This week in The Dressing Room:
What happens when the dream ends at 13
Why being surrounded by support doesn’t necessarily mean somebody is looking after you
The gaps I’ve started noticing from academy sport right through to the very top
What Nick Kyrgios, a conversation with someone from the NBA and a former Crystal Palace academy player have unexpectedly got in common
And the question I haven’t been able to shake: whose job is it to notice?
I’ve had a strange run of conversations recently, and they all seem to share the same theme.
Individually, I found them interesting, but when I put them next to each other they became rather difficult to ignore and really rather exasperating.
Last week, I spoke to someone who had once been absolutely convinced he was going to become a Premier League footballer.
He wasn’t being ridiculous. He was 14, and he’d been playing at a high level for years. He’d been scouted by professional clubs and brought into an elite football environment. He was so good, in fact, that he was a local celebrity, and good enough that the adults around him were investing in the possibility of him becoming a professional footballer.
Football occupied most of his week. He missed things with his friends because training and matches came first. Everyone around him knew him as the brilliant footballer and, more importantly, he knew himself as the brilliant footballer.
“Everyone made me believe I’m going to be a footballer,” he told me.
So he hadn’t really contemplated anything else.
And when you’re 14, I’m not sure how capable you are of maintaining the distinction between:
I’m very good at football.
People think I could become a footballer.
and
I am going to be a footballer.
Especially when the adults around you, like the people at the professional club who signed him, are helping to make that possibility feel very real indeed.
Then he got injured. Frightened that other players were going to take his place, he started playing again before he’d fully recovered. Eventually, he was released.
I asked whether anyone had sat down with him beforehand and really explained what he needed to develop, and whether someone had helped him understand the gaps in his game and what he could do next.
“Not really.”
And that was pretty much that. The system he’d been part of, what he’d assumed was all just going to happen and how he’d envisaged his life had all simply moved on.
He hadn’t.
Afterwards, he didn’t want to kick a football. His love for it, he said, simply died.
The boy who had thought he was going to be a superstar suddenly had an enormous hole where football had been, and something he hadn’t had for years: time. The evenings that had been filled with training, the matches, the weekends and the things he’d missed with his friends were all gone.
He lived in an area where there were postcode wars and gangs. After a blow like that, he found it increasingly hard to deal with, started spending more time on the streets and ended up involved with gangs, robberies and selling drugs.
About a year later, he was facing the possibility of a custodial sentence. He received probation instead.
I’ve found myself telling people this story ever since, because, honestly, what?!
We take a child. We identify him as exceptional. We bring him into an elite environment. We let the idea of becoming a professional footballer start to feel like his future.
And then, when that possibility disappears, what happens to the child?
