This week in The Dressing Room:
Why I want to go back to the boy I introduced you to last week
The one sentence from our conversation that I think deserves much more attention
What happens when the adults around a talented child start believing the dream too
Why having no Plan B looks rather different when you’re barely old enough to understand why you need one
And what we owe children when the dream ends before they’ve worked out who else they might be
Last week, I told you about a former academy footballer I’d been speaking to. He was released at 14. Within roughly a year, his love for football had gone, and so had the training, matches and structure that had filled so much of his life. He started spending more time on the streets, and his life went in a very different direction.
There was one line in our conversation I want to come back to, because there is a much bigger question inside it.
“Everyone made me believe I’m going to be a footballer.”
He said it without any arrogance, as a plain description of his childhood.
He had been the best footballer in his school and his borough, and he’d been scouted by major clubs. Football filled most of his week: training three or four times, matches, and missing things with his friends because football came first. Adults repeatedly told him how talented he was. By the time he was 14, football was no longer simply something he did but where he believed his life was going.
The word that matters most in that sentence is everyone, because children don’t construct these ideas about themselves entirely on their own. Parents, coaches, scouts, teachers and academies all do some of that construction too. They are the adults who spot the talent, select the child, praise the performance, move things around to accommodate training and reinforce, quite reasonably, the possibility that this child might be capable of doing something exceptional.
Nobody has to say, “You are definitely going to become a professional footballer.” The environment can start saying it for them.
And then the same system that had helped build that belief released him.
