Football: Crushing the Dreams and Cashing In

Posted by Rob Shepherd on Tuesday, July 18, 2017

You are a 14-year-old boy who aspires to follow in the footsteps of your idols. You watch every game, feel every tackle, score every goal, your life is football.

When you are not watching football, you are playing football. You train hard, your coaches are praising you, you have the belief, the passion and the desire. You are going to be a professional footballer.

You support Chelsea, no, so much more than that!

You emulate the moves the players make, your duvet at home bears the crest of Chelsea Football club and since last week you have watched every Youtube clip on Chelsea’s new signing Timoue Bakayoko.

When having a kick about, you are Eden Hazard, you dream of playing with him, you dream of being him. Chelsea are interested in signing you, a dream come true?

Chelsea Youth – Something Sinister?

The sad truth is, if you sign up for Chelsea as a young player, the chances are, you are joining the football equivalent to a battery chicken farm. Mass scale manufacture of young players who are fed to plump up. Only to be rejected at the quality control and you are then thrown in the “raggy doll” bin and you see all your dreams ragged and torn.

Maybe a battery farm is too harsh, Chelsea of course believe in free range young players and like a pushy Tesco salesman, Chelsea will tell you that their youngsters are not a commodity and they love each and every one of them as if they were their own children. I imagine the conversation would go something like this;

Chelsea Official: I dispute the fact that some people are accusing us of stockpiling players of potential mass destructive ability. We are not a Sainsbury’s or an Asda’s, I see us more of the local farmer who sings songs and talks to the vegetables. Take 698776543 for example, only last week we let him visit his parents just outside of the Five Hills area in Mongolia for 30 minutes.

Reporter: 698776543? What is that?

Chelsea Official: Errrrr, I mean… errr Thomas, Thomas Mitchell, yea that’s the one, nice lad, nice family, 698776543 is his nickname. Always fooling about is 698776543. Insists we call him 698776543. Him and 765234542 are always laughing about it!

The sad truth is that Chelsea currently have 36 players out on loan. 36 Players!!!

Unless they have changed the rules this summer, only 11 players can play in a game at any one time. So, this is 3 football teams worth of players, owned by Chelsea out on loan. This sounds like a cartel and I struggle to see how this is acceptable, money is being used to mine sweep all the talent and prevent them from developing naturally.

Even Chelsea’s own website sounds like a creepy, weird dating site for young footballers, a Chelsea Tinder.

“Fikayo Tomori joined the club as an Under-8 and has played predominantly on the right side of central defence or at right-back through the age groups. He made his youth team debut while still an Under-16 before going on to feature as a regular for Joe Edwards’s side in his first season as a scholar.” – “Tomori likes fast cars, sitting on benches and watching Division Three games on wet Tuesday nights”, is maybe what the second part should say.

It continues, the next profile;

“Born on 19 May 1996, Jhoao Rodriguez is a young striker from Cali in Colombia”, now I must admit the site doesn’t state if he came of his own free will or if a cage is used at any time during the recruitment of these players.

What I worry about the most is the emotional damage that this does to a young person. You are courted by the best, promised money, education, a new life. When a club like Chelsea come in for you, it’s natural that you think you have made it. In reality, very few will, Chelsea have and are always likely to buy big. Fans demand big signings and instant results.

So, Are Chelsea the Worst?

I was perhaps a bit harsh using Chelsea as an example, they do cause concern but by World standards, they are in the little leagues. However, it does seem that the loan system is a clever way of circumventing third-party ownership rules that are in place in the Premier League.

A 2015 Bleacher Report article (so the figures are bound to be much higher with other clubs like Manchester City joining the arms race) stated that Chelsea were only 8th out of the 16 worst offenders. Again, all sounds very fishy to me. You get a situation in which a newly promoted club is offered a £50 million striker for only £5 million a year because he will not get into the first team, as part of the loan agreement, a player can’t play against the parent club. This creates an unfair disadvantage to the rival clubs.

So, whilst Chelsea and other English clubs are not the worst, that means nothing. Not being the most prolific serial killer doesn’t mean you are a nice guy! I want to see a lot more control in this area.

Liverpool’s recent ban from signing youth players at best hints at a dark underground of “tapping up” kids and promising them the world. I understand some safeguards are in place but we most impose limits to how many players one club can “own”.