The English Football Thread

[Jase 43,479]

LOL

[NikkiCFC 7,582]

 

Cuadrado on Juventus players’ pay cut: “Hopefully we serve as an example for the others.”

Speaking on air to Sky Sport Italia, Juventus wide man Juan Cuadrado discussed the recent agreement between his club and the first-team squad over a pay cut worth four months’ salary.

“The captain, Chiellini, spoke with the club and then explained everything to us on the WhatsApp group we have with the others. We had a discussion on what was going on and we found that it was fair. In a delicate moment like it is right now it’s normal that everyone should contribute. Hopefully we serve as an example to the others.”

 

So it looks like only PL players are so greedy. They all can FUCK OFF! Embarrassing!

[NikkiCFC 7,582]

 

[NikkiCFC 7,582]

56 days for just 9 rounds? 

[Vesper 27,310]

Revealed and explained: the ‘terrible’ state of Premier League clubs’ finances

https://theathletic.com/1729003/2020/04/08/premier-league-finances-accounts/

Famed investor Warren Buffett once said it was “only when the tide goes out that you learn who has been swimming naked” and the gravity of the coronavirus pandemic has dragged football’s tide way out beyond the pier, forcing lots of embarrassed bathers to scurry back to their beach huts.

Since the Premier League was suspended, the news cycle has been dominated by talk of bail-outs, pay-cuts and potential lawsuits, as the professional game has struggled with the greatest financial threat it has faced in peacetime.

Football is far from alone in this regard: construction, retail, travel… any sector that depends on people being able to go out, congregate and spend freely is in a fight for survival.

Getting through this will depend on a combination of luck, nimble management and what state you were in when it started. To paraphrase former British prime minister David Cameron’s favourite criticism of his predecessor, did you fix the roof while the sun was shining?

The Athletic has analysed all the Premier League club accounts filed at Companies House over the last few months and the answer for the majority of them would appear to be there has been very little DIY done ahead of this storm.

“The accounts are awful,” says John Purcell, the co-founder of financial analysis firm Vysyble. “The numbers had fallen off a cliff for some of the clubs long before this crisis.”

While Dr Dan Plumley, a sports finance expert at Sheffield Hallam University, says the financial shock of COVID-19 has “brought to light just how stretched the industry is and how many clubs live from hand to mouth”. 

Crystal Palace and Newcastle United have taken advantage of an emergency measure that gives businesses three extra months to publish their year-end figures, so we do not yet know for sure what impact the 2018-19 season had on their books.

But we do know what happened at the other 18 clubs and it is the stuff of accountants’ nightmares.

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If we use the 2017-18 figures for Palace and Newcastle, the league’s total income last season was £4.8 billion, with most clubs reporting rises, albeit mainly small ones, in all three revenue streams: broadcast, commercial and matchday. Unfortunately, as that other great business sage and former Tottenham owner Alan Sugar memorably pointed out, this money goes through clubs like prune juice.

Of the 18 teams for which we have up-to-date numbers, only Watford reduced their wage bill year-on-year. If we include the old figures for Palace and Newcastle, which are almost certainly lower than last season’s, the league’s overall staff costs topped £3 billion. This means they spent 64 per cent of their income on wages.

But that is the average. Bournemouth, Everton and Leicester all spent more than 80 per cent of their turnover on staff. In fact, exactly half the league spent more than 70 per cent of their income on wages, a level that automatically raises red flags for European football’s governing body UEFA.

According to Deloitte’s Annual Review of Football Finance last May, the wage/turnover ratio was rising across Europe’s “big five” leagues — England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain — with the Premier League’s figure rising from 55 per cent in 2016-17 to 59 per cent 12 months later.

The wage/turnover figures for three promoted teams, Aston Villa, Norwich City and Sheffield United, are even worse at 175 per cent, 161 per cent and 195 per cent, respectively, but that is par for the course in the Championship, which is a disaster zone for those who like balanced books and tidy profits. Just to underline what those figures mean, Sheffield United spend £1.95p on wages for every £1 that came in.

Travel costs, utility bills, repairs, insurance, paper clips…they all add up and pretty soon they started nibbling into the overdraft. The cumulative pre-tax loss for the 18 clubs to have filed their accounts is nearly £300 million.

“Lots of the clubs are in a terrible state,” says Purcell. “I’m not picking on them but I was not surprised to see reports this week that West Ham are looking for extra financing of £30 million. It’s so predictable.”

The use of averages and totals also irons out perhaps the most obvious point to make about the state of the industry before the pandemic struck: the Premier League is not a collection of equals.

The six richest clubs account for nearly £3 billion, or 61 per cent, of that total turnover. Arsenal, who have slid in recent seasons to sixth in the big-six mini-league, earned £367.5 million in 2017-18 — £176.8 million more than West Ham’s best-of-the-rest total of £190.7 million. That deficit is about the same as Bournemouth and Aston Villa brought in between them, as you can see below.

Manchester United, the league’s biggest earner, turns over more than three times as much as West Ham and exactly four times as much as Crystal Palace and Southampton. Manchester City and Liverpool, second and third in the money list and as competitive off the pitch as they were on the pitch that season, earn four times the amount Bournemouth bring in.

The only way the clubs further down the economic ladder can even hope to compete with the big-earners on the pitch is to spend a higher percentage of their income on salaries and ask their owners to keep topping up the shortfalls. These clubs also tend to be more reliant on the league’s main source of income: broadcast rights.

If there was one economic marker that tells the story of English football’s rise from the ignominy and tragedy of the Bradford City fire and Heysel Stadium disaster in 1985 and Hillsborough in 1989, it would be the incredible amounts companies around the world have been willing to pay to televise it.

When the Premier League split from the English Football League in 1992, the top flight’s domestic rights were worth less than £40 million a season. Nobody even noticed what the international rights were worth.

This season, the clubs will share about £2.5 billion in broadcasting rights between them, with the rest going in parachute and solidarity payments to the EFL, assorted good causes and central costs. These rights deals have been negotiated centrally, usually on a three-year basis, and distributed more evenly than any other big league in Europe. The best clubs still get more than the worst but the margin is tighter than in France, Germany, Italy or Spain, creating the idea the Premier League is more competitive.

The key landmarks are the back-to-back increases of 70 per cent the Premier League managed to persuade domestic rivals BT and Sky Sports to cough up in 2012 and 2015. The two broadcasters declared a truce before the 2018 rights auction, resulting in a slightly reduced return for the league, but nobody really minded as the appetite for English football abroad means the international rights are now nearly as valuable as the domestic ones. With a 30 per cent increase from overseas deals, the overall 2019-22 broadcast pot is eight per cent up on 2016-19.

Before the current crisis, Deloitte estimated that Premier League clubs would earn £5.25 billion this season, £2 billion clear of the totals in the Bundesliga and La Liga. But English clubs spend twice as much on wages as German clubs do and 50 per cent more than Spanish sides.

