One football agent had a particularly good reason to watch last night's FA Youth Cup semi-final between Arsenal and Manchester City. He had a vested interest in nine of the players on show, who are all on his books. Considering these two clubs possess the best academy sides this year, and he had a very healthy pick of them, he found it difficult to disguise his enthusiasm for the riches that lie in store.
So, what was the first thing on his mind at the end of the game? How well his Arsenal boys had done to reach the final? Wrong. How to console his vanquished City boys? Wrong. He was preoccupied with the new 50% tax hike for Britain's highest earners.
Every top player, he reckons, now wants to be paid net, so there are a chunk of contracts that suddenly need renegotiating. The thought made him look positively jubilant. The question of who is going to foot the bill to effectively compensate Premier League players for an increased tax rate is a huge worry for clubs, and for the fans whose ticket prices can ill afford to be bumped up. "Not my problem," the agent replied cheerfully.
At which point the urge to excuse myself to find the nearest brick wall against which to bang my head took over. Such conversation seemed startlingly out of place at the end of a game involving a bunch of kids whose careers are at such an embryonic stage. But that is one of the realities of youth football today. Agents and scouts are ubiquitous. It isn't long before a scamp with skill is being buttered up and told about all the delights that will come his way if he would care to scribble on a dotted line.
The most promising players already exist in a miniature version of the celebrity life of fully fledged Premier League footballers. They are "looked after" by their agents. They are adored by groups of squealing girls. At the end of the semi-final they dutifully signed autographs and looked cool. It must be hard for them to maintain the supreme determination and dedication necessary to develop into a top class performer when there is a certain sense of having achieved already.
Fortunately, the FA Youth Cup still manages to beguile burgeoning footballers up and down the country. It is a real prize - not about money or contracts or fame. And they want it badly. Arsenal beat last season's winners with an early blitz that saw them take a four-goal lead, before City recovered to fight like hell to at least try to win the second half.
It may come as a surprise for many people to learn just how English Arsenal's youth team is now, with nine out of the starting XI hailing from these shores (mostly Londoners), and the other two imported from France. In fact Manchester City's set-up was far more cosmopolitan.
It would be daft at this stage to make comparisons with the Fergie fledglings of the 1990s, but what this Arsenal crop does have - unusually - is a handful of players with a genuine chance of making it who have grown up alongside each other. As their coach Steve Bould points out, "If you look around this team a lot of them have been playing together for Arsenal since they were nine years old. They have grown into a great unit."
The captain Jay Emmanuel-Thomas is one of them. Now aged 18, the tall, powerful midfielder with a silky touch underlines how helpful it is to team spirit that they all know each other so well. "We hang around a lot together and you can see that we all get on when we're on the pitch together," he says.
Arsenal have moved on from the days when they were the leaders in having a multi-national youth system. Why? Because the domestic talent is coming through, and being properly nurtured, so the need to import more capable players is less pressing.
Arsène Wenger has always been of the opinion that passports matter less than ability. Over the years the critics have struggled to buy into that, and wondered whether the Frenchman had an anti-English agenda. It has certainly taken time for Wenger to trust in English potential after making disastrous buys in the likes of Francis Jeffers and Richard Wright. But Theo Walcott and Kieran Gibbs are becoming increasingly important players, and he could not have more encouraging material to work with than the batch looking to win the FA Youth Cup in next month's final, which is likely to be against Liverpool.
