Arsenal’s latest signing has been revealed as Zayn Ali Salman.
He was featured on the BBC last week, who told Ali Salman’s story by including video clips of the player as a four-year-old displaying far superior technique against older opponents almost twice his height. Only, that’s pretty much all of Ali Salman’s story, so far.
We are told he was the youngest player to be recruited to Arsenal’s “pre-academy” at four — this is a nursery school child we are talking about — after being spotted by one of the north London club’s talent scouts. There’s an interview with the scout, recalling how after watching him play for the first time and learning of his age he replied, “No way, he’s not, he can’t be in nursery”. In any normal world the next reaction would be: he’s still at nursery, perhaps let’s leave him alone for a while. Not in the Premier League!
Discussions were quickly held with his — understandably proud — parents. And since then, after recently celebrating his fifth birthday, Ali Salman has had offers from “other big name clubs”.
Surely nobody can really believe that Premier League clubs pursuing nursery school children is anything but… well, totally weird, right?
Professional clubs are forbidden from registering players until Under 9 level — signing eight-year-olds already feels a bit wrong. But apparently it isn’t young enough. Last year [2020], clubs had discussed introducing a minimum age for children to be involved with academies, or “pre-academies”, as it’s been dubbed, which is really just “academies”. The idea was unanimously rejected.
What’s next? Will scouts start lurking in post-natal maternity wards trying to spot signs of unusually strong thighs or a sharpness in the reactions of newborn babies? Will the Bounty reps who already ambush exhausted new mothers soon be joined by a coach from your nearest top-flight club handing over a business card and recommending they get in touch if their baby shows early signs of promise with a football?
A new documentary series broadcast by talkSPORT that started on Sunday night is exploring the plethora of problems with the modern academy system. It Was All A Dream… The Football Academy Journey, created and narrated by Troy Townsend, reveals that football has long known how detrimental the game can be to the mental health of academy players.
Townsend knows all too well. “I was a forward, a captain, a leader of my youth teams, I was told and truly believed I was destined for the top of the game,” he says. “When I was released by Millwall and then Crystal Palace as a teenager in the late 70s my whole world shattered.”
And Townsend got pretty close: he scored on his Millwall debut and lined up alongside Teddy Sheringham, but when football was taken away he says he “felt empty” and like “a failure”, adding it is “a feeling I admit I carry with me to this day”.
If Troy felt like that 50 years ago, so many people who work in football must have long known the impact the academy process has on a player’s mental health — so why did they continue push it, to recruit more kids, at a younger age?
Troy’s son, Andros, is one of academy football’s success stories: he was signed by Arsenal at eight, released, went back to playing Sunday League football but was soon snapped up by Spurs.
But Troy has seen the darker side, with more interviews to come in the next episode, and is “determined to ensure we have a system that offers greater support to my grandkids should they decide to take up the game”.
One of the issues highlighted is that the authorities do not keep accurate figures of who enters and leaves the academy system. The Premier League has, however, started to collect and monitor that data and will analyse and work with clubs to work out what works and what’s wrong.
A concern repeatedly raised is the lack of aftercare provided to those released at 16 and 18. When asked about this, QPR’s director of football Les Ferdinand, who speaks well on other areas, gives an unconvincing answer, describing it as “an unfortunate part of football”.
If clubs are going to recruit from nursery schools, the least these children deserve is to be guaranteed the best available support if they do not succeed all those years later.
NBA exiles the unvaccinated
After writing a column recently on how the Premier League could look to the NBA for an example of how to convince conspiracy-theory swayed players to have the Covid-19 vaccine, the Brooklyn Nets have since banned unvaccinated star Kyrie Irving from playing.
The Premier League finally published the vaccination status of their players, revealing 81 per cent had one jab and 68 per cent two. Presumably they will have a tough time persuading the remainder.
But let’s say players, who have had the red carpet rolled out for their sport during the pandemic, were told they have to be vaccinated to play, and it started to inconvenience them a little. You can bet they would be queuing outside the club doctor’s door for the jab.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/2Zvq3Yz
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