Kieran Maguire teaches the Football Industries MBA at the University of Liverpool and is the man behind the popular “Price of Football” blog and podcast. He sees an industry that did not believe the cheques would ever stop arriving.

“Broadcast income accounts for about 60 per cent of Premier League clubs’ turnover but if you are that reliant on a single income source and don’t have contingency plans, you will always be at risk,” he explains.

“Football is a part of the entertainment industry and like all other businesses in this sector it will be hit hard by a lockdown. The difference is football has higher fixed costs than most and these are the wages and transfer installments.

“As of last June, the clubs owed £1.6 billion in installments and had £700 million coming in. Some of this money is circulating within the division and some will be flowing downwards to the EFL, but there is a £900 million deficit. The concern is that financial problems in one league could spread throughout the industry just like the pandemic.”

The fees clubs pay for players are actually spread across the length of those players’ contracts in their annual accounts, a process known as amortisation. Maguire points out that if you take amortisation and staff costs together, they amount to 86 per cent of Premier League turnover.

“That does not leave much over for anything else and the number will be much worse for the Championship, where this crisis will cause havoc,” he adds.

A good example of how these fixed costs can cause an explosion of red ink at even the richest of clubs can be seen in Chelsea’s accounts for 2018-19. A high wage bill, a net transfer spend and a season outside the Champions League left them with a £101.8 million pre-tax loss. They at least can point to the Europa League trophy in their cabinet and return of Champions League cash to their accounts this season. Everton, on the other hand, only have an eighth-place finish in the league to show for their record £107 million loss, as you can see below.

And for proof of Maguire’s point about the reliance on broadcast money, you need look no further than the response of every major league and governing body to the suspension of play: every possible avenue must be explored for completing season and honouring the various contracts associated with this season.

The Premier League has already spelled this out to its clubs, saying their broadcast partners could ask for £762 million back if the remaining games they have paid to broadcast are not played. And if that sounded too theoretical when that message was delivered two weeks ago, streaming service DAZN, which has the live rights in Brazil, Canada, Japan and Spain, has since confirmed it will not be sending any more money until the action resumes. BeIN Sports and Canal+ have made similar moves in France.

The good news for the Premier League, however, is the final year of a three-year broadcast cycle usually results in losses, and most clubs return to profit when the cycle starts again.

“We’ve been tracking the data since 2009 and you can see these three-year cycles in the accounts are tied to the new TV deals,” says Purcell. “So, in 2014 and 2017, there are these walls of money that arrive in year one but by year three, most of them are losing lots of money again.”

The bad news is that there has been a deterioration over time.

“This set of accounts is a real shocker,” explains Purcell. “The tail-off over the previous two cycles wasn’t as bad as this time.”

Unlike most other analysts, Purcell’s firm uses a measure called economic profit, which is all the usual things analysts measure plus the cost of equity or, in other words, the cost of investing in this particular business as opposed to any other.

“We think it is a better reflection of how much money the owners are putting into these clubs every year to keep them afloat,” he says. “If we look at the previous three-year cycle, from 2013-14 to 2015-16, there was a league-wide deficit of £380 million. But with 18 of the 20 accounts now in, the deficit from 2016-17 to 2018-19 is £624 million. We’ve never seen anything like that before.

“Of the 18, only five have posted an economic profit. Since 2009, we believe the Premier League has made an economic loss of £2.74 billion.”

Sheffield Hallam’s Plumley also ties the league’s cost-control issues to the revolving door of bumper broadcast deals and the players’ demands for their fair share of that booty.

“Costs have been the issue for football for more than 20 years: you can trace it right back to the start of the Premier League era,” he says. “Whenever a new broadcast deal has been announced, most of the clubs have immediately pushed the envelope in terms of what they can afford.”

Ramon Vega enjoyed a 13-year career as a professional footballer in his native Switzerland, Italy, England, Scotland and France, playing for sides such as Celtic, Spurs and Watford, before retiring in 2003 and becoming an asset manager and sports business consultant.

“Ten years ago many of the Premier League clubs were bankrupt from a balance sheet point of view but then they got those two big TV deals in a row and it lifted them all out of the red,” says Vega.

“Those huge increases really saved them. OK, nearly all of that money has gone to the players but, as an ex-player myself, I don’t blame them at all. If you’re offered it, you take it. You’d do it, too, that’s human nature. But as a businessman, I’d worry about the wage to turnover ratio. Were the clubs prepared for this crisis? No. Was any other industry? No.

“The strange thing is most of these guys are very good businessmen away from football but very few of them run their clubs like their other businesses. I think Mike Ashley at Newcastle is the exception but even he does haven’t lots of money in reserve.”

Purcell agrees. “Who signs these contracts on behalf of the clubs? It’s not the players or their agents. It’s the owners,” he says.

“You’ll never find a bricklayer who refuses a wage because it’s morally reprehensible. This isn’t the players’ fault. Good luck to them. This about the ambitions and agendas of the owners.

“Of course, nobody predicted this particular crisis but good businesses can and do predict a crisis. Football should have been able to model some kind of shock to the system that would have an impact on broadcast income because they’re all on such a fine tightrope. Any shock would see some of them tip off that tightrope.”

Dr Dan Parnell is a senior lecturer in sports business at the University of Liverpool’s Management School and the chief executive of the Association of Sporting Directors. For him, football’s cost-control problems could be sorted out at a stroke if the big calls were left to the experts.

“There are lots of good, well-intentioned people in the game who desperately want to make good decisions for their clubs but all too often those people are either not making the final decisions or those intentions go out of the window when the owners get involved,” Parnell explains.

“You can see it in the Sunderland ‘Til I Die documentary (on Netflix), where you have the manager and head of recruitment saying, ‘don’t pay any more than this for that player’ but then go ahead and do it anyway. It’s like they’re playing with a new toy.

“This is where a really good sporting director can help. Look at Stuart Webber at Norwich. OK, it looks like they’re going down but nobody can say they are not in better shape as a club than when he started.

“He’s overseen the new training ground, he’s changed the way they recruit and develop players and he’s got them on a secure footing financially. Any player he will have signed this season will have been signed with the thought that they might go down and his contract will have to work in the Championship. It’s a more honest and sensible approach than lots of other clubs.”

Maguire, Parnell, Plumley and Purcell all told The Athletic they hope the Premier League will learn something from the current crisis, either bringing in a salary cap, increasing the amount it shares with the EFL or simply persuading the owners to let their staff get on with it.

But Vega is not so sure this will be the “enormous wake-up call” the industry needs. “I don’t think football people ever learn,” he says. “The game is so geared up around today. Nobody thinks about tomorrow.

“That’s why they’re panicking now. You can see that they’re not thinking straight with these decisions to furlough non-playing staff. How much money is that really saving them? But with no Champions League income, no matchday, maybe they have to repay some of the broadcast money…they’re thinking, ‘shit, what do I do?'”

Not everyone is quite so sure football has arrived at this point in such terrible shape. Not compared to any business sector, anyway.

Dr Stefan Szymanski teaches sports management at the University of Michigan and is the author of the best-seller Soccernomics.

