We have to act now to stop the grass-roots of our game withering



Earlier this month I visited Gigg Lane, the ground of my home-town club, Bury. If I have Manchester United in my soul, then Bury has a place in my heart. When United were away, this is where me and my brother, Phil, would go to watch football.



While I know the club reasonably well, I wanted to understand more about the problems further down the football pyramid. And after my visit to Bury I have enormous concerns.



I met Bury’s new chairman and owner, Stewart Day, who stepped in to save the club from extinction last May, and the chief executive Glen Thomas. The night before they had just seen Bury knocked out of the FA Cup to miss out on the televised game for the second round. ‘We’d have cleared probably six figures for that game,’ said Day. ‘And £100,000 is a lot for this club.’



Difficult times: Bury, pictured here in League Two action against Northampton, have just one academy graduate in their first team squad Looking forward: Recently appointed Bury boss David Flitcroft is hoping to guide his new team out of the relegation zone

Day is from Huddersfield so I was intrigued as to why he wanted to put money into Bury. He is also a property developer and there will always be a cynical element that says he just wants to build on the ground. But he told me Bury would always play at Gigg Lane. And he says his drive runs deeper than that.



‘I’m passionate about football but I get disillusioned about how things are being done,’ he said. ‘In the lower leagues a lot of clubs are making substantial losses. We wanted to show you could do things differently.’



I have to agree with him. But what really shook me in our conversation was talking about the youth system at Bury. Day said that out of 30 professional players in the squad, only one — Regan Walker — has come through the academy. He’s 17 and a good prospect but he has made only one substitute appearance.



That scares me to death. How can a football club have only one player in their squad from their youth system?

My gut instinct was that Bury’s experience wasn’t unique: that the production line had dried up. My mum, who is the club’s general secretary and has been there for 25 years, would say that once there were dozens of top flight scouts at Bury games; now there are hardly any.



As I left Bury that day, I wanted to see if my instinct had any foundation. So we commissioned statisticians to compile a list of the 4,162 transfers to top-flight teams in the past 31 years and have analysed the results.

What follows are just some of the findings of a substantial piece of research, which I believe makes an important contribution to the debate about young English players. These findings demonstrate that the influence of the lower echelons of English football, which were once a vital breeding ground for players, including England internationals, are now withering away.

During those 31 years, the names of the divisions and leagues have changed, so we’ll have to refer to the old First Division and the Premier League as the top flight, and the divisions below them as Tier Two (Championship), Tier Three (League One) and Tier Four (League Two).

Homegrown talent: Theo Walcott, pictured here scoring for England against Scotland earlier this year, came through Southampton's youth academy despite an influx of foreign players to English football

The most alarming trend is in the lower reaches of the game, tiers three and four, and the non-League. Between 1982/1992 those lower levels accounted for 233 players who were sold directly into the top flight. They included England internationals Mark Chamberlain, David Bardsley, Mark Bright, Tim Flowers, Lee Sharpe, Warren Barton and Rob Jones.

Take a look, too, at the players non-League clubs were selling directly into the top flight in those days: England’s Stuart Pearce, Les Ferdinand and Stan Collymore, the Republic of Ireland’s Andy Townsend and top-flight players such as Gary Crosby, Mike Marsh, Ian Woan and Andy Impey.



Twice as many players are now bought by top-flight teams — the total number of transfers almost doubled from 991 in 1982-92 to 1,776 in 2002-2013 — because squad sizes are bigger. So you might expect the signings from the lower tiers to have increased. But from 2002-2013 there were just 106 players from the lower divisions and non-League making the move to a Premier League club. That’s less than half the figure for 1982-1992.

In percentage terms, the pattern is even worse because of the huge increase in foreign signings. Between 1982-1992, 24 per cent of all transfers into the top flight came from tiers three and four or non-League. Between 2002-2013, that figure has dropped to six per cent. Analyse the figures for what might be considered the big five clubs and the picture is even bleaker.

There will be some who will say the Premier League clubs pick up these players a lot earlier for their youth academies. At Bury, I heard how that had happened to two of their schoolboy players recently. Anyone would find it hard to turn those opportunities down — but I worry that those youngsters might never be seen again. The opportunities to progress are narrowing even in Premier League academies.



Is staying at Bury going to give young players a better grounding and opportunity? Getting into the first team at 16 and playing in front of crowds of 3,000 every week at a club might produce a better player. This is something that the stats make you think about.



But English football is neglecting the base of the pyramid. Are we saying that the likes of Stuart Pearce or Les Ferdinand do not exist any more? I don’t believe it. I think we have severed the cord between the elite game and its roots.

Rough diamond: Striker Les Ferdinand, pictured here celebrating a goal for Tottenham against Everton in August 2002, was plucked from non-league Hayes by QPR

Moving up: Former England goalkeeper Tim Flowers, pictured here in action for Leicester City, made the jump from the fourth tier to the top flight Big talent: Stan Collymore, pictured here scoring for Liverpool against Nottingham Forest in 1996, joined Crystal Palace after impressing at non-league Stafford Rangers

The question we need to ask is whether English football wants to continue to be the playground for globalisation — or whether, as I believe, it should be a marriage of equality between a local and a global network. I would maintain that local network still has plenty going for it, that the Burys, Bradfords and Bristol Rovers are still vital to the health of our game.

At United I was brought up on the maxim that if you’re good enough, you’ll make it. And that if you didn’t quite make it at United, you still had the chance to work your way back. The statistics suggest that’s not the case any more.



It seems unlikely that the problem can be fixed from the top down. The Premier League is largely foreign-owned and each club will take decisions that suit them.

Holding back the tide: Joe Hart, pictured here making a save for England against Germany, came through the youth ranks at Football League side Shrewsbury Town

But going to Bury has struck a chord with me. It will have an impact on decisions I make in the next period of my career. I love working at the elite end of the game and want to continue in my roles. But I know I also have to put something back into the grass-roots of football.

