When Ron Greenwood remarked, while responding to criticism for dropping the young Glenn Hoddle from his England team in 1979, that “disappointment is part of football”, he was widely derided for appearing to stifle the expression of creativity. But Greenwood knew what he was talking about, even if he chose the wrong words at the wrong time. Beneath them lay a truth that comes closer to the surface as the rewards for success in English football grow ever more outrageous.
It’s a sad fact that young footballers sometimes have to gamble with their lives if they want to make the breakthrough of which they have dreamed since childhood. This is a very big summer for two young English players who faced each other in an FA Youth Cup final three years ago and have answered the challenge of negotiating a career path through disappointment, actual and potential, in different ways.
Patrick Roberts, the winger who moved from Fulham to Manchester City for £12m two years ago at the age of 18, faces a summer of wondering whether, at the end of a season and a half on loan at Celtic, he has done enough to convince Pep Guardiola of his right to a place in City’s first-team squad. He returns to the Etihad laden with medals and with the good opinion of the staff and supporters at Parkhead, but not knowing whether this will prove enough of a final stepping stone.
At least he has been appearing regularly in someone’s top-tier first team, scoring and making goals and generally keeping his name on the agenda of the people at his parent club charged with monitoring players out on loan. His decision to push for an 18-month stay with Celtic rather than a proposed half-season has certainly been vindicated in those terms, and also in the more basic sense that he has actually been playing matches in proper competition most weeks rather than experiencing the frustration of warming a bench or mooching about in an age-group team.
Dominic Solanke took a different route. A Chelsea player since childhood, he won two Youth Cups with the club and was a prolific scorer at that level before being sent on loan to Vitesse Arnhem, where the London club often park young players in order to give them first-team experience.
Seven goals in 25 appearances answered few questions, and Solanke returned to Stamford Bridge a year ago with demands for a big rise in his pay (£7,000 a week at the time) and a place in the first-team squad.
Neither was forthcoming, which meant that he did not sign the sort of extended contract that Chelsea normally offer to tie down young players whom they intend to send out on loan, and which enables them to receive a transfer fee if they decide to let them leave permanently.
So, this week, with his Chelsea contract at an end, and looking back on a season including very little actual football, Solanke signed a deal with Liverpool said to be worth around £20,000 a week. He has joined a club already well stocked with attacking talent but where he presumably feels that Jürgen Klopp will give him a fair crack.
Chelsea will now wait to hear the transfer tribunal’s decision on the size of the compensation to which the they are entitled for nurturing him through their academy system. It is likely to be around £2m-3m, which is not what anyone would expect to pay for a 19-year-old chosen to represent England at all age-group levels from under-16 to under-21 and currently featuring at the under-20 World Cup in South Korea, where the team meet Mexico in a quarter-final on Monday.
So Liverpool seem to have got themselves a bit of a bargain, while Roman Abramovich is unlikely to be distraught at the loss of what would otherwise be a realistic transfer fee – unless, of course, Solanke comes back to Stamford Bridge next season and shows them what they are missing.
But with young players, who knows? The goal Roberts scored against Manchester City at the Etihad in the Champions League group stage last December may have given Guardiola a timely nudge but provided no guarantees. City’s interest in promoting young English players from their well resourced academy appeared to end with the departure of Sven-Goran Eriksson, while Chelsea’s academy seems to be used primarily as an additional source of revenue, given that John Terry was its last graduate to succeed in the club’s colours. Salaries of £30,000 a week for teenagers and loans to clubs in England and the Netherlands do not appear to provide an efficient pathway to the first team.
Both Roberts and Solanke are mentioned in No Hunger in Paradise, a new book in which the sportswriter Michael Calvin investigates the experiences that young English footballers undergo after their talent is first recognised, usually when their age is still in single figures. To complete a trilogy which previously explored the worlds of the scout and the manager, Calvin uncovers stories that are occasionally heartwarming – such as that of Steadman Scott, a 60-year-old who served a prison term for drug offences before setting up a community scheme in Brixton which has produced a professional player for each of its 20 years of existence, including Liverpool and England’s Nathaniel Clyne – but more often chilling. Check the descriptions of the way promising children are spotted, encouraged, spoilt rotten, and then tossed away like tarnished dolls, left to cope with life-changing disappointment.
The tiny percentage who make it even as far as Roberts and Solanke find themselves in a world defined by the astonishing sums revealed this week in the publication of the prize money and television fees earned by the 20 Premier League clubs this season – £93.4m for coming last – which are largely recycled to foreign players and their agents. Only the very lucky ones find their paths eased by a fortuitous injury crisis, like Marcus Rashford, or a particularly sympathetic manager, like the current crops of young English players at Spurs and Everton.
The Premier League and the FA are unlikely to pause for the sort of meaningful reflection that might involve reading not just No Hunger in Paradise but The Spirit Level, the book in which the academics Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett demonstrated that the more unequal a society is, the unhappier it will ultimately become. But they should, because Calvin makes it clear that the present system is inhumane, and that – even should Roberts and Solanke fulfil their dreams – it needs to change.