In an exchange with The Athletic this week, he said: “The problem is that all this analysis is in a vacuum. If you’re going to say that everything that ever goes wrong is due to incompetence without considering any other benchmarks or comparators, then there’s no defence.

“The Premier League is not perfect. But why are they held to a standard of perfection? Who else are we holding to that standard? Is there any business not in a state of panic right now? What other sport is faring better in this crisis than the Premier League?

“This is one of the most successful organisations in the world, measured by year-on-year growth over 30 years. They deliver an outstanding product for consumers. Who cares if they can’t control their costs?”

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Szymanski is right. The Premier League has been giving people around the world what they want for nearly 30 years. But now, for reasons beyond its control, it cannot. And because it has perhaps been a little too generous with its players (and their representatives), it is not in as robust a position as a business of its stature should be.

You do not need to be an accountant to know that Bournemouth, who get 88 per cent of their revenue from broadcasters and spend almost all of that on wages, are in a tough spot. Even frugal Burnley, with their balanced books, lean very heavily on the league’s biggest backers. Getting football back on fans’ screens is of paramount importance to them.

But nobody is immune. Manchester City, perhaps, with the almost limitless wealth of Abu Dhabi behind them, will emerge relatively unscathed and Manchester United’s many mattress and noodles partners do not look so stupid now everyone is looking for other sources of income. But they, and the other big clubs, need the exposure the Premier League and Champions League give them to make their numbers add up.

[Vesper 27,310]

Crisis highlights lack of unity, solidarity and trust in English football bubble

https://theathletic.com/1727007/2020/04/07/crisis-premier-league-coronavirus-pfa/

By Oliver Kay 

On Monday afternoon, as players from Germany’s Bundesliga were keeping a safe distance from each other on their return to light training, a leading virologist spelt out the difficulty in forecasting a resumption of normal service.

“The problem is solvable, virologically speaking,” Professor Alexander Kekule told German broadcaster ZDF when asked about the possibility of the clubs returning to competitive action over the weeks ahead. “But only if one achieves a sort of special bubble for the players.”

A bubble, you say, Professor? English football exists in one of those. Or rather a whole load of them. It excels at splendid isolation. Some say Premier League players live in a bubble but surely they are just a product of their environment. Many clubs are isolated from their fanbases, from each other and, as such, from any concept of a common good.

Since March 13, when the coronavirus epidemic caused the football season to be suspended until further notice, English football has been looking for ways to try to combat the looming threat of financial crisis. Matches behind closed doors and a loss of match-day revenue? The cost of a curtailed Premier League season has been estimated at £762 million in broadcast revenue alone if television rights contacts cannot be fulfilled. Little wonder that, with the turnstiles closed and cashflow at a near-standstill, Premier League clubs are proposing an initial 10 per cent pay cut for a players, along with a 20 per cent deferral in case broadcast revenue is lost.

Within six days of the Bundesliga’s suspension last month, Borussia Monchengladbach announced that their players, coaches and directors had agreed a wage reduction for as long as the season is suspended. “The goal is for Borussia Monchengladbach to survive this crisis without having to give notice of termination to anyone,” Stephan Schippers, their managing director, said. “In order to achieve this, we will all have to work hard together.”

Union Berlin, Werder Bremen and Schalke were quick to announce similar initiatives. Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund, whose revenue streams are much greater, said their players had accepted a temporary 20 per cent wage cut. Bayer Leverkusen outlined their plan upon their return to light — and socially-distanced — training on Monday. Bayern, Dortmund, Leverkusen and RB Leipzig, this season’s four Champions League entrants, have pledged a total of €20 million (£17.7 million) towards a solidarity fund to help ease the financial crisis faced by poorer clubs.

For a moment on Friday afternoon, it sounded as if English football had developed that same sense of solidarity in a time of crisis. A Premier League statement declared that 20 clubs had “unanimously agreed to consult their players regarding a combination of conditional reductions and deferrals amounting to 30 per cent of total annual remuneration”. But they had jumped the gun. A conference call held by the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) the next day, involving player representatives from all top-flight teams, only widened the disagreement between the players and their clubs.

None of it is helped by politicians pointing the finger at footballers; how predictable that Matt Hancock, the health secretary, would seize the invitation to urge those rich young men, most of them from working-class backgrounds, to “take a pay cut and play their part” rather than extend that principle to high earners across the board, or indeed to the various billionaires, a few football club owners and major political donors among them, whose wealth is invested offshore.

As has been highlighted many times over the past weeks, there is no shortage of players playing their part. To list but three examples among many, Wilfried Zaha has made his various rental properties across London available to NHS staff, Marcus Rashford has helped the charity FareShare to raise huge sums to distribute food for children who usually rely on school meals and Toby Alderweireld has donated a large number of tablet devices to hospitals and nurse homes.

Jordan Henderson has led talks among senior Premier League players about setting up a charitable fund with a view to making a multi-million-pound donation to the NHS – separate from the clubs’ plan to donate £20 million, which was announced on Friday.

These are just a handful of the stories we know about. So many other players have long-term relationships with charities or with their own foundations: some well-publicised, others low-key. Some of the attempts to paint footballers as an angelic breed can be rather cloying – there are certainly some who know the price of everything and the value of nothing – but footballers, as a collective, do not need to be shamed into playing their part. Football club owners? With some of them, that might be a different conversation.

For the clubs and players to be locked in an unedifying dispute over salary reductions and deferrals, though, is not a good look at a time like this. The players are perfectly entitled to question their clubs about the financial imperative and, in particular, to seek guarantees about the job security of non-playing staff, but it is now 26 days since the football season was suspended and this process is still at an early stage. A collective agreement now looks further away than it did before Friday’s Premier League meeting.

The PFA statement on Saturday made a number of important points, not least when it came to pointing out that the Premier League clubs had merely agreed to an advance of future broadcast revenue to clubs below the top flight, rather than an additional sum. “Football needs to find a way to increase funding to the EFL and non-league clubs in the long term,” the PFA said. (Too bloody right, it does.)

What this whole situation has underlined, though, is the vast number of competing interests in English football — so many different ownership models, many of them sharing nothing other than a ravenous hunger for that next tranche of broadcast revenue. Unlike in Germany, there is little or no tradition of collectivism in modern English football. Indeed, with a few notable exceptions, there is little sense of the whole-club ethos — directors, staff, players and fans as one — that genuinely means something at many Bundesliga clubs. It would be nice to think that the English game might finally come together in a time like this but, listening to the briefings that have followed various meetings, it feels as if there is even less common ground than might have been imagined previously.

Where collective action was called for, among Germany’s four Champions League clubs, consensus was swiftly reached. But when it came to the salary issue, clubs were quick to reach their own individual agreements with their players and staff. There is not the instinctive distrust that exists throughout English football — between clubs, within clubs, between leagues, within leagues. It was recognised as a complex issue rather than one that called for a one-size-fits-all approach but still there was a sense of accord rather than division.

