Authors: Michael Calvin
‘The FA coaching courses seem driven by an economic imperative. They are not age specific. The system, at youth level, is too unstructured. A lot of coaches don’t understand critical things like development cycles. The analogy I use is that most people see the car dashboard. They see the dials, indicators of what is going on under the bonnet. Scouts are the sat nav system, to see where we are going, and how to get there.’
We parked at Warren Farm, on what was once a series of shale tennis courts. Up to 20 games are staged here each weekend, on a 63-acre site, and the shortcomings were immediately obvious. An Under 11 game was being played on a full-size pitch: it was an absurd Lilliputian spectacle, closer to a cross-country race than a suitable contest in what coaches regard as the final meaningful year of a young footballer’s technical development. The parents, mainly young mothers with double buggies, and fathers in a fog of cigarette smoke, loved it.
Rios was a familiar figure. He shook hands with several coaches, asked after the occasional boy. He was respectful, engaged and observant. As we wandered along the touchline of an Under 9s match on a mercifully truncated pitch, he pointed out a sullen youth, with his hands stuffed into the pockets of his baggy jeans: ‘He tells me he’s an academy coach. What do you reckon?’ No answer was required. Had one been delivered, it would probably not have registered, because he had found what he was looking for.
An Under 15 game was in its final quarter. It was a frantic match, fuelled by unstructured effort and unintelligible instructions from the sidelines. ‘Look at the ethnicity of the teams,’ murmured Rios. ‘Certain coaches can only handle certain types of boys from certain types of backgrounds. Their teams are a reflection of who they are.’
One of the coaches, in a white half-sleeved tee-shirt, looked like a middleweight boxer gone to seed. His harsh negativity – ‘go on Smiffy, fuckin’ have him’ – matched his taut body language. His team was exclusively white and working class. The opposition was much more ethnically diverse. Their coach was white, but straight from central casting. He carried a clipboard, and wore a tracksuit top emblazoned with his initials. His three-quarter length cargo trousers and ankle socks did not give him the gravitas for which he so evidently yearned.
By the time I resumed following play – apologies to Mel Johnson, incidentally, for that schoolboy scouting error – Rios’ demeanour had changed. He had his eyes locked on to Clipboard Man’s number 9, in the way a gun dog follows the descent of a fatally wounded pheasant. The boy was tall, thin, and finely featured. At a guess, he was of Somali descent. His orange boots were out of keeping with the dowdiness of the day. ‘Watch the speed of his feet,’ said Rios. ‘It’s late in the game, but he’s still chasing the ball. He’s got desire, but he’s not running willy-nilly. There’s something there, allright.’
Once the match had ended, Rios approached one of the number nine’s teammates, Michael, whom he had taken to train at Brentford after seeing him excel in a schools’ match, several weeks before. The boy beamed at being recognised by the scout, and was eager to please. It transpired the newcomer’s name was Daniel. He came from an Angolan immigrant family. He had scored in the final minutes, converting a loose ball spilled by the goalkeeper, but had changed on the opposite touchline, and was already wandering away. Rios approached Clipboard Man, introduced himself courteously, and offered his business card. The response could not have been more guarded had it been a court summons.
‘What do you want?’
‘Can you tell me anything about Daniel?’
‘Don’t know anything about him. He just turns up on my doorstep every Sunday morning.’
‘Do you know his family? I gather he goes to school with Michael.’
‘See the Mum, once in a blue moon.’
‘I wonder if you see her, you’d tell her that I’d like to speak to her. I’d be grateful if you’d give her my card.’
‘Well, I’m not happy. He’s with me this season . . .’
‘Appreciate that. Thanks for your time.’
The resentment ran deeper than we realised. Bizarrely, the coach subsequently complained to the county FA about the nature of the approach. The innocence with which the day began, at Lampton School in Hounslow, was evidently an illusion. That was a different scene. Grandparents with ancient camcorders brought picnic seats and flasks. The boys, joined by a smattering of girls, were younger and more carefree.
The school, a product of 1960s functionality, was being updated. A patchwork quilt of starkly contoured pitches was folded around a site which combined Portakabin classrooms with new Alpine-style wooden chalets. The shrill sounds of childhood were intermittently drowned out by planes coming in low to land at Heathrow. United, BA, Singapore, Virgin. The world was evidently in unison.
