Luke Webb was 10 years old when he first knew something was wrong with the academy system. He was a trainee at Arsenal, an academically and athletically gifted child who at times was made to feel guilty for taking the place of another young footballer whose intelligence might not take them to university and beyond.
And that feeling stuck with him. It was there when he developed lower back and hip injuries aged 15 and felt the pressure to play in pain. It was there six years and two clubs later when the pain forced him to retire. And it would manifest in an urge to explore how a system that chews up and spits out hundreds of young footballers every year could be fixed.
Why should young players be forced to choose between education and football? Why did they have to sacrifice a “normal” adolescence for the slim chance of making it? Who had created these trade-offs?
Football had killed Webb’s love of academia but when he left the game it would guide him through the next stage of his life. Webb considered he had two options: become a coach at a club and push education from within or create an elite football program at an established school.
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He is the son of former England midfielder Neil, had followed his father around the country, in long stints at Nottingham Forest and Manchester United, and when the family settled in Reading towards the end of his father’s career, Luke had spent a little time at Bradfield College, a £40,000 per year private school in the Berkshire countryside.
“I realised it would be quicker to go into a school,” Webb says. “A football club would have to build a school. It would’ve been so much more expensive. To build a school like Bradfield would cost millions.
“Bradfield is 170 years old, you can’t do that overnight. But you can input an amazing holistic educational football program with the right people, understanding and knowledge, within a decade, which I’ve done.”
Webb, 35, still wants to build a school with a football club. He has designed a blueprint for the revolution of elite sporting development in the UK, and believes if one top team does it others will follow. For his ideas, he has borrowed from Premier League academies, psychology, the American scholarship system, Taoism, private schools and more.
At Bradfield, the pupils used to only play football from September to December. After joining as a teacher, it took five years of lobbying until his superiors signed off on a trial year that was so successful it stuck.
Not only have Webb’s footballers gone on to earn football scholarships at American universities (where two play professionally), some have gone into further education in the UK, one is a Hong Kong international and three have signed professional contracts. Ed Cook left for Burnley, Jacob Roddy signed for Charlton Athletic. One boy is currently on the verge of finalising terms with a Premier League club.
But first, Webb had to design an elite league in which his teams could play. “There’s no point your team being amazing and not being able to play amazing teams,” he says. “I created the Hudl Independent Schools National League.
“You have to be prepared to travel the length of the country, you have to film every game and upload every game so we can study each other. Everyone can see everyone. We learn from everyone. Boys can clip their clips and learn.”
Even before the formation of the Hudl league, some talented footballers were emerging from the private school system. Repton School was attended by Crystal Palace midfielder Will Hughes. Aston Villa captain and England defender Tyrone Mings went to Millfield on a scholarship after leaving Southampton.
But in the five years since the league was formed around “two to three boys per year” from the nine schools have signed professional terms at clubs. “If you look at Hudl league stats others went to amazing unis, got amazing jobs,” Webb says.
“The word I hate is ‘released’. The word we used is ‘graduate’. I don’t know why clubs don’t use that. Even if you’re leaving the club the experience of the club should’ve uplifted your life, not destroyed it. Because they’ve used the word released, they act like they have been.”
The schools now take on a handful of footballers who aged 16 do not earn deals at professional academies but meet the academic requirements. The Premier League and EFL distribute Webb’s details and clubs now come to him directly. They can earn bursaries through scholarships. Last year, they welcomed boys from Swansea and Sheffield United.
And through all this Webb met Ged Roddy – the man who created the Elite Player Performance Plan in 2009, the modern academy system that has produced astonishingly talented footballers but has had negative unintended consequences for many others. Ged’s son is the footballer who left for Charlton, who attended Bradfield after he was let go by Southampton.
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“I’d say we’re Category Two standard of football, if you apply the EPPP standard, in terms of ability. We’d beat a few, lose to a few. We have two or three Category One footballers, but not 16. Every now and again, like this year, it’s come together. We’ve kind of transcended school football this year. And this is the first year the boys have been through the system from the start.”
There have been hurdles and stumbling blocks. Webb has bumped against an elite football ceiling he has been unable to break. He tried to gain entry to the FA Youth Cup but was denied by the FA, who insist they must be affiliated to a professional club, not a school.
“If you were to progress in the FA Youth Cup, you beat Arsenal, Chelsea, these teams, people will say, ‘What’s going on there?’ It would just take one, a Manchester City, to build a school. If Manchester City did it with the talent they already have, they would win everything forever. And then the other clubs would do it.
“That’s always how football’s worked. They’ve built that facility, we’ll copy it. Then maybe one day the Government will invest in state schools to be those places. Maybe the FA or the Premier League will finally say the academy system is not going to start until 14, which is what should happen.”
The obvious argument against all this is that it is out of reach of most teenagers from disadvantaged backgrounds. That even if the most talented boys wanted to choose a private school ahead of a Manchester City, they could only do so via a paid scholarship, and the pool is limited.
While Webb accepts this, he believes the next step is football clubs building schools. “Those need to be normal schools. Their under 14s-18s are the A teams in those schools. If a player got released they stay in the school and become a B team player or C, D, E, F, and they still have their friends. If they join late, they can join. But once they get ‘released’ they stay in the school. They’re never getting released. It’s always a graduation from it.”
It sounds far-fetched, but so did the idea of private schools rivalling Premier League academies to produce the next generation of footballer a decade ago.
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