There is an increasing divergence in ownership models in Germany, along with calls to move on from the “50+1” clause that has often been held up as a panacea but there remains, at most clubs, a sense of unity from boardroom to dressing room to the terraces.

That sense of unity and trust barely seems to exist in English football these days. When Mike Ashley and Daniel Levy decided that Newcastle United and Tottenham Hotspur would take advantage of the government’s coronavirus job retention scheme, placing non-playing staff on furlough, it was only natural for fans (and players) to react with suspicion or, in many cases, vehement disapproval. Whether those clubs end up doing as Liverpool have done, reversing their decision after being unsettled by an initial backlash, is another question entirely. Ashley, in particular, is not so easily shamed.

For all the negative perceptions that surround footballers, most of us, I suspect, would trust the typical Premier League footballer far more than we would the typical Premier League owner when it came to setting the right example and doing the right thing. But this crisis has put players in a difficult position. The clubs’ attempts to force a collective agreement on wage cuts and deferrals, via Friday’s public statement, put pressure on the players to establish and then clarify their position with a statement of their own.

Some clubs are understood to have approached their players directly, attempting to bypass the PFA. Gordon Taylor, rubbing his hands as he prepares for one final battle as the union’s chief executive, says there will be no such unilateral agreements. “Of course some clubs would prefer that,” he told The Times. “Why do you think we have a union?”

Taylor made a number of reasonable points — “Players are saying, ‘We want to help non-playing staff, youngsters and community schemes’ but it’s the players and the PFA who are being painted as the villains” — but there is, without question, something disconcerting about the idea of a dispute rumbling on and on at a time like this.

One hesitates to give too much credence to politicians when it comes to football matters but Oliver Dowden, the culture secretary, was right when he wrote in the Daily Telegraph yesterday that “clubs, players and owners should be thinking very carefully about their next step. It’s important that a disagreement over wages doesn’t undermine all the good work that sport — including football— is doing to help the government’s efforts to tackle coronavirus”

It is. The players’ commitment to launching that new charitable fund, initially focusing on donations to the NHS, should serve as a reminder of that good work. But football, as an industry, needs to be seen to be making the right decisions — and, beyond that, for the right reasons.

Far bigger, far more profitable companies have already taken advantage of the government’s furlough scheme — and for many clubs outside of the Premier League’s elite, it is understandably being seized like a lifeline — but then again, not many sectors are as intent on trying to cultivate a cuddly, fan-friendly image as the football industry. It really isn’t a good look for Tottenham, for example, when their financial accounts revealed just a few days ago that Levy was paid a £3 million bonus last year on top of his £4 million salary and when their wage bill, relative to turnover, is the lowest in the Premier League.

There has been an abundance of strong, powerful, meaningful gestures from individual players, managers and clubs over the past three and a half weeks but there is also a danger that, as Dowden suggested, the good work would be undermined, or rather overshadowed, by an ongoing wrangle over pay. The public are watching. And judging — particularly after Hancock’s intervention last week.

It is, as the FA chairman Greg Clarke put it on Tuesday, time for English football’s stakeholders to rally together towards a common cause — or indeed several common causes, which include saving jobs, providing security for those lower-league clubs whose existence is under threat and, yes, contributing to good causes. But it is hardly surprising if, after all these years of self-interest, there is suspicion towards Premier League owners and chairmen suddenly preaching about collectivism, or indeed towards players who find themselves leaning on the experience and negotiating powers of Taylor, whose regime at the PFA seemed to have run its course after almost 40 years.

Taylor has emphasised the importance of taking the time to “get it right” but why was it so much easier for so many German players, even with a less-influential union, to arrive at agreements with their clubs? It comes down to questions of unity, solidarity and trust: virtues that the English football industry has not exactly been famous for over the past couple of decades.

English football has spent too long in its own bubble, rarely stopping to think what might happen if that bubble bursts. Nobody could have foreseen a crisis of this nature but a greater culture of togetherness — from the top to the bottom of every club, from the top to the bottom of every division, from the top to the bottom of the whole English pyramid — would have seen this nightmare scenario confronted in a very different spirit.

If there is one thing English football can learn from this situation, it is that it can draw strength from unity, even at a time of crisis. It has been suggested that the challenges of lockdown will bring some families together and tear others apart. English football’s vast, dysfunctional family, so rarely given to introspection, would do well to bear that in mind.

[Vesper 27,310]

Why Mourinho was in the park with Ndombele

https://theathletic.com/1731917/2020/04/08/mourinho-ndombele-park-coronavirus-sessegnon-sanchez/

Have you heard? Jose Mourinho has been training with Tanguy Ndombele in the park. At first, Tuesday’s news sounded like a joke concocted on social media, the sort of thing that is made up to inspire a series of memes.

But no, it was actually happening — and there was a photo, taken by an Arsenal fan of course, to prove it. And soon the plot thickened, with a clip showing Tottenham team-mates Ryan Sessegnon and Davinson Sanchez running along the side of a road not observing the UK government’s social distancing measures. (Official advice is that all individuals should keep at least two metres apart at all times and outdoor exercise can only be undertaken with one other person from your own household. Sessegnon and Sanchez do not live together).

Keen to get in on the act, Serge Aurier shared a video of himself on Instagram running closer to a friend than the allotted two metres.

So what exactly happened, and how did this all come about?

Let’s start with the first event — Mourinho and Ndombele’s one-on-one session. The pair currently live nearby to one another (Mourinho is temporarily housed with his core staff in accommodation close to the club’s training ground) and so he suggested meeting in Hadley Common in Barnet, north London.

The session lasted around an hour and consisted of routine stretching, sprinting, and jogging. Given the uncertainty around when the season will resume and with therefore no specific timeframe to work towards, the priority for players is to maintain core fitness levels.

There was nothing especially advanced in the session, hence Mourinho taking it himself rather than one of his dedicated fitness coaches. According to one source, because of the absence of a definitive return date, the session was “not about working obsessively over fitness. It was more a psychological strategy to make Ndombele feel important and part of the team.”

All the players have a dedicated fitness programme, with slight deviations depending on the individual. Mourinho thought it would be helpful to the player to have some face time rather than another video session and since they would keep the requisite distance from one another throughout, misguidedly didn’t see it as being a major issue.

Turning around the fortunes of Ndombele has been a big priority for Mourinho, even if some questioned whether his public shaming of the player after last month’s draw with Burnley was the best way of doing it. On this occasion, one could appreciate the desire to work individually with Ndombele but seriously condemn the inappropriateness of it, especially as face-to-face work is only being permitted if it is deemed essential.

Ndombele lives in an apartment block, so it is natural he should want to exercise outside but across the country, players and coaches have been interacting on video link rather than in person. Later on in their session, Mourinho and Ndombele were joined by two members of the public, who are understood to have abided by the two-metre rule but the group then acted in breach of only exercising with members of one’s own household.