This was QPR territory. The most interesting match, at Under 8 level, involved one of their feeder clubs, Old Isleworthians. Judged by his accent, the coach was South African. He had a prop forward’s shape and character. A grey t-shirt was stretched across large, tense shoulders. He emitted a well-meaning stream of consciousness, barely pausing for breath as he told the boys where to run, and what to do.
‘It’s all so vocal,’ said Rios, barely audible because he had positioned himself amongst parents, close to the halfway line. ‘There are no technical details. He should be positive, let the game develop.’ You didn’t need to be a geneticist to realise that Isleworthians’ number 6, Paolo, was the coach’s son. He was like his dad, squat, earnest and shaven-headed. When he committed the cardinal sin of passing sideways, he was rewarded with a yelp of ‘We are not playing for a draw we are playing for a win.’
Rios has worked for two years, identifying the most talented boys in the area, aged from six to eight. He has developed his own database, in which boys are classified by body shape and ethnicity. ‘The game develops continually,’ he explained. ‘At a match like this we’re trying to look fifteen years into the future. If you are a good footballer at this level, the kid who can score from the halfway line, it doesn’t necessarily mean you are going to be an elite footballer.’
The Barcelona influence endures: ‘I wanted to see inside their system. They judge by ability rather than age. They have A & B squads that can play up and down the age groups. Their physical literacy is much better than ours. Between the ages of six and eight, Barcelona do things that, if we tried them, we’d get laughed at. It is all about co-ordination. It involves balance, agility, a simple thing like hopping. They dribble the ball and rub their stomach at the same time. Then they change their hands. Can the boys cope with that? The coaches are usually teachers. They are looking for intelligence, the speed of execution of technique.’
He had spotted a boy, playing in an empty goalmouth on an adjoining pitch. ‘Hi Derek’ he shouted. The boy smiled, and waved, soundlessly. Rios had asked his coach, a Brentford fan, to try him in goal because of his agility and outstanding hand–eye co-ordination. ‘Derek doesn’t like it,’ reported the coach, who had been half-volleying shots at him. ‘He doesn’t like to get dirty.’
Rios grinned. He believed in the rotation of goalkeepers at such a young age, ‘otherwise the biggest lad, or worst outfield player, goes in all the time’. His ideas met with resistance, because the coaches were wedded to winning, even when, officially, the result was not recorded. ‘We’ve got one coach around here who calculates how his team gets on in non-competitive tournaments,’ Rios revealed. ‘He actually produces imaginary League tables on the club’s website. The problem is the parents buy into that type of thing.’
A multi-cultural society produces multi-faceted problems. The stated ages of some young players, particularly those of African descent, are unreliable. Rios is acutely conscious of the danger of causing offence, but asks them, in a light-hearted manner, to smile, so he can check surreptitiously whether they have milk teeth. ‘I had one player, a Nigerian with a German passport, whom they told me was 11. He was bigger than me!’ he exclaimed.’ Rios splits age groups in half, separating boys born between March and August from those born between September and February, because winter babies tend to dominate.
The value system, encouraged by the elitist nature of scouting, also needs to be addressed. Rios learned, at Barcelona, that getting the right boys into a club is only ‘20 to 25 per cent of the job’. Parents must be educated because ‘the ones who chase the brand, the ones who talk and influence others, are a cancer’. Ose Aibangee, Brentford’s head of youth development, has introduced a series of workshops for parents with boys in their academy, to give them an insight into their responsibilities. He explained: ‘They basically explore how to work with their kids and how to work with us. The objective is to not make boys feel like they’re under pressure every time they go on a football pitch. They are babies. Even we forget sometimes, because they’re in their kit and you look at them like they’re little mini footballers. We’ve had parents openly admit that they’ve over-pressurised their sons. That’s good but I would imagine there is a bigger percentage that won’t tell us. They probably won’t even know that they’re pressurising their kids because, in their minds, they are just supporting them and giving them feedback. They can do the wrong things for the right reasons, because they’re all experts, aren’t they? Everyone involved in football is an expert.’
Some have a more intuitive grasp of its demands than others. Shaun O’Connor, the club’s head of youth recruitment, has been showered with stardust. He is one of the few scouts to have found ‘The One’. His moment of clarity came in April 2001, in his last match as a coach at Barnet, who were closing their Centre of Excellence as a result of losing Football League status. Having already arranged to run a satellite centre for Arsenal’s Academy, he had little motivation to fulfil an ill-timed fixture against Luton, but did so as a favour to their coaches, Dean Rastrick and Mark Ridgeway.
