem with football, his dad says, is that it's not about absolutes. 'In swimming or athletics you're picked on times. If you don't make the time, you're not in the swim team. But football is about the whims of managers. It's a game of opinions.'
'The academy product is flawed,' says Mark Warburton, assistant academy manager and the architect of the new model, based on one at Ajax in Holland. 'It involves hours and hours of driving, hours of standing outside watching the boys with the rain lashing down, getting home at half nine or 10, eating meals in the car, being behind on homework, and always being generally tired, because that is what it takes to be a pro footballer – it's always been that way. But it's not that way in Holland, or France. So if it works there and we're buying their players, doesn't that tell you that we've got to change the way we do things?'
It has certainly changed the life of Oli Sprague, 15, and his family. Oli, who lives in Ruislip, was scouted for Queens Park Rangers at age eight, then Chelsea, and now Watford. This means that Oli and his dad, Clinton, 44, a director of an accident management company, have a thorough knowledge of the M40 and M25. This was a problem for his wife, Susan, and his two other children, Jordan, 10, and Bliss, six. 'Really that amount of travelling started to kill our lives,' Clinton says. 'It put a lot of strain on the family.' But now Watford takes care of it all. 'I've got a home life again!' Plus, Oli is less tired, he says, 'and incredibly happy playing football.'
This is a relief, because Oli hit a bad patch, aged nine, soon after he was bought by Chelsea for an alleged £25,000. The surprise is that it isn't just pro footballers who are bought and sold. Children are too. It is 'compensation', I was told, for the money invested in training and so on. Neither the boys nor their families apparently get any of the money – indeed, many might wish it was the 1950s again when Mrs Edwards at least got a washing machine out of Manchester United for her son, the legendary Duncan Edwards. But still, £25,000 is a lot of money. 'Theo Walcott cost £3 million at 16 when Arsenal bought him from Southampton,' White points out; '£25,000 for a nine-year-old is good value if he turns out to be the next Theo Walcott.'
But Oli's dad sees it differently. 'It puts way too much pressure on the kids. For it not to put pressure on, you've got to be a Ronaldo or a Rooney, someone who is so excellent it's not going to make a difference.' When Oli reported for duty at Cobham, Chelsea's training ground in Surrey, he says he felt scrutinised. 'It was hard,' he remembers. 'They thought you were the star player and you could run rings around everyone, but it wasn't as easy as that. I wasn't amazingly better than anyone else.' He also sprained his ankle soon after the season started. Oli's dad says
he became a lot quieter, a lot more tired. Then Oli fell awkwardly during a match and damaged his knee. He was released after two years. 'They thought I was a bit injury-prone.' But he picked himself up, carried on and within a month or two was spotted by Watford – clubs operate as a network, and will often have trials for boys released from other clubs. 'You scored a blinder, didn't you?' recalls Oli's dad. 'Within a few weeks he was signed up.'
So do academies treat boys like commodities? Some said yes.
I was told that one regime was so 'brutish' that the parents felt too scared to tell the coach their son had glandular fever. 'We didn't want him to look weak,' his father says. 'The ethos was you had to be tough at all costs. If you're injured or poorly, you're out.' The eventual confession was greeted with a chilly silence. The boy quit soon after. I was told of favouritism (more free tickets to matches); of coaches screaming like sergeant-majors; of a pack mentality that turns on the losers. I was told they should be Ofsted-inspected; that the bosses are a shambles who need lessons in management because 'they're not dealing with a conveyor belt in a factory, but human beings – and young ones at that'. I was told of the pressure to impress all the time; and how the coaches reinforce that by standing there with clipboards, shouting, 'There are lots of boys who want your place.'
But each academy is different. Take Manchester City's, which is hugely successful – former academy boys Micah Richards, Joey Barton and Shaun Wright Phillips are now worth £40 million; 10 other boys are millionaires; sixty per cent of graduates make a living out of the game. 'We're by far the tops,' says Jim Cassell, 61, the academy manager, who puts this down partly to 'care, time, knowledge, understanding and patience with young players'. Cassell, a former bookkeeper and local government officer, looks like a schoolteacher, acts as a guru and sounds like a dad. This has been especially valuable to Kieran Trippier, 18, captain of Man City's youth team, who joined the academy aged nine.
'Kieran lives near me and I quite enjoy giving him a lift home after the game,' Cassell says. 'We have a chat and it's usually pretty boring because I keep on reminding him of all the things he got to do. He's probably glad when he gets out of the car.' Trippier nods, smirking.
There is another problem, Cassell says. 'There is so much pressure at the top, managers want instant results. They don't have time to work on the players and grow them.' Plus, managers change every year. 'This doesn't give the boys the stability they need. They've come from an environment where I've been their only manager for the last 10 years. This means boys have to adjust and not many people like change.' Jim White predicts that opportunities for home-grown talent at Man City will be reduced now it has a new billionnaire owner, Dr Sulaiman Al Fahim, who heads the group linked to the Abu Dhabi royal family. 'They bought Man City as a vehicle to promote Abu Dhabi. They're not going to do that successfully if Man City's got a bunch of unknown locals playing for them rather than world-known superstars.' Last September Man City signed the Brazilian Robinho from Real Madrid, for £32.5 million.
Back at the Tottenham academy, John McDermott talks me through options for boys who are 'released': lower league club; university (both here and in the States) to study something like sports science; club abroad; other apprenticeships; one Spurs reject recently went into the City. He says it's never easy: boys cry, parents cry. One father expressed his heartbreak by pinning Allen against the wall with his hands around his neck. But, 'Tottenham will look great on their cv,' he says. 'They're super-fit, disciplined, have travelled the world playing football, had a go at achieving their dream.' But their chances of reaching it were minuscule in the first place, I say. 'The boys are told that, the parents are told that,' he stresses, 'but you're also trying not to burst their dreams.' That's the thing about football academies, he says. 'We're focused on success, not failure.'