At around the same time, Sessegnon and Sanchez were also involved in some outdoor exercise. They live in the same apartment block as Ndombele and so did some of their training on Hadley Common as well. The pair were not involved in Mourinho’s session with Ndombele but they did briefly meet with the head coach to receive instructions on their training, which mainly involved running exercises as part of their daily programmes.

At that point, they were all said to be more than two metres apart but a video later showed Sessegnon and Sanchez running much closer than that along a road side. Aurier, meanwhile, was training elsewhere and did not meet with Mourinho.

Once footage started to circulate and the various incidents were brought to the attention of the club, Mourinho and the players were reprimanded by senior officials. Spurs released a statement from a spokesperson that said: “All of our players have been reminded to respect social distancing when exercising outdoors.

“We shall continue to reinforce this message.”

Mourinho accepted the telling off, and on Wednesday said: “I accept that my actions were not in line with government protocol and we must only have contact with members of our own household. It is vital we all play our part and follow government advice in order to support our heroes in the NHS and save lives.”

Earlier this month, the Tottenham manager appeared alongside other athletes and celebrities in a video to say thanks to the NHS for their work to combat the coronavirus pandemic and last month, he and his coaching staff hit the streets of Enfield to help Age UK and other charities pack and deliver goods to help the elderly.

Back to Tuesday — and the incident gives an interesting insight into his way of thinking. From Mourinho’s perspective, seeing the players was a way of keeping them motivated and engaged.

For Ndombele in particular, it was a chance to show that he is valued at the club and there is a commitment to making his time in England a success. The convenience of doing so and being able to briefly meet with Sessegnon and Sanchez made the whole thing seem erroneously like a good idea.

Mourinho misses regular contact with his players and he has repeated often since he joined Spurs in November that he sees the training pitch as the place where he does his best work. In normal circumstances, he is tactile with the players and relishes the regular contact — he still messages them often but clearly, that is not the same.

None of which of course is to in any way justify Tuesday’s actions — it is just to add context to what on the face of it appeared like a completely inexplicable decision.

Many will still view it that way but some have pointed to the recent misdemeanours of Jack Grealish and Kyle Walker to argue that Mourinho and the players made a mistake, but not an especially heinous one.

They were still in breach of government guidelines though, and speaking of context, given the nightmare week Spurs have had PR-wise following the furloughing of staff, it would surely have been prudent not to engage in any activity that could generate negative headlines. Mourinho wearing his Tottenham tracksuit was also ill-advised as it gave off the impression that this was a club-approved activity.

As for the coming weeks, Mourinho will be more circumspect, though who knows how the situation will change in the medium or even short term.

In the meantime, he’ll have to rely on awkward, stilted Zoom interactions like the rest of us.

 

[NikkiCFC 7,582]

If season continues it is not good for us because Pogba, Rashford, Son, Kane will be back and that was our huge advantage. I know we also had a lot of injuries but still we look better without Kante and we have a lot of players on similar level. These 4 are 50% of their clubs.

[Tomo 21,681]

3 hours ago, NikkiCFC said:

If season continues it is not good for us because Pogba, Rashford, Son, Kane will be back and that was our huge advantage. I know we also had a lot of injuries but still we look better without Kante and we have a lot of players on similar level. These 4 are 50% of their clubs.

We faced 3 of those 4 upto January and we never got below either despite spending December in relegation form.

United look on the up and a challenge regardless but Spurs are broken, Kane and Son or no.

[Jase 43,479]

 

[Vesper 27,310]

Friday April 10 2020 Football Nerd

Will teams blooding youngsters have a post-coronavirus advantage? By Daniel Zeqiri Arsenal are one of the clubs giving minutes to young players CREDIT: GETTY IMAGES Through football's coronavirus hiatus, we are committed to providing a weekly newsletter of facts, analysis and retrospectives. If there is a topic you want us to cover please email [email protected]. Above all, stay safe.     The coronavirus crisis risks draining all liquidity from football's transfer market, meaning those teams with their eye on an expansive rebuild might need to come up with contingencies. If the market is stagnant whenever the next window opens, promoting academy products to fill squad roles could be a necessity and the teams who have already started this process may have an advantage. Manchester United, Chelsea and Arsenal impressed this season by giving minutes to players aged 21 or younger, behind only Norwich City whose collection of talent is likely to attract admirers.     While there are always high hopes for academy players establishing themselves in the first-team, those players can also be a valuable financial resource when the market picks up again. Chelsea have been trading a vast number of players for many years, enabling them to balance the books in an era of financial fair play and fund more high-profile purchases. Liverpool also sold young talent at a hefty premium, with the sales of Jordan Ibe and Dominic Solanke to Bournemouth putting £44 million in the coffers. Norwich run the tightest ship in the Premier League, with a wage bill of just £54 million, but the loss of matchday revenue during football's suspension — and likely relegation — could mean selling the likes of Ben Godfrey, Max Aarons, Jamal Lewis or Todd Cantwell. The presence of former players Frank Lampard, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and Mikel Arteta in managerial roles and the patience afford them by supporters is one factor in the proliferation of youngsters at their clubs. The dominance of Jurgen Klopp's Liverpool and Pep Guardiola's Manchester City also means there is little prospect of winning the title in the near future, so rearming for the future makes more sense. Reece James, Callum Hudson-Odoi, Billy Gilmour, Brandon Williams, Mason Greenwood, Matteo Guendouzi, Bukayo Saka and Gabriel Martinelli all have the potential to be fixtures at Chelsea, United and Arsenal for seasons to come. One intriguing aspect of the coronavirus shutdown is how an extended period without matches or collective training will affect youngsters. These are supposed to be the formative months and years of their career, when they learn the requirements of top-level football and absorb information like sponges. Just how much potential will be lost? Unlike when a young player is out injured though, rival players at their own club and elsewhere are also out of action so they are not losing ground on the competition.

[NikkiCFC 7,582]

'He blamed me for getting the sack... he said I was a white witch': Unai Emery claimed his EX-GIRLFRIEND was at fault when he lost the Arsenal job as he thought she was BAD LUCK

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-8211881/Unai-Emery-claimed-EX-GIRLFRIEND-fault-lost-Arsenal-job.html

LOOOOOL

[OneMoSalah 8,614]

3 hours ago, NikkiCFC said:

'He blamed me for getting the sack... he said I was a white witch': Unai Emery claimed his EX-GIRLFRIEND was at fault when he lost the Arsenal job as he thought she was BAD LUCK

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-8211881/Unai-Emery-claimed-EX-GIRLFRIEND-fault-lost-Arsenal-job.html

LOOOOOL

Lol someone desperate for media attention. Superb. Good to see that despite the corona virus there are still these attention seeking morons who will say anything for there 10 minutes in the spot light and even worse, get it from these newspapers. Honestly 35 years old, running off to the sun newspaper for a payout to say Unai Emery called her a white witch and blamed his sacking/poor run of results on her, holy fuck 😂

Is it really that easy to be a journalist/reporter/newspaper writer but? Just wait for a footballer or managers ex gf to come to you with a bullshit story, write it up and add in a few photos of them in a bikini, post it online, sorted. Or is there more to it? Swear thats about 75% of the news these days in the UK.

