Will is seven years old, mad keen on football, but can't find a game to play in. Here, his mother investigates how children as young as 18 months are being coached like pros ? and why this might result in less fun and more kung-fu kicks
Will was first yellow-carded at the age of five. "Hand! Ball!" the referee barked, flashing the card for inspection to an imaginary stadium crowd. Will shrugged and frowned. He didn't know you weren't supposed to pick up the ball. He was at a themed birthday party at a football training centre. A pitch had been hired for an hour. The referee ? a gruff older man ? came with the deal. And he played his role to the max.
Despite not understanding what was going on, Will took it like a man and played on. Ten minutes later, however, he began to realise he was one of the only boys on the pitch not wearing a full replica kit. Gradually the humiliation caught up with him and he sat the rest of the game out, claiming to be tired. A week later he asked for his first proper football shirt.
Two years on, he's recovered from this initial setback and is a keen football fan. He's a Liverpool supporter ("because they've got the most money ? and they're the best") and is a devoted collector of Match Attax cards. There's just one problem: he's not professionally trained. And these days that is making it difficult to get a game.
I'm not joking about this. Many of the other boys he wants to play with have been in coaching since they were three or four. They're not keen to play with amateurs. There are plenty of soccer fanatics around, but if you're remotely serious you train several times a week. You want to play seriously and be refereed properly. There's no more jumpers for goal posts. It's enough of a rarity to see boys playing football in jeans. Playground football for boys like my son ? who love football but have no ambitions to be the next Rooney ? has virtually disappeared.
This situation upsets me. I'm not a football person and neither is Will's father. But we want to encourage him. Football is a common language for boys of any age. And surely it's especially important to know your way around the game if you're not naturally sporty? Will is not keen to go into training. He just wants a kickabout now and again. In the playground he cunningly cast himself as the goalie for a while, until he got bored of that. Now it sounds like he just doesn't really bother. It's all too intimidating. So what can we do?
It turns out I'm not alone in my frustration. There are a growing number of grassroots organisations campaigning about the over-professionalisation of childhood football. Give Us Back Our Game launched four years ago. "The game has been taken away from children by over-competitive coaches and parents," says founder Paul Cooper. It has several offshoots, including Football Football, an initiative to revive inner-city football. Then there's the Children's Football Alliance, which champions "mixed ability" football, and the Don't X The Line campaign against over-the-top parental behaviour at children's football matches.
Cooper says informal football culture is all but dead: "It's become a Premiership for tots. It has gone crazy. It is all about the adults' agenda and not really for the children at all." He is keen for the old, unwritten rules to be reinstated. "With street football you made it up as you went along. You learned off others. Having to play on a concrete pitch made sure you learned not to fall over. In my day you played with maybe 20 a side, down the park, in the playground, so your touch had to be good and you had to learn ways of using intelligent play to compete against older players."
But street football doesn't really exist any more, Cooper admits. "Many children have never played outside. And in some cases their parents haven't either." He cites a 2009 survey by the charity Living Streets which found that only half of five- to 10-year-olds had ever played in their street, whereas nine of out 10 of their grandparents had. In 2008 he carried out his own research in 100 primary schools and found that a third of them had banned games like British Bulldog for being "too rough". It's rare now for children to play games of any kind without highly organised adult supervision.
Former Middlesbrough and Celtic manager Gordon Strachan has spoken about this problem: "I know a lot of younger players don't love the game now, but it is not a game you love any more. When I was young we played in the street, had fun, identified with great players. We thought and talked nothing but football, lived for a Saturday game on telly. Now there are too many games on TV, and you see the kids in their teams at nine years old and it's: 'Do this, do that.' with their parents on the touchlines screaming at them."
The culture of professional football is all-pervasive, argues sports writer and broadcaster Danny Kelly. "It's all down to the sheer amount of money that has gone into football. Before, it was a healthy pastime, a way of getting children out of the house. Now some parents see it as a road to unlimited riches." He would like to see us adopt a system similar to the Dutch ? who have far better success at turning out quality players anyway. They have 10 times as many coaches as we do, says Kelly, and their aim is to teach children not how to play football but how to enjoy it: "They are taught to play the game for its own sake and not in order to impersonate professional footballers."
