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Youth
football is all the rage these days, right across England. A decade
ago, the likes of Liverpool and Manchester United had an enormous
advantage over the vast majority of clubs in the country, simply
because they had the necessary resources to plough into building
advanced Academies, impressive coaching centres, state of the art
facilities that could monitor every element of a young boy’s
progress.
But that huge advantage has been gradually eroded over time with
virtually every Premiership club, and many of those in the Football
League, now boasting their own Academy set-up and all that goes
along with it, in terms of recruitment, scouting, coaching and general
facilities, with many of them benefiting from the advances in artificial
pitch technology which means they can use a better surface than
those who went the Academy route in earlier days. Essentially, the
gap had, to some extent, been bridged.
This, of course, is not good enough for the big boys who need to
ensure that they are constantly ahead of the pack, that they continue
to squeeze the life out of smaller clubs in order to strangle competition.
It’s not fair that the smaller clubs try to compete on a level
playing field is it? After all, what good is money if you don’t
use it to beat the living daylights out of those who can’t
fend for themselves?
We’ve been fortunate enough to get wind of new plans laid by
one of the biggest clubs in the land that will revolutionise youth
football however.
Their thinking has not only been clouded by the way in which others
have caught up with them, but by the hit and miss results that even
the best get from investing in youth football. Put simply, a football
club can spot a precocious youngster at the age of eight, a boy
who looks like he might become a world beater but, over the course
of the next ten years, he may not fulfil that early promise and
have to be hurled on the scrapheap.
Never mind the cost to the individual, a football club will have
put thousands into him, money that these Premiership clubs milking
the TV channels can ill afford to waste.
In the modern world, sleek efficiency is all. If you don’t
run a lean, mean killing machine, it’s you that’ll end
up dead. This leading club has understood this business maxim and,
in youth football terms, it has reinvented the wheel in breathtaking
fashion. Rather than scouring the world for brilliant eight year
olds, why not grow your own footballers?
It’s easy to see where the idea came from – horse racing,
bloodstock, the creation of a stable based upon selecting the right
genes. After all, did not West Ham full-back of the 1970s, Frank
Lampard senior, sire the midfield genius Frank Lampard?
Ok, for every Frank Lampard, there’s a Jordi Cruyff, but that
doesn’t detract from the brilliance of the concept. Create
a footballing bloodline and you minimise the risk of your youth
team producing a whole bunch of duds.
This Saturday, this leading club will announce that it has renegotiated
the contracts of every one of its senior players. Contract length,
wages and the like are not an issue. Instead, every player that
signs for this football club, now and in the future, will be required
to contribute to their youth system in the most direct fashion –
by contributing to the creation of a sperm bank.
Each player will be required to make regular deposits, will waive
up any parental rights and responsibilities, just as they do in
real life, and the club will then take charge, deep freezing them
for transport across the globe to a new Academy, or, more accurately,
a football farm, the location of which is a closely guarded secret,
but which is rumoured to be somewhere out on the Steppes.
A well known centre-forward, on hearing of the scheme, said, “Yes,
as you saw last weekend, sometimes I use my hand. It seems a good
idea to me.” He then fell over.
It’s here that skilled fertility doctors will match the donations
to suitably athletic mothers – defensive semen will go to former
female shot putters, while an attacker’s emissions will find
a home with ex-sprinters. In this way, the risk will be taken out
of youth football because the next generation will be genetically
perfect. Better yet, it will be a self perpetuating system, for
any girls that come out of the system will be groomed to be footballers’
wives, thus producing the next generation of mothers.
Remember, when all is revealed on Saturday, you heard it here first…
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