[Vesper 27,310]

‘13 years down the drain. Just like that’ — The Premier League’s forgotten kids

https://theathletic.com/1721538/2020/04/12/premier-league-manchester-united-city-academy-released/

(Main photo: the United U18 squad in July 2014. Back row (L-R): Scott McTominay, James Dunne, Cameron Borthwick-Jackson, Devonte Redmond, Charlie Scott. Middle row (L-R): Marcus Rashford, Ruairi Croskery, George Dorrington, Dean Henderson, Oliver Byrne, Jordan Thompson, Tyler Reid. Front row (L-R): Travis Johnson, Oliver Rathbone, Demitri Mitchell, Axel Tuanzebe, Joe Riley, Tosin Kehinde. Photo: John Peters/Manchester United via Getty Images)

 

Devonte Redmond will never forget the day he found out he was no longer a Manchester United player.

He was on holiday. It was the summer of 2018, Jose Mourinho’s final year at the club, and Redmond had headed to the beach on the Greek island of Kos.

“I looked at my phone,” he tells The Athletic. “All of a sudden I’d got loads of notifications on Twitter. ‘All the best’ — lots of messages like that. It was really strange. But then I saw the reason why all these messages were being sent. There was a list of all the lads that United had let go. It had been posted on Twitter and it was the official ‘retained and released’ list. And that was how I found out.”

How do you even begin to understand the shattering effects that had on a young footballer who had known virtually nothing but the United system?

Redmond was eight when he joined United’s junior ranks. He stayed with the club until the age of 21 and, though he has had nearly two years to come to terms with the rejection, there are still times when it is unmistakable sadness in his voice. Even now, with a sense of order returning to his life, it is a difficult subject. All those dreams, all those aspirations. “Thirteen years,” he says at one point, “all down the drain, just like that.”

It certainly hasn’t been easy to adjust since that day in the Mediterranean sunshine when Redmond found out United had submitted their released list to the Premier League.

“I tried not to panic at first,” he says. “I rang my dad and it was the first he had heard about it, too. ‘It’s obviously not been done in the right way,’ he said. ‘Try to keep your head.’ He’s quite a calming person, so I listened to him. I don’t think it sunk in straight away. It was later, probably after a couple of weeks, that I started to panic.”

It helped that his father, Paul Edwards, was an ex-pro who knew and understood the sport. Edwards made nearly 350 career appearances, including spells at Wrexham, Blackpool, Oldham Athletic and Port Vale, and could pass on his knowledge from nearly 20 years in the game.

But it still did not prepare Redmond for what it was like, mentally, to cope with the rejection and the long months when life felt empty and directionless.

Redmond was in the same youth team as Marcus Rashford and regarded as one of the more talented players from a crop that included Scott McTominay, Timothy Fosu-Mensah and Axel Tuanzebe. Only one, however, had found out via Twitter that he was being cut free and Redmond was so wounded by the experience that, to begin with, it was an ordeal even to watch United games on TV.

The United team before a UEFA Youth League match against Wolfsburg in 2015. Back row L-R: Ro-Shaun Williams, Devonte Redmond, Matthew Willock, Marcus Rashford, George Dorrington, Ethan Hamilton, Timothy Fosu-Mensah. Front row L-R: Tyrell Warren, Callum Gribbin, Tosin Kehinde, Axel Tuanzebe (Photo: John Peters/Manchester United via Getty Images)

 

He can remember feeling lost without the daily routine of training, the camaraderie of the dressing room and the emotions of a match-day.

Then there was the sudden realisation that he had no real life experience other than being inside “the bubble” of a Premier League club.

“I’d come from a background where football was everything,” he says. “It was everything to me when I was growing up. I was always the most enthusiastic player. I loved it. And then I was no longer part of it.

“It would always hit me when United were on television. I found it hard to watch, especially because a few of the lads from my age group were starting to break through. There was a period at the start when I used to think that could have been me, or maybe that should have been me. I was hurt.”

On some days, even the people who were closest to him found it difficult to find the right words. “Every day I was trying to stay fit, doing runs and playing football with friends. Then I’d go home. Everyone always asked how training was, but you could feel they were a bit edgy around me. They didn’t really know what to say to make it any better.”

He, in turn, did not want to show his family how much it had affected him. So he told them he was OK and that he was sure everything would work out. He did not always know if that was true, but he said it anyway. But the longer it went, the harder it became. The weeks turned into months. Christmas came and went.

“I remember going out in my car one day,” he says. “I said to my mum I was going for a drive. ‘I don’t know where,’ I said. I just wanted to drive. I set off and, all of a sudden, I found myself crying.

“It was one of the first times I’d had an outpouring of emotion like that for years. I’d been bottling everything up for so long. I’d been trying to put a brave face on everything because I’d never been in a situation like that before. I’d always been looked upon as being one of the better players in my age group. So it was hard.

James Weir, Devonte Redmond and their United team-mates, including Dean Henderson, back row centre, celebrate with the Under-21 Premier League trophy before the Premier League home match against Bournemouth in 2016 (Photo: Alex Livesey/Getty Images)

 

“Then there comes a point when you haven’t had a team for a few months and you have to think, ‘Right, what do I do now? What’s my purpose in life now?’ And that’s when you start thinking negative things. ‘I’ve got no purpose now. Are my family still proud of me?’

“When it gets to Saturday, it hits you again. You say, ‘Good luck for the match’ to your friends. But then it hits you: ‘I’m not playing, I’m not doing anything.’ My mum would always tell me that something would happen. But the phone wasn’t ringing. There was nothing going on. I had thought the transition would be easy. My dad kept telling me, ‘Don’t think it will be easy.’ But in my head, I thought it would be easy. Then after a while I started to realise, ‘Wow, this is hard.’”

What he realises now is that it hit him harder than he ever let on.

Redmond spent his first post-United pre-season at third-tier Shrewsbury Town. He trained with Dijon of Ligue 1. He knows what it is like to go on trial and be seen as ‘The lad from United who didn’t make it.’ He came to realise how, in terms of perception, that wasn’t always a good thing.

He would also find out that the skills he developed on United’s training pitches did not necessarily suit lower-league football. “If you have come through the academies at United, Man City or Liverpool, you are trained a certain way. It isn’t about long balls, or being a battering-ram up front, or running the channels. I’m not saying you can’t adapt. But a lot of managers lower down don’t have time for academy players.”

This was around the time in autumn 2018 when McTominay was establishing himself in United’s midfield. Redmond had played alongside McTominay for years and was once considered the better prospect. Now, though, they were heading in completely opposite directions.

As McTominay became a Mourinho favourite, Redmond was straying dangerously close to becoming another of football’s statistics — chewed up and spat out, with nowhere left to go.

“I had to start thinking if there was anything else I could do,” he says. “I knew that if it got past January I might be struggling because if you go a year out of the game, how do you get back in?

