Five-year-old ball-playing goalies? It’s time for junior football to have a rethink

“A lawyer isn’t fighting to be a lawyer at the age of six,” as Trent Alexander-Arnold put it in a new interview with the BBC. “And thinking, ‘if I don’t study these laws well enough, I won’t be able to do it next year’.”

Alexander-Arnold was discussing his new initiative to help players who drop out of the game at academy level but is clearly fully aware of the pressures that are piled upon young players at a ridiculously young age. It’s also a comment that happens to chime rather neatly with the Facebook post from a grassroots community page that you may have seen doing the rounds lately:

Imagine the notion of demanding all of that from a five-year-old. Not just that they can play out from the back (at five!) or that they should be tall (what sort of heights do they think five-year-olds reach?), but that they need to be “committed” and “brave” in order to play for this “high level” football team.

It is, of course, impossible to play at a high level at the age of five. Even small children with a certain precocity about them can only play so well at a point where their legs have barely developed sufficiently to kick a ball a few feet. There are natural limits to this – which hasn’t stopped football clubs, coaches and parents from the lowest reaches of grassroots football to the top of the league pyramid from trying to identify that talent and push it as far as it will go.

Michael Calvin’s book on youth football, No Hunger In Paradise, recounts the story of Zak Brunt, a young player who, at a similarly young age, joined pre-academy training sessions with Sheffield United. Players can’t sign with clubs before the age of nine – as if that wasn’t obscenely young enough – but they’re already getting their claws in to any small child with a shred of early talent, and Brunt was quickly playing with Aston Villa and Manchester United at the same time as he was practising with the Blades.

By the time he was finally able to sign terms with a team, he quickly cycled through periods with Villa, Manchester City, Átletico Madrid, Derby County and even Matlock Town before ending up back at Sheffield United in 2018, at the age of 17. His entire childhood has been uprooted and sent spiralling around different teams and even countries in pursuit of a dream as the system sucked him in and spat him out time and time again, pretty much from the moment he was able to kick a football. He is, at least, now in the professional game – at the age of 21, he is on loan at Boreham Wood in the National League.

Not every coaching set-up is crass or exploitative – or, least, there are people within those systems that work hard to do things the right way even if the set-ups push in the wrong direction by design. About five years ago I spent an enjoyable hour or so at Manchester United’s training base The Cliff in the company of senior youth coach Eddie Leach, who had been working with primary school-aged children at the club for decades and had coached Marcus Rashford and Jesse Lingard, among many others.

For him, the first order of business was making sure the children he oversaw – ranging from cherry-picked talents to kids playing as part of community schemes – enjoyed themselves. He felt that if they weren’t having fun, they’d never want to push themselves to develop. Technique and specific skills would come after that, and then tactical and physical work would be left to a later point in their childhoods. He told me that winning football games didn’t become the focus for developing players until they reached the senior team.

Leach clearly cared quite sincerely about looking out for his young charges, as a great many coaches around the country across the levels do, but as Zak Brunt’s parents put it, “there are good people in the system but there are also a lot of second-hand car salesmen. They crawl all over you to… get the signature but when they’ve got it they’re suddenly busy.”

And even when the intentions are good, the sheer enormity of the dream of professional football – a financial and social pinnacle which most peoples’ lives offer few other chances to reach – means that kids are being put in pressure-cooker situations by clubs, coaches and parents long before they’ve learned to do long multiplication.

It doesn’t help that so many parents and coaches take it all incredibly seriously even well below the levels where a child could ever be concerned by the concept of turning pro. In 2013 the FA first pulled together the numbers for parental misconduct at junior games and found it was over 250 a month – and while a second full study has yet to happen, numbers released occasionally by local FAs suggest the numbers have only been increasing since.

In November the FA trialled a nationwide scheme called Silent Support Weekend, where parents were asked not to shout anything during youth games, be it encouragement or abuse. The hope was to foster an environment without the endless bawling that excessively competitive parents produce from the touchline – whether it worked in any way is unclear, but of course it was described as “woke” by some of the more idiotic right-wing newspapers like The Mail and The Express, who presumably think that parents screaming at kids and officials alike should be encouraged. The professional game has certainly encouraged it plenty over the years, without meaning to.

Perhaps it would be a better world if professional clubs were banned from coaching youngsters until a later age, 11 maybe. You might sacrifice a few percentage points of quality down the line, but you wouldn’t roll the dice on the mental health of thousands of kids knowing only a tiny percentage will actually reach the top.

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As England coach Gareth Southgate put it: “We don’t know if a lad in our national under-16s is going to have a career in the game, never mind whether he’s going to be a senior England player, so how do we know a kid will be a pro at eight, nine, 10, 11?

“I don’t think we talk enough about the hardness of football. It’s a sh*tty, horrible world really.”

There will always be kids who want to be involved, and parents willing to push them up the ladder – but maybe it would be a good idea to delay the moment when professionalism comes into it for as long as possible and give some of these kids a more normal, balanced and fulfilling childhood first. Or we could carry on asking around for a five-year-old equivalent of Ederson, of course.