Doing the 92 is Daniel Storey’s odyssey to every English football league club in a single season. The best way to follow his journey is by subscribing here.
The goal is not only majestic, but delivered at the perfect angle for those sitting in the back row of the directors’ box at Edgeley Park to take it in. By then, Louie Barry has already collected a ricochet, taken half a second to compose himself, as if returning body and mind to their natural starting position, and driven forward. By then, Barry is directly in line between them, the penalty spot and the goal.
Barry’s shot is set way outside the far post, impossibly so, a shot off target until the moment that it hits the net. What’s most striking is how, at the point when everybody else – teammates, manager Dave Challinor and supporters around me and behind the goal – are stuck still watching the path of the ball, Barry has already run off as if to celebrate his work. He knows.
“I think I’ve been doing that for my whole life, cutting in off the left and curling a shot with my right foot into the far corner,” he says afterwards, a sheepish smile dispelling any hint of arrogance in an instant.
“With those finishes, I don’t really need to look at the ball to know that it will be close to going in or the goalkeeper will have to pull off a worldie save to stop it. I know when I hit a good one and I know when I hit a bad one. I aim for a specific area outside the post and then bring it back in.”
I am here to watch Stockport County face Wrexham, two clubs who seem intertwined by their own rapid promotion via markedly different methods. But I’m also here to watch, and then interview, the best player of his age at this level and, after this goal, its top goalscorer too. Louie Barry helped Stockport up to League One last season despite being injured for four months. Now he’s threatening to do the same again.
This type of piece doesn’t always work out. Sometimes something happens – red card, home defeat, muscle injury, simple poor performance – that means your subject isn’t really feeling it or all parties agree that a rearrangement would be best. Sometimes nothing happens at all but the player isn’t chatty. That is entirely their right; I am the intruder on privacy here.
As it happens, Barry’s wonderful goal is the only one of the match. As he is substituted during the second half, every Stockport County supporter who can takes to their feet to chant Barry’s name as he leaves the pitch.
Ten minutes after full-time, he finishes signing autographs for a group of children, heads back towards the tunnel and hears an older season ticket holder shout: “Well done, Louie lad – keep it up”. “Will do mate, I really appreciate it,” comes the reply.
It is a good time to do something brilliant. In the days that follow, the international break news cycle focuses on nuggets from the weekend and turns them into viral stories. A selection taken over the space of 24 hours: “Things to know about Leicester transfer target Louie Barry”; “Tottenham keen on Louie Barry”; “League One loan star slapped with £12.5m price tag”; “Louie Barry… emerging as the star of League One”. it must be exhausting.
Barry is 21 years old and on loan at Stockport County from Aston Villa. That is a familiar enough story. What makes this, and Louie, so interesting is what happened before, how it might have turned out differently and how it has made this young man so determined to take control of his career. You hear that even in the description of the goal: Barry knows what he is doing and why he is doing it.
At the age of 15, Barry was a young kid from Sutton Coldfield who was contracted to West Bromwich Albion, scoring freely for England’s youth teams and attracting fluttering eyelashes from some of Europe’s biggest clubs. Until he was 16, Barry could be signed by nobody. After his birthday, things went a little crazy.
There were visits to Bayern Munich and RB Leipzig and more contact still with Paris Saint-Germain, but one day Barry’s agent rang the family to say that Barcelona were interested. At that point, according to the player himself, there was only one club that we wanted to join and one academy system he had dreamed about being part of.
A deal was agreed, although West Brom lost out because the move left them awarded only £235,000 in compensation and forced to fight for even that to be paid. For Barry, it made history. He became the first English player in history to board at La Masia, the most famous football academy in the world.
“It’s one of those elements of my life that I don’t think I’ll fully appreciate until I’m a lot older,” he says “I can look back on it with some pride now, but it will take years for the true significance of it to register. At the moment, because I’m young, it’s kind of like; ‘I went there, I had a great time and then I moved to Villa’.
“And I tend to find that when you’re in your career you just don’t get the chance to look back properly; you’re living it. You have to keep looking forward – the next game is always the most important one. When I have settled and have retired – hopefully a long, long time away – it’ll be different.”
Although Barry stayed in Spain for months, not years, it opened his eyes personally and professionally. Because he lived in La Masia, his family did not move over to Barcelona; that was hard. The level of training was revolutionary to him, as was the emphatic focus on ball control and technique.
“Weirdly enough, I hadn’t experienced anything like it before I went to Barcelona but then when I came back to Aston Villa it was very similar,” Barry says. “Unai Emery is evidently an unbelievable coach for improving players and I was with him in pre-season this year. It was crazy to me how similar the training was to my time in Barcelona: the rondos, the in-possession box work and drills.
Stockport County 1-0 Wrexham (Saturday 16 November)
- Game no.: 37/92
- Miles: 188
- Cumulative miles: 6,141
- Total goals seen: 108
- The one thing I’ll remember in May: The outside of Edgeley Park’s Main Stand, with its red brick and blue paint, is one of the great heritage sights in English football.
“It was incredible in Barcelona, like nothing I’d ever seen. You’d get into the rondo drill but you weren’t allowed to do any flicks and the ball was never allowed to go above knee height – on the floor, proper passes every time. That was hard for me because I like flicks! But it was such a good experience to improve your touch, quick passing and vision.”
