I was sent a clip over the weekend from a Head of Performance with whom I have become good friends. In the clip, Matt Jackson, Technical Director at Wolverhampton Wanderers Football Club, is discussing the battle they have in keeping hold of their academy players who face pressure from the so-called bigger clubs.
From the tone of the clip, it is fair to say Jackson is not a fan of the current system. He starts by saying:
The academy system in this country [the UK] is set up to channel the best players to the biggest football clubs, and we can do nothing about it.
I can give you a list of a dozen players that have left us in the last three years from different age groups that walk out on us and our development to go to bigger clubs.
What is great about the clip is that it gives an insight into how professional football clubs think and the realities of their day-to-day lives. Jackson outlines a few examples of what we are now seeing. Jackson continues:
Right now, we received last week demands for one of our under 16 players from an agent. And we have a decision to make on that agent walking that player out of our football club, that we invest about £2 million in salary and an agent's fee of £300,000 to retain a player that we have had in our academy for a long time. And that player can just walk out. We have no power to do it.
We have an outstanding goalkeeper in our academy at the moment, and we resisted offers from the...biggest clubs last summer because we could at the stage of the cycle he's at with us in the academy. We expect to lose him this summer.
Can you have it both ways?
Here is one rather obvious point that needs to be made. On the one hand, while it is hard for a club like Wolverhampton Wanderers to keep hold of a player when a top-six club comes knocking, they similarly exploit their own position as a 'big club' by recruiting players.
They have, for example, in recent years taken Mateus Mané from Rochdale and Leon Chiwome from AFC Wimbledon. One unintended consequence of bigger clubs signing a lot of young players is that you can benefit from picking off talent that the big six waste - Saheed Olagunju from Chelsea, for example. It is completely understandable, but also something that we need to talk about. In this case, those who are embedded in clubs are, of course, looking at things from their club's perspective, not the player, and certainly not from other clubs.
The complex picture
At the heart of this is a complex set of relationships, and stuck in the middle of that is a player and their family simply trying to figure out the best thing to do right now. It is a story I hear over and over again. How do you know who is telling you the reality? How do you know the agent is being open about the best decisions? How do you know that the signing club will follow through on promises? How do you know if you stay put, there is a path to the first team? That goalkeeper could stay with Wolverhampton, but the first team manager could sign two new goalkeepers.
Evidence
At the root of this is a broken process. A process where kids are bought and sold based on hope rather than evidence.
The Danish physicist Niels Bohr’s stated that:
“Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution. It forces us to change our thinking in order to find it.
It is a quote I use a lot. Because where evidence is often absent in these settings, it is evidence that provides a way out of this. We simply have to change our way of thinking.
As a club, show the evidence of how you will get them to the levels they need to get to. Plan it out and educate the players and parents on what this will look like, then be accountable for that plan. If a member of staff leaves, the plan cannot disappear. Promises made can't be changed if you want someone to put their trust in you.
From a player's and family perspective, if others are protecting their own position, then you have no choice but to do the same. Where is your evidence that you are good enough? Where is your plan, and how will you be accountable? If you head to a Big Six club, where is the evidence that they will put you on a path to where you want to go? Does the evidence show you would be better off staying at Wolverhampton?
