“The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.”

– Plutarch

What has that got to do with preening, posing, designer clobber-wearing, convertible Mercedes-driving, young footballers you may ask? It’s not a perfect analogy, but it works well enough for my purpose.

It’s got everything to do with young footballers, the youth, the academy. There’s been much debate over recent weeks over the role of academies in the English game. They’ve been characterised as production lines, as if young footballers are homogenous entities. A rivet here, tighten a bolt there, paint them blue, stick them in their box and off they go for general consumption. Education (or development to couch it in football terminology) of course is much more nuanced.

We have a perception in English football that experience and maturity are everything. They aren’t. They are characteristics (and essential characteristics) that you’ll find in every team. A player is ‘not ready’ until they’ve gone through these rites of passage. Play academy, play reserves, go on loan, go on a better loan, spend time training with the first team, get 5 minutes in a cup game, but what is the next step? Prove that you are capable of playing at the same level? There are two ways of achieving that, by playing in the first team or by going on loan to a club of a similar stature. Both are problematic in their own way. We’ve seen repeatedly that getting first team minutes at a top club if you are a developing player is unlikely. It’s a risk. It happens in extreme circumstances but rarely by design. A loan to a club of a similar stature is a possibility but again, it’s a risk. Andreas Christensen didn’t break into the BmG team immediately, it took a change of manager. Thibaut Courtois was in direct competition with another promising young goalkeeper at Atletico, Asenjo. He beat off the competition but it could have quite easily gone the other way had a manager been changed or had he sustained an injury at a crucial time.

It all plays into the concept of fatalism. If you are good enough, you’ll get the chance, if you are good enough you’ll make it. People will point to footballers once considered highly promising who never made it at the top level, pointing out that actually, they were never going to make it. This characterisation ignores the role of circumstance, the role of the environment and the crucial role of opportunity. Not every genius will go to an Oxbridge University, not every prodigy will go on to invent or discover something that changes peoples lives. Some of them just exist in the same mundane universe as everyone else, working 9 to 5 and getting by. Does it mean they weren’t capable? Or does it just mean that the dice fell a different way at a crucial time. Footballers are no different.

As a case study, lets look at Marcus Rashford. A highly regarded but not exceptional talent in junior age groups. Anyone at the FA Youth Cup match where he and his United teammates were humbled by Chelsea would not have guessed that 12 months later he’d be one of the hottest properties in football. It was only by extreme circumstances, an incredibly long injury list, that Louis Van Gaal was forced to select him and he never looked back. The performances he displayed in the first team were streets ahead of anything seen from him in junior ranks. He rose to the occasion. He relied on talent of course, the environment at the Carrington training ground, the culture of the club but above all he relied on opportunity. Had Anthony Martial not succumbed to injury that night, Rashford may never have had that opportunity, likely he would have got a handful of subs appearances before going out on loan to one of United’s ‘feeder’ clubs in the North West.

I’ve written at length on the loan system in previous years, I stand by what I said then. The loan system can be terrific…. for the right player. It isn’t a panacea and it doesn’t suit everyone. English clubs have sought to remedy this by placing more players on two years loans or in the case of City and Chelsea, by establishing relationships with overseas clubs where players can go as a group.

Imagine you are a 17 or 18 year academy player. You’ve had the best coaching money can buy, the best medical and sport science facilities, you’ve played on immaculate pitches, used the best equipment and been schooled in an elite centre of excellence. You’ve excelled at that level and now you’re plateauing from a lack of challenges. What’s the logical next step for your development? For most clubs and most footballers it’s to go on loan. Let’s imagine a born and bred Londoner and a club from the North East wants them on loan for 6 months. The manager of said club knows he has the talent, he doesn’t know if he’s capable of first team football, it’s a risk for him to take him but he just doesn’t have the transfer budget to buy anyone outright. The young player knows he needs to play football, knows he needs to be challenged, knows the manager of his own first team is more concerned with keeping his job. He agrees to go on loan for six months. Chances are that 17/18 year old still lives at home, still had his washing done for him and his meals cooked. His friends will all be there, everything he’s ever known. Now he’s displanted to an alien environment, where coaches are of a far lower quality, the medical facilities aren’t the same, training grounds are, if not ramshackle, sub-standard. He may be expected to fit into tactics that have no resonance in a top club, taught techniques that don’t work at the highest level.

This is the football side, the environmental factors for a 17/18 years old are much more significant. He won’t buy a house, he probably won’t even rent a house, he’ll live out of a hotel. He’ll have precious few peers with similar experiences. He’ll have no life experiences to call upon to handle loneliness, to handle stress, to deal with pressure. Whilst not alone, he’s isolated. That’s hard enough for a seasoned pro, for a kid of 18, it’s a potential game breaker.

The final significant factor is the club itself. Why did they want him on loan? They have no interest, no stake, in his development, beyond the development he makes in the six months on loan. He is of use to them so long as his performances lead to the club achieving something. When there is no prospect of achievement, perhaps a mid-table club, what is the upside of that player getting game time? They may believe they can sign the player permanently (certainly BmG and Atletico believed that with Christensen and Courtois). They may also want to foster strong relations with the parent club. Beyond this, there is no upside. Better to give game time to a player they might need next season, or a player they can make money on. You also have to factor in the managerial merry go round. If a manager leaves, an incoming manager will have little to no interest in a loan player he didn’t sign. He’s contractually stuck with the rest of the squad so necessity dictates that he has to make an effort, loan players are different.

Add all these factors up. Your take a young player out of their comfort zone, you lower the level of facility, the level of instruction, the level of football they are subjected to. You move them hundreds of miles away from friends and family and put them up in the most temporary of accommodation. You ask them to perform above anything they’ve ever achieved before, to continue to develop, to excel, yet the environment, the circumstances and perhaps the level of opportunity aren’t remotely conducive. Can we really expect that level of excellence from an inexperienced and naïve young man? As cliched as it may sound, you generally only get out what you put in.

That isn’t to say that loans are always doomed to failure. They can be the making of players, but it’s dependent on personality. Some young men are fiercely independent, fiercely determined. They will make a success of a loan move. This doesn’t mean that they are inherently more suited to first team football at their parent club. Teams are made up of all different personalities, some need a bullet, some need an arm round them, youngsters are no different.

We need to get away from the idea of a production line, where players are given identikit experiences to mould them into a first team footballer. As the opening quote says, the mind is not a vessel to be filled. They aren’t flatpack furniture where A fits into B and C screws into D. They are unique and individual personalities, each with their own unique and individual journey. For some that journey will take them down dead ends, for others it will be a long hard path. For others yet still it’s a mainline station into the first team.