If there is a talent drain in England, it is the intention of John Murtough, the academy director at Fulham, to plumb it. Which is why he is going on the campaign trail this season. His motive? Because in some of Fulham’s neighbouring boroughs, such as Lambeth, there may not be a grass pitch for miles and some youngsters never get to kick a ball. And if football is not getting to the children, Fulham will take the game to them.
“We want to go into inner cities, where kids don’t really get to play,” Murtough said. He has a community scheme working there full time and will go in himself two or three times a month. He recently took three boys into Fulham’s under-14 group who, he discovered, had never played 11-a-side. “We saw they had pace, power, desire, were technically not bad and had real raw talent — but never a team or a pitch to hone it, ” Murtough said.
His intentions are fine, yet they represent merely a finger in the dyke. The most basic cause of the shortage of talent at junior levels in England is the lack of football being played.
The obesity debate is so well aired and the social changes in the way that children exercise — or do not, as the case may be — so long established, it is no surprise that football is feeling the effects. Fewer youngsters playing less football means less talent finding its way to the top. It sounds logical, but far worse when you hear it from the likes of Sir Trevor Brooking or Liam Brady.
“Technically, we’re losing ground on Portugal, Spain, France and some of the Eastern European countries,” Brooking, the FA’s director of football development, told The Times. “If we don’t revamp, in eight or 12 years’ time our challenge will be qualifying [for the World Cup], not winning it.”
Brady, the Arsenal academy director, said. “I’ve long said that there’s a dearth of talent. Society just isn’t producing so many footballers any more. Kids are not getting to play at school, boys don’t practise as much as they used to, so natural talent is not as abundant as it used to be. There’s just not enough to service the number of clubs.
“At Arsenal, we’ve gone some way to compensating for that with some foreign boys. But we wouldn’t go foreign if we had the players here.”
Even West Ham United, masters of developing local talent, are feeling it. “Mass participation of the traditional groups of players has altered,” Huw Jennings, the youth development manager for the FA Premier League, said. “West Ham’s supply line from East London and Essex is huge. But they’re saying it’s changing. It’s becoming much harder to extract players from those areas because there’s been a change in population there.”
Throw in the decline of sport in schools, the swallowing-up of the playing fields, and you come up with the kind of statistic presented to Brooking recently: that 60 per cent of 11-year-olds leaving primary school are physically illiterate, which means that they do not possess the basics of physical movement — agility, balance and co-ordination.
Brooking is obsessed with the 5 to 11-year-old age group and has grandiose plans to manage change that would result in after-school football being coached in the educational environment. It would be a considerable coup for an FA administrator to knock the heads of schools and Government together sufficiently hard to achieve this, yet anyone would wish him luck because this is England’s biggest problem.
As Murtough said: “I don’t think a couple of rule changes can make this happen. I think it’s got to be something really drastic.”
The difficulties for those intent on developing talent is far less pronounced on the Continent. When Georges Prost arrived at Southampton five seasons ago, having been a youth coach with Marseilles, he was enormously impressed by most of what he saw. What he could not understand was why he could not see more of the essential ingredient — the boys.
Even accounting for the problems society has inflicted on the game, there is talent out there and football academies do a pretty good job of digging it out. But then what? Here again, we find English football labouring against odds that heavily favour foreign competition. It is simple: Marseilles and the vast majority of foreign clubs train their youth teams five times a week; English clubs train theirs three times.
This is what struck Bo Nielsen, the head of youth at Helsingborgs, the Swedish club, when he visited England on an information-seeking trip recently. “If you work in football, then you believe in training,” he said. “That’s why we train our boys five times a week. Some clubs have increased that to six by taking their training into schools. Three times a week in England will be a big disadvantage compared to other European nations.”
While it is widely acknowledged that English professional players are technically inferior to those from other countries, it is also recognised among those who work in the junior age groups that the technique deficit is apparent as early as under-13 and under-14 levels.
This is what Prost calls the “golden age”, the time when players soak up skills that become second nature. Yet, if you are exposed to them less often, it stands to reason that they become less ingrained.
“You have to wait until under-17 level here before you can train daily in England,” Prost said. “So you are missing the golden age of learning here. In Europe — Holland, Germany, wherever — every country gives their boys the opportunity to train every day. To find that not the case here was a surprise.”
Why is this the case? Again, it is football versus the social system. In Germany, school finishes at 2pm, thus engendering a culture of after-school activity. In England, school ends at 3.30pm or later, so Fulham, for instance, will have only two or three training sessions a week, and for a shorter time.
As Murtough said: “Look at other countries — their school system supports the development of talent and, unfortunately, ours doesn’t. We get far less time to develop. Less access means less opportunity to train.”
Again, it is not as if clubs are not trying. When a boy at Fulham last season stopped turning up for training, the club discovered that it was because of a family break-up that left the mother short on her rent and thus living farther from the ground. So the club helped out, contributed to the rent out of a hardship fund — and the boy returned.
But a club such as Fulham rely heavily on parents being able to drive the boys to training, which rules out a large percentage of potential players. One of their most exciting prospects is a young African immigrant who is driven in by a scout — that is the effort they will put in. And that is just to train three times a week.
How to rescue that golden age? Shift the entire school day? Unlikely. Build boarding schools on site, as Bayern Munich and Hertha Berlin have done? Expensive. As it happens, Murtough is trying to establish links with a school next door to Fulham’s Motspur Park training ground so the boys can come straight in. But school would still end at 3.30pm.
