BALANCING THE LOVE OF FOOTBALL AND A GOOD EDUCATION
I have said before that many people, including myself joke about football players not being very clever; there is always this perception that footballers heads are only useful when connecting with a football and not for thinking and being smart. In reality, this is not true as we only need to listen to many players speak and clearly they are very switched on.
What always amazes me in China is that the link between academic education and football does not really exist. I understand that perhaps for many parents, having their sons (and recently daughters) play football as a profession was considered unacceptable, although with the money now coming into the game, this attitude is changing, but what is more incomprehensible is that when a "football school" is established here, this includes only the basic requirements of schooling and the main focus is football.
There seems to be an assumption in China that if you are a footballer, that’s the only job you will ever do, so learning other skills that may provide an income or improve a persons life skills are unnecessary; this is very short sighted especially as the country is now trying to "process" more young players in order to find the best ones. What will happen to all those who don’t make the grade? Using England as a comparison, from such a small country with a fraction of China’s population, but far more professional football clubs, there are tens of thousands of ex-footballers in the country, some never made it through the youth system and some were signed and never made the first team because the competition was so great. In ten years time, China will have hundreds of thousands of men and woman who went to football school and didn’t make it into a team, what will they all do afterwards?
A footballer is like any other person, they need life skills, an education and they need a plan B for the time when they either cannot get into a professional team, or can no longer play at a professional level due to age or injury. If they are only ever exposed to the world of football from an early age, they will know nothing else and their value to themselves, their families and the community will be relatively low; they need to prepare for their life after football. Of course we all see some of ex-players working as presenters on TV, and a few really famous ones can earn money as the face of some consumer brands, but these people are a fraction of one percent of the footballing population.
So what can China learn from other countries in this area? I am going to use England again, but in much of Europe, a similar approach is adopted. If you are a 16-year old youth player signed by any professional club in England, the club recognises that it has a responsibility to develop your footballing skills, but also must help prepare you for life off the pitch. To do this, these players not only train and play practice and competitive matches regularly, but they also go to college and are taught in class as the club. There are typically two areas that their education focuses on; sports coaching and management, and life skill’s.
These young people are not just potential professional football players, they are trained athletes, and if they cannot work in football in the future, they could potentially work in another sport, so they learn many different aspects of fitness, nutrition and sports management. If we think about these subject areas they make sense because youth players can chose to become coaches for any sport including football, but they can also make a decision to work on the business side of a football club or any other sports club. Football clubs need business minded people to work off the pitch to run the business, to bring in sponsorship, to develop other income streams, and why not use young people who understand and really care about football to do this?
If the young player likes to teach others, they still need to have the basic teaching skills as well as the technical skills in the future. Their clubs can leverage these youth players off the pitch, even if they cannot use them on the pitch; it’s a win-win solution. Even for those youth players who are good enough and go onto play professionally, there will come a time when they must hang up their boots and retire. This prior knowledge and experience they gain when they are young is very important for them, as they get older as it gives them greater choices.
At this time the focus is very simply a numbers game; if we create thousands of football schools coaching hundreds of thousands of young people to play football, we should get a few thousand reasonably good footballers as a result! The problem is the hundreds of thousands that are not quite good enough, what happens to them when they are rejected?
Here is another thought regarding footballers and education. Does choosing or wanting to be professional footballers prevent anyone from gaining a good quality degree, whether they actually need it or not. Are footballers clever enough to pass a degree, or should they wait until they receive an honorary one if they become famous, like many famous names have? The simple answer is that it shouldn’t stop anyone who is focused and determined to do it, and here is an example.
Duncan Watmore is a 21 year old striker who plays for the EPL club Sunderland, he is a very good talent who may have been lost if he wasn’t rediscovered by his current club. Duncan was part of the Manchester United academy until the age of 12 when he was told he wasn’t good enough to remain within it and was cut from the list. He carried on playing football locally and studying like any other normal English kid, but his goal was always to get the best education and to play professional football; he wanted the best of both worlds.
At 18 he was signed by Sunderland, but had already started studying for his degree, so he carried on doing both. Last year he was awarded the EPL U21 player of the year award and played in the England U21 team. The Sunderland coaches commented that is was strange to see all the squad on the bus travelling to a match listening to music and playing on their phones, but Duncan was at the front of the bus with his textbooks studying.
A week ago Duncan was presented with a first-class degree (the highest an English university can award) in Economics and Business Management. He said that it took a great deal of time after training and into the night, and he had to catch up on lectures online, but he was very proud to be only the second EPL player to have ever been awarded a first-class degree. Not only does he score goals for Sunderland, Duncan clearly recognises that the value of education and the love of the beautiful game can be combined; it just requires effort and focus. Let him be an inspiration to all of us, and to those in China who see football and education as two distinct choices and not one joyous combination.