They appreciated Barry’s talent at Barcelona. They didn’t want him to leave. But his registration with Fifa was initially delayed, meaning he meant the first seven matches of the Under-19 season. Although he scored on his full debut, Barry’s minutes were more limited than he would like (and he was 16 playing at Under-19 level), mostly used as a substitute.
In January 2020, with talk of Covid-19 becoming a pandemic and with Barry wanting to see his family more often, he made the decision to try to move back home. There was reported interest from Liverpool and Manchester City, but also Aston Villa. As with Barcelona, this was the one club Barry had been waiting to hear from.
“I loved my time in Barcelona,” he says. “I don’t have a bad word to say about it. But I decided to come back close to home. We had got wind that Covid-19 might be a big thing. Villa are 10 minutes away from my family home. I grew up there. I support Villa. I wouldn’t have gone anywhere else and I’m so thankful that they came in for me. And it was everything to be back with the family.”
Although Barry has appeared for Villa’s first team, scorer at Anfield during an FA Cup tie for which Villa’s team was decimated by Covid withdrawals, it became clear that breaking into the first team on a regular basis would be mighty difficult. His club were about to embark upon a period of vast spending to consolidate and then flourish in the Premier League, proven by their last two years.
Playing in the bottom two tiers of the EFL must be daunting for any academy player, but especially true for a diminutive forward who likes drifting left and taking on defenders. There were significant setbacks, both at Ipswich and MK Dons, but Barry remained convinced that this is how he would learn to grow.
“I’m 21 and I’ve racked up almost 120 senior appearances,” he says. “That’s what I wanted. I went to Ipswich for my first loan and it didn’t go well. I didn’t really know what I was going into. I was a young 18-year-old. I wasn’t getting making matchday squads and I was low, yet on the flipside I had this deep hunger that wasn’t being satisfied. So I got out to Swindon Town.
“I think people forget that I’m only 21 because my name has maybe been around for a while. Not a lot of 21-year-olds have played as much league football as me and experience comes with being on the pitch. But what has really made me mature is that I have had the lows and never want to go back there or feel that again.
“Even if you score every game, you never want to have a bad training session because you don’t want to ever experience things you have before. If I was to speak to a young player now, I’d say ‘Go out on loan – no matter how well or badly it goes, it will be better than Under-21 football’. The experience is so invaluable.”
After that Villa goal against Liverpool, Jurgen Klopp described Barry as “the little Jamie Vardy” and the reputation stuck. Barry himself says that Vardy is the striker he has studied most for his work on and off the ball. You can see, given his lack of imposing physical presence, how he might want to be a nuisance for defenders.
The comparison clearly isn’t perfect, but there is certainly a similarity in the way that Barry seems to come alive when the ball comes near him, 0-60 in a second. There’s also something in the way Vardy takes his shots a fraction of a second earlier than you expect that Barry shares.
“I do work hard out of possession, and ‘cheat’ isn’t the right word because I do track back and do my defensive work, but when I feel that the ball might be passed to me, or take a ricochet and come my way, I’ll come for the ball and then all I want to do is go forward. I don’t really like turning back. Even if I lose the ball a few times, I want to be as direct as possible.
“Some players probably hate that I do that, some love it, but I love being direct, particularly when I’m confident. This club has made my confidence skyrocket and that’s how I get to play like this. I love the feeling of going past players and I’ll never not want to do that, no matter what level I’m playing at.”
More than the style of play, Barry explains, it is Vardy’s story that inspires. The guy who played in non-league and then got his big move and immediately seemed able to make defenders look foolish exactly as he had always done because he worked damn hard to make sure it would happen.
On the surface, Louie Barry and Jamie Vardy’s stories are polar opposite: the late bloomer and the child prodigy, Stocksbridge Park Steels and La Masia. But allow Barry to dig down and you see it. Vardy’s USP was an unshakeable single-mindedness that would allow him to stare each challenge in the face and then knock it to the floor.
This could all have fallen away very easily for Barry. He must know that. You leave England for the move that made you a headline. You leave Barcelona for your beloved club but the first team has no room. You can work your way through academy football and PL2 and hope to come out the other side fully formed, or you can drop down in search of the bruises that you hope might make you.
That’s what stands out about Louie Barry. It’s not that everything has gone right, because it hasn’t. It’s not that he’s definitely going to be a regular in the Premier League, because nothing can be certain. It’s not like moving to Barcelona guaranteed anything other than a tag would be hung around his neck, because it didn’t. It’s that he’s still only 21 and seems to understand all of that already.
“I always say that 80 per cent of the work with a loan is getting the respect of staff, players and supporters,” he says. “But when you have already earned that, like this season when I came back here, you only have the 20 per cent left to do: believe in yourself, which I have in abundance. That’s why I’m here.”
The maturity, the self-assuredness that never sounds like overconfidence and the ability to take a step back to just appreciate what he needs to do now; all of them knock you off your feet. The mania – superclub hype, Barcelona, Premier League, Liverpool goal – could have distorted some young players. All of it, and now Stockport County, seem to have made Louie Barry.
Daniel Storey has set himself the goal of visiting all 92 grounds across the Premier League and EFL this season. You can follow his progress via our interactive map and find every article (so far) here
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