The irreversible change to childhood football in the UK came towards the end of the 1990s, when clubs started to coach junior players from the age of nine instead of 14. Chris Green, author of Every Boy's Dream: England's Football Future on the Line, lives in Worcester and is the father of an eight-year-old boy who plays for a local junior club. "I have spoken to a lot of coaches who feel very uneasy about the under-12s, simply because of the pressure and because it's such a guessing game at that age. Some will tell you the boys would have been better off developing their skills playing with their friends, getting a bit of rough and tumble." The fact that the FA's academies recruit from the age of nine pushes the starting age down even further, he adds. "They have to go looking when they're at least eight years old. The reality is they go looking well before that. You're quite a veteran now if you're seven and they haven't identified you."
Even outside the academy system, this poisons the culture. "In local football there's a concentration on who are going to be the best ones," Green continues. "My son is in a well-run junior club where they do everything right, but some of the teams they come up against?" He sighs. "The kids are out to win, the parents are out to win, and the attitude is horrendous. It's not a bunch of mates; the players are all cherry-picked. You feel like the village idiot sometimes when you're the odd one out at these things."
Some of the game's other more adult characteristics are also being transferred, Green adds. "I remember a junior referee from Cornwall who ended up in traction for nine months. It was just after Cantona's kung-fu kick. A kid copied it and kicked the ref. Kids will copy whatever they see. The parents do, too. You see these characters with the same mannerisms as the managers you see on TV. They stand there with their baseball caps? It's a joyless experience for them, hammering a team like my son's."
These attitudes filter down. My son has no interest in playing football professionally and yet he is indirectly affected by all this because there are few football-mad kids around who don't harbour these ambitions. Similarly, the entire idea of informal play is being transformed. If you need to get selected by the age of seven, you'll need pre-school training. And so now we have classes called things like Socatots, Footie Tots and Kiddikicks signing toddlers up to "learn the ABCs of football: Agility, Balance and Coordination" from as young as 18 months. These initiatives really represent the death knell for informal football to me. They're a bit like getting Linford Christie in to "coach" your baby on how to walk. One advertises its classes as "the beautiful game for hotshot tots". They boast of "enhancing skeletal and muscular development". Which I'm sure they do. But so does bouncing up and down in your cot.
The trouble is, these schemes are hugely popular with parents. Shane Bird, a coach with Academy Soccer, which takes children from the age of 18 months, explains: "More traffic on the roads means parents can rightly identify that the games we played in the street [as kids ourselves] are no longer a safe option. They are looking for a structure. The enjoyment the children experience and the progress they make ensure they keep coming." These types of sessions don't have to be pressurised, though, he says. "Children should not be overcoached, and they are given the opportunity to discover things for themselves."
But Chris Green has dozens of horror stories of highly coached children pumped up and then rejected by the academy system. There's the four-year-old who turned up for training with a nappy clearly visible beneath his shorts; the six-year-old who cried himself to sleep when he was dropped from the squad. "I spoke to him later and it was like talking to a retired footballer on the way down. He'd say: 'It's OK. I'm enjoying it so much more now I'm just playing for fun.'"
When I told one FA coach about my son's yellow-card incident, he said: "That sounds horrendous. That's too young to be playing a game which is properly refereed. That guy is crushing that child's self-esteem. He should not be involved in looking after children." But increasingly this kind of behaviour is what the children ? and the parents ? have come to expect: a proper game with a proper ref. No one else at the party was shocked at a five-year-old being yellow-carded (several other boys were, too). Instead they seemed pleased that the boys were "learning the rules properly".
One coach suggests that I just need to move house. We are in Teddington, Middlesex. It's a fairly built-up area and no one plays in the street or on waste ground. (I don't think there is any waste ground. It would be snapped up by property developers.) Jimmy Smith is chairman of a local Oxfordshire club, Hinksey Park, and his son plays for their under-nines team. He says "jumpers for goal posts" still exists in some communities. In his area a group of neighbours allow their children to play in the street. "We encourage it. There are cars occasionally, but you instil some road sense in them and they can still play. There is always a risk, but we won't stop them playing." He also thinks I should be more open-minded about organised football and introduce Will to a local club. "With our club it's about encouraging children to get out on a Saturday morning and be a member of a team. But they're not professional footballers. They're having fun."
Maybe I'm making too big a deal about something which is a normal male rite of passage. After all, every boy has to learn he's not as good at football as he'd like, says Danny Kelly: "In the past you'd discover you weren't good enough to be in the school team, but you still loved football. You 'found your level' ? that's what we called it. Boys like me would play on Hackney Marshes on a Sunday morning with a bunch of drunks from the local pub. And there was no great shame in it. Somebody has to be David Beckham and somebody else has to be a plumber who happens to like playing football." This, then, is my problem. I need to find a bunch of drunks for my son to play with. Any volunteers?
Viv Groskop is a journalist and regular contributor to the Observer
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