In March 2013 a young man killed himself after suffering years of mental health difficulties following his release by a Premier League football. The Andrelton Simmons Youth Jersey summing up by the coroner who presided over the inquest into his death could hardly have been a stronger or more salutary warning about the potential dangers of English football’s youth development system.Relentlessly ambitious and commercialised professional clubs recruit thousands of boys into intensive, four‑times‑a‑week training from the age of eight, in numbers still broadly based on those first sanctioned by the Football Association’s “Charter for Quality” 20 years ago this month. Hundreds of these boys are released each year, as the clubs narrow their focus on who might have a faint chance of making a career in professional football and becoming a valuable financial asset. Despite the huge numbers housed in this system, currently 12,000 boys, the chinks of first-team opportunities have diminished every year since 1997. In each transfer window, most Premier League clubs overlook their young graduates and instead spend multimillions of pounds on fully formed overseas stars.
The inquest was told that the young man had been “a happy and bright and fun child who Ben Revere Womens Jersey was a talented footballer”. The Guardian has agreed not to name him following a request from his family to spare them further distress.He was spotted playing junior football, brought into the academy of a lower-division club, then picked up by the Premier League club, who had him in their system for three years from the age of 13. At 16, when the cut is made for who will be asked to join the scholarship programme, in which boys leave school and have a full‑time, two-year association with the clubs, the young man was released.“I find that it was … that pivotal point that crushed a young boy, a young man’s life and all the dreams that go with it,” the coroner said. “It is the one, I find, the single most important factor that led to the events which ended [in his suicide].”
She continued: “I think it’s very difficult to build up hopes of a young man and for them to be dashed at a critical age, when a boy becomes a man. To be found wanting in every way, it’s very cruel …“I am not here to Asdrubal Cabrera Youth Jersey pronounce on football clubs that make the arrangements about … young footballers and giving them hopes, because they are not here to explain it. But it feels to be let go, and from all the evidence that I have heard today there’s not much [support]; to have no support for that letting go seems to be adding cruelty upon cruelty. And that lack of support, I find in absentia of the football clubs … to be a certain and compelling factor in what happened ultimately … and I find [the young man] was a statistic of that.”
The Premier League and Football League adamantly defend the professionalism of their youth processes, coaching and facilities, which have undoubtedly improved since the introduction in 2012 of the Elite Player Performance Plan. Both leagues stress that boys who are taken on for the 16-18 scholarship must continue with education – commonly this is a BTEC sports diploma – and receive a broad range of welfare provision and courses in life skills including emotional wellbeing. The EFL says it is “supportive of the holistic development of young players”, and the Premier League aims “to support the development of well-rounded young players”.The EFL says that its League Football Education department, which delivers the welfare programmes, tracks Authentic Darryl Strawberry Womens Jersey what happens to players for four years after they have been released; the Premier League says its clubs keep in touch. All the outcomes they cite for these young men are positive.Fifteen Premier League and nine Championship clubs have Category One EPPP academies and operate under-23 teams, so they report a relatively high number of 18-year-olds given initial professional contracts – 65% last year, according to the Premier League. But Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association, says that of the boys who make it into the elite scholarship programme at 16, past PFA research has found that five out of six are not playing professional football at 21.
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