“I’d done business studies at college. Maybe I could have been a personal trainer or something to do with sport. I didn’t really know what I was going to do.”

---

It is a hard industry sometimes.

When Manchester United sent their list including Redmond to the Premier League, showing the eight players who had been released from Old Trafford, it also included Charlie Scott, one of their young midfielders.

Scott had established himself as a regular in United’s under-23s and, according to his profile on the club’s website, was “commanding but composed in possession” with the “attributes to become a valuable asset”.

Redmond was the year above and thought his younger colleague had a long career ahead of him. Scott, he says, was a “really good player technically”. Yet there is a misconception sometimes that when a player is dropped by an elite club there will always be another one, not too far down, who will break their fall.

Scott is 22 now and has moved home to Staffordshire. He plays for Newcastle Town, who were fourth-bottom of the Northern Premier League’s south-east division when their season was aborted after the coronavirus pandemic forced football to hit the pause button. Otherwise, he has been working on building sites in and around Stoke-on-Trent.

“He does a bit of coaching, too, and we’re very happy to have him,” Ray Tatton, Newcastle’s club secretary, tells The Athletic. “We’re his local club. He lives so close he can walk to games.”

Michael Carrick was also on that United released list from June 2018, at the end of his 19-year playing career. The others, however, were aged 19 to 21 and they have all found it a long way down.

Theo Richardson is now at eighth-tier Cleethorpes Town. Ilias Moutha-Sebtaoui plays in Luxembourg. Max Johnstone is third-choice goalkeeper for St Johnstone. Joe Riley, who was given a first-team debut by Louis van Gaal, has had two difficult years at Bradford City. Jake Kenyon, once a promising left-back, drifted out of the game. Redmond might have gone the same way if he had not been put in touch with Paul Mitten and, together, formed an action plan to reignite his career.

Mitten is another one-time United starlet and if his surname rings a bell it is because his grandfather, Charlie, played for the club in their 1948 FA Cup final win and made over 150 other appearances. His father, Charlie Jr, was on United’s books too. Football follows in the family and Paul, now 44, is a fitness coach and mentor for modern-day players who have been left, in the parlance of the sport, on the scrapheap.

His first impression of Redmond was that he was “completely lost, his world has come to an end. No direction, no focus, expecting the phone to ring but it doesn’t. It’s a horrible, horrible, lonely place. I know because that was me 20-odd years ago.”

Mitten speaks from experience after finding out, the hard way, what Alex Ferguson meant about United being a bus that waits for nobody. Mitten was 18 when he was released from Old Trafford and, by his own admission, he was not prepared for the mental devastation.

“The gaffer called me into the office,” he says. “There were two queues. One was the queue where you got a contract, the other was for the lads who didn’t. It was five minutes with the boss. He just said, ‘We don’t think you’re good enough.’ There’s no answer to that, is there? So you accept it, you pick up your boots and off you go. And you don’t get another phone call. That was the last time I heard from the club.”

As harsh as it is, Mitten can understand why football clubs are programmed this way. “I don’t blame them,” he says. “Football is brutal — one out of the door, the next one in. But they are leaving a trail of destruction behind them: broken young men, dreams shattered, weaker characters turning to gambling, booze, drugs. Then that becomes some mess.”

In his case, Mitten was a striker, or a No 10, in the team a year behind the famed Class of ’92. But he suffered a grievous setback in the form of ruptured knee ligaments — and the standard at Old Trafford was frighteningly high.

“I’d cry myself to sleep,” he says. “I felt like I’d let my parents down after they had spent years of their lives taking me everywhere. I was embarrassed. I knew old school associates would be laughing at me, I was an outcast, I didn’t belong. I was a mess.”

Mitten eventually found a way back, signing an 18-month contract at Coventry City, but his knee gave way again, six games in. It was during the long hard slog of rehabilitation that the club signed Darren Huckerby and Noel Whelan, both of whom played the same position as him.

He was placed on a month-to-month contract and two incidents in particular linger in his mind.

“They put a list of all the pros on the wall,” he says. “It was pinned up on a piece of A4 paper, numbers one to 40. It went all the way down, player by player, to 27. Then it stopped. There was a gap. And then it was me, number 40. Take that, at 20 years old.”

Later that day, the players were asked to try on their club suits. “I went in and the message was, ‘Sorry, we’ve not got one for you.’ I was still a kid. I’d never grown up because — forget the real world — all I’ve done is go from football club to football club. Those two little things probably ruined me, mentally, more than anything else.

“You’re out of football. You get a black bag, get your boots. I went to my digs, picked up my little portable television. I drove up the M6, crying my eyes out. I turned up at home and my mum and dad didn’t know why I was there. ‘I’ve been released’ — and then I’m bawling, at 20 years of age, on their sofa.”

A fortnight later, Mitten signed up with an employment agency and landed his first job out of football. “It was cutting grass at the hospital. I had a lawnmower, going up and down, and there was someone bollocking me because I hadn’t done the hedges. That was two weeks after being a professional footballer at a Premiership club.”

How long does it take to get over that kind of ordeal?

“Honestly,” he says. “I don’t think I ever did.”

---

What is it like, as a teenager, to train alongside Sergio Aguero, Kevin De Bruyne and Raheem Sterling?

Sam Tattum joined Manchester City as a 10-year-old in the year before Abu Dhabi took ownership of the club. He signed as a first-year professional eight years later — the season that would eventually lead to Pep Guardiola replacing Manuel Pellegrini as manager — and harboured his own dreams of starring in the Premier League.

“People ask me sometimes if I wish I had started from the bottom and worked my way up,” he says. “But I can’t say yes because some people will never experience what I did, being on that training ground, training with those players, in the transition of City going from being a big local club to a massive club worldwide. I’m proud of what I achieved to get a professional contract at a club that size.”

Unfortunately for Tattum, he also knows what it is like to be told, after nearly a decade in the system, that City were letting him go.

“It hits you in the stomach,” he says.

The difference, perhaps, is that City handled a difficult situation with care. Tattum has always been grateful to Simon Davies, their then academy coach, and Mark Allen, who headed the department at the time, for cushioning the blow.

“When you hear it, you still think, ‘Oh shit. Fucking hell,’ but they were just being honest. They were straight-talking and I have a lot of respect for them,” Tattum, who had won caps for Wales’ under-17 and under-19 teams, says.

“People ask me sometimes, ‘Did it break you?’ But I had to be positive. I had to think, ‘OK, it’s time to press on and maybe it’s my time to shine somewhere else.’ I wanted to prove them wrong. I expected I would find a league club and I was thinking it would be a decent level.”

A trial was arranged at Leeds United but, short of match fitness, Tattum accepted an offer to play for non-League Stalybridge Celtic at Droylsden. A bad tackle came in. His leg was broken, the ankle dislocated. “Then I was in the back of an ambulance on my way to hospital and, in the space of three months, I’d gone from Manchester City, where they had the best facilities and the best care possible, to lying in a hospital bed, still in my kit, without a club. It’s then you realise you’re on your own.”