O’Connor was monitoring the Under 11s and Under 12s at the Furzefield Centre in Potters Bar, when he was informed the referee for the Under 9s hadn’t turned up. He took charge of the match out of a sense of duty, and quickly had his attention seized by an eight-year-old, playing on the wing for Luton. ‘Reffing was a complete pain, because it had been a really manic day, but this kid was quick. His close control, running with the ball, was the best I’d ever seen. He had fantastic balance, and didn’t mind leaving his foot in. He had that nasty streak you need, had such a will to win. He tore us apart. As soon as the game had ended I asked one of their parents who he was.’
Jack Wilshere, a graduate of Knebworth Youth and Letchworth Garden City Eagles, was O’Connor’s first recommendation to Arsenal. He went through proper channels, asking for permission to speak to his parents, and, helped by Steve Leonard, an Arsenal youth scout, lobbied Wilshere’s father, Andy. ‘I went over to a couple of tournaments during the summer just to make Jack feel that he was wanted by us,’ he recalled. ‘It was hard work to get him in because the old man was a bit sceptical about moving him out of Luton.’
Scouts are resilient sorts, who understand the value of the grand gesture. Arsenal staged a special Under 9s match for Wilshere against Leyton Orient, on the pitch at Highbury. Leonard recruited another Luton boy, Ryan Smales, who played a year up. Jack waited until the last day of the registration window before agreeing to join Arsenal’s Hale End Academy in Walthamstow. He thrived, but Smales regressed. The fresh-faced boy who sits alongside Leonard, in an Arsenal Under 12 team photograph for the 2002–03 season, faded, and returned to reality.
Just as the vagaries of life outside football are etched in the game’s all-consuming spotlight, football fails to look after its own. It is widely believed Wilshere will be captain of England one day. He is worth conservatively £50 million on the open market. Arsenal paid O’Connor £50 when Wilshere joined the academy. He received another £250 when he signed a scholarship. The scout worked diligently for the club for a decade, at one point having 35 boys in the system, but had signalled his intention to leave just before Wilshere signed professional forms. Under a policy implemented by Liam Brady, Arsenal’s head of youth development, this meant he did not receive the £750 usually due in such circumstances.
O’Connor is sanguine: ‘That’s Liam’s policy. At the end of the day, if it wasn’t for him I probably wouldn’t have got a full-time job at Arsenal. He helped me get where I am today, and I’m very grateful to him. I wouldn’t have had clubs asking about me. I could have joined Tottenham, and I sat down with Chelsea, although they weren’t for me. There’s a lot of politics in these clubs, and if I can’t do it to my full potential, which is how I felt at Arsenal, I won’t do the job.’
O’Connor had last seen Wilshere 18 months previously, when he visited his house to get a shirt signed. He follows his progress through Andy, his father, but feels no special affinity. ‘I was there then, I’m not, now,’ he said. Respect, of a more profound form, was paid by Aibangee, who pursued O’Connor relentlessly, because he had painful proof of his potential to play a pivotal role in the restructure of Brentford’s youth system. There is, indeed, honour amongst thieves.
Aibangee is a watchful man, but the memory of O’Connor’s larceny lightens his mood: ‘Yeah! I mean, I hated him. That’s why I brought him here, because he’s the best at his job. I thought I was good at my job when I was at Watford. We had some good kids and Shaun took my best one to Arsenal. We had that boy for a good year, trained him, coached him, did all we had to do. Then two or three months before he was meant to sign, Shaun, my enemy, took him. I couldn’t work out how he’d done it. It’s the worst thing in the world, the absolute worst. But that’s the job. Yeah, you take it personally, of course you do. I think if you don’t, then the job ain’t the right job for you.’
O’Connor agreed: ‘It’s emotional, exactly. I mean, when I was up at Arsenal I didn’t like to lose at all. If I lost a player it would probably take me a month to get over it. That was a club I supported and grew up following round the world. I felt I had let them down, somehow. So I didn’t like to lose anyone or anything, and it’s the same here. I go home and I can’t sleep. If I lose a player or I’ve lost out on a player, I can’t let it go. It affects me.’