Tattum plays now for Brattvag, in the third tier of Norwegian football, but there have been other spells at FC United of Manchester, Marine and Altrincham. And for the best part of 18 months, trying to get back to fitness, his career in football was a whirl of uncertainty.

There were trials at Macclesfield and Gateshead when, by his own admission, he came up short. “I’d never played men’s football before,” he says. “I was coming back from 12 months on a sofa and trying to play men’s football for the first time. Physically, I was nowhere near.”

As Guardiola set about turning City into record-breaking Premier League champions, Tattum had to reassess his life. He started looking for other bits of work. He did some football coaching for kids of primary school age and, for a while, he thought about getting an office job. But it was a scary thought. “I knew as soon as I did that, nine to five, Monday to Friday, that would have been it for me and football. And I wasn’t ready to give football up.”

Instead, he teamed up with Mitten to build his fitness. Then he left his home in Salford and, at the age of 23, relocated to Scandinavia in the hope that he can still make a career in the sport that has shaped his life.

Mentally, he has had to be strong.

First, he spent 10 days at Ostersunds in Sweden. After that, it was Hodd in Norway. But now he is in Brattvag, a seaside village of 2,400 people in the Alesund municipality, 350 miles north-west of Oslo. Their league season was supposed to begin on Monday but it has been put back because of the coronavirus crisis.

And, though the air is fresh and the mountain views spectacular, it is not where Tattum saw himself when he was measuring up against Aguero, De Bruyne and the rest of City’s A-listers.

---

“It’s quite sad because there is no real support network,” Devonte Redmond says. “A lot of lads can go astray.”

Older, wiser, Redmond has learned a lot about himself, and the football industry as a whole, in the last two years.

Salford City, then of the National League, offered him the first route back, seven months after his release from Old Trafford. He started 11 league games last season and played the full 90 minutes as they beat Fylde at Wembley to win promotion to the Football League. “It has made me realise there are other pathways,” he says. “It wasn’t meant to be at United. I gave my all. Then I worked to get out of that hole and I got back in.”

Redmond signed for Wrexham, again in the National League, in the summer and, to be absolutely clear, he holds no grudge against United. His social-media feeds are filled with positive messages about the club where he spent 13 years. They are still his club, as a United fan, and he knows they would not usually release a player without breaking the news personally.

“At the time, they were going through a transition,” Redmond says. “It’s better now. They have a better loan system, they have a loan manager who can help the lads. There is more communication. It just felt, at that time, like there was no communication. It was always: who do you go to? There was no one person who made a decision. It was a bit all over the place.

“Until then, it was really enjoyable. It was like a family club. But it changed when Jose Mourinho came in. It went from being a family club to something else. Suddenly it was the first team, the reserve players and the academy. All separate. It wasn’t as integrated. It was structured more in a way that the first team were always by themselves.”

Redmond has also had to be mentally tough.

“He never once missed a session with me,” Paul Mitten says of their fitness regime. “He never kept anything back. Eyeballs out when I asked him to dig in and see what it’s like in that dark place. What a kid. We put a plan together: get fit to do yourself justice, get mentally ready, get an opportunity, grasp it.”

But what about all the other young footballers who have gone all the way through academies only to have their dreams snatched away?

Mitten’s organisation, Revive Player Care, is supported by Karl Brown, who was part of the Class of ’92 but torpedoed from the team of David Beckham, Paul Scholes, Nicky Butt, Gary Neville and brother Phil because of a series of major injuries that led to him being released and sinking into depression. He, too, can remember what it was like to feel “lost and isolated” and so damaged psychologically that for a long time he could not even watch football.

“I was in a team with some of the most successful players of the last 30 years,” Brown says. “Leaving was the hardest thing I have ever done. The club was my home. I was left with no job, no real life skills and no sporting career. I also lost most of my friends. They were off, soaring to success and I felt left behind. My life, as I had known it through all of my teenage years, had ended.”

Brown returned to football after 18 years out of the game to go into coaching. He was taken on by United in 2014 and has worked in their academy ever since. “I felt I could offer players first-hand advice and support, along with developing them as footballers,” he says. “I never wanted another player to feel the way I had felt.”

Mitten has helped Callum Gribbin, once one of United’s more highly-rated youngsters, to refocus after being released last year. Gribbin is now at Sheffield United and, at the age of 21, still has time to turn his career around.

Further down the football pyramid, another example comes in the form of Max McGreal, formerly of Rochdale’s academy.

McGreal is one of hundreds of youngsters, thousands even, who are let go every year. He, like many, felt he was treated badly. He started to drift and go out drinking when ordinarily he would be preparing for games. Now, though, he has knuckled down under Mitten’s guidance. McGreal has started playing for 10th tier Stockport Town and says he is enjoying football again.

But it is still a drop in the ocean when, as Brown says, there are footballers being “discarded daily”.

For many, the added problem is they have been so fixated on the idea of becoming footballers they have not taken their education as seriously as they should.

Mentally, it is harder than ever to cope when many have been attached to clubs from the ages of six or seven — not 14 to 16, as it used to be — and it is all they really know. And, though nobody wants to be too alarmist, there are qualified people who genuinely fear that football needs to wake up to this problem, belatedly, and remember the tragedy of Josh Lyons at Tottenham Hotspur.

Lyons was released from Tottenham’s youth system, aged 16, and spiralled into depression before committing suicide ten years later. At the 2013 inquest, the coroner, Dr Karen Henderson, criticised the sport for not doing more to support young footballers. “It is very difficult to build up the hopes of a young man only then to have them dashed at a young age,” she said. “It is very cruel. I find there was an absence and lack of support in football.”

Many in the sport still do not think the authorities — the Premier League, the EFL, the Professional Footballers’ Association — do enough on this front.

One suggestion is that clubs should provide parachute payments to any academy graduate who is released or that, as part of their contracts, a top-up fund should go into a pool that can be used, if necessary, as player-care packages for education and fitness programmes.

But then again, there still appears to be an attitude among some clubs that, once that player is gone, it is somebody else’s problem.

“Too many amazing players are ignored and just disappear,” Mitten says.

He, after all, knows what it is like to be sold the dream then churned out with no aftercare or direction.

“It took years to pick myself back up after so many people had forgotten me,” he says. “Did I get any support? Zero. And guess what? Twenty years later nothing has changed.”

[Vesper 27,310]

Only pen he ever missed (49 career attempts)

a bit late with the post, lolol

 

[Vesper 27,310]

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Jimmy Greaves: Tottenham and England legend returns home after a week in hospital with ill health
Bournemouth become latest Premier League club to reverse decision to furlough staff after ‘listening to supporters’
Graeme Souness tells Paul Pogba to ‘put his medals on the table’ after Manchester United ace said he ‘didn’t even know who he was

 

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Barcodes could become the next Man City with a Saudi led consortium as owners, and doubtless a big spending spree coming.....

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Looking at restarting the league mid June or early July. Matches to be played behind closed doors. 
 

